I Was an Atheist – I Used to Be an Atheist

Disclaimer

Very few of the ideas expressed here are my own. I have borrowed liberally from the ideas of much smarter people than myself who have already published extensively. I commend the below books to further study for anyone who may be interested. Much of what is below was in one of these books first.

Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D., New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Grand Rapids Michigan, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010)

Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism(South Bend, Indiana, St. Augustine’s Press, 2008)

Edward Feser, Five Proofs for the Existence of God(San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2017)

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies(New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2009)

Michael Hanby, No God, No Science? (Chichester, West Sussex, UK, Wiley Blackwell, 2017)

David Berlinski, The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays(Seattle, Discovery Institute Press, 2009)

Introduction

I was an atheist. Now I believe in God. I was an atheist for a long time, beginning in the eighth grade and continuing through high school, college, a six-year stint in the Navy, law school, and for many years while I was a practicing lawyer. By all odds, I should still be an atheist. But as it happens, I have reasons for my religious belief. It is certainly not simple, blind faith. It is based on scientific evidence and thought, historical evidence, and logic.

I used to be pretty sure of my atheism. I was quite comfortable in my assumption that quaint religious beliefs had been overmatched by modern science. I thought that religious believers were benightedly stubborn, or dull, or both. My path out of atheism is a long story, but that story is tangential to my purpose in writing this. I will say that I was NOT flooded with light. I did NOT have some stupendous revelation suddenly dawn upon me. God did NOT mysteriously appear to me in a burning bush. There was NOT even an identifiable moment when I switched from being an atheist to a believer in God.

What did happen to me was that religious belief gradually began to make more sense than atheism. It dawned on me that just maybe it was religious believers who had the intellectual upper hand over atheists. The more I read about religion, the more I contemplated religious belief, and the more I considered my own experiences in life, this idea grew from a possibility into a conviction. I came to realize that I had been stubborn and ignorant. My contempt for those who held religious belief was tainted by more than a little hubris. In some cases, I was led astray by people and writers and preachers I had encountered who insisted that we must follow blind faith in the face of all evidence, those who insisted the world is only 7,000 years old, or those who insisted the dinosaurs never existed, for example.

In that, I was guilty of the “anecdotal” fallacy. An example of the anecdotal fallacy in logic would be the statement, “Cigarettes are not really unhealthy because my grandfather smoked a pack of cigarettes every day since he was 14 and he lived to be 95.” It is an anecdote that proves nothing. It is easy to see that the fact that someone’s grandfather smoked a lot of cigarettes and lived a long life does not prove cigarettes are healthy. Similarly, just because a lot of ignorant people blindly insist on the validity of religious faith without relying on convincing evidence does not prove that religious faith is not valid, nor does it prove that there is no convincing evidence to support religious faith. The fact that many people are turned away from religious belief because the claims of some believers make them incredulous does not prove that religious belief has no logical or scientific support. It only proves that some people, myself among them at one point, are ignorant of logic and that they have been seduced by the anecdotal fallacy.

I propose that what fundamentally divides believers from unbelievers is this question: Can everything we experience be explained by the blind operation of natural physical laws, or is there convincing evidence that something outside of scientifically formulated and understood phenomena are at work in our reality– something, in other words, that is supernatural? There is a strong bias in our culture today against belief in anything supernatural. Is this bias justified? Is the bias simply a manifestation of the logical fallacy, appeal to tradition, i.e., most people believe this to be true and have for a long time, therefore it must be true. Or might it actually fit into the logical fallacy category of argument from consequences— it can’t be true, because if it is true that means that there are things that can’t be explained by science.

I am a lawyer. In my work I sometimes have to deal with the concept of proof. The definition of proof can be slippery. In legal cases there are three different standards of proof. Probably, the most familiar one is the standard used in most criminal cases: Proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Much has been written about what that really entails. Suffice it for the moment that it is the highest standard of legal proof. It is not proof beyond all doubt. It is not empirical proof. It is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, or, some may say, proof to such a degree that there is no good reason to doubt what it asserts. It is considered a sufficiently strong standard of proof to send an individual to prison or even to invoke the death sentence over a defendant’s protestations of innocence.

A second standard of proof is generally used in civil liability cases: proof by a preponderance of the evidence. This is the standard used in most negligence cases, such as claims resulting from car wrecks, medical malpractice, and product liability. It simply means that must be convinced that it is more likely than not that a particular claim is true.

There is a third standard, and it sits somewhere between proof beyond a reasonable doubt and proof by a preponderance of the evidence. The term generally used is proof by clear and convincing evidence. It means proof that a claim is substantially more likely to be true than not true. It is used in cases such as attempts to set aside a will, or making decisions to withdraw life support when that withdrawal is contested.

Please be aware that none of these standards rise to the level of unassailable proof, or scientific or empirical proof. Empirical proof involves something that can be observed and repeated, and it does not depend on any prior hypothesis or assumption. We can empirically prove the existence of gravity, but we have to rely on certain assumptions to explain why there is such a thing as gravity.

Legal cases nearly always involve proof that does not rise to level of empirical proof, but rely instead to some measure on circumstantial evidence. A prosecutor can show that a defendant’s fingerprints or DNA were detected at a crime scene. That the fingerprints or DNA traces match those of the defendant is empirically verifiable. But that may or may not be enough to say that the defendant was at the scene of the crime when the crime was committed. Perhaps a witness testified that the defendant told her that he was going to the crime scene shortly before the crime was committed. A judge or jury may then find that the witness is credible by her observed demeanor, and thus decide to believe her testimony, and to believe that the defendant did in fact tell the witness that he was going to the crime scene. The judge or jury may then weigh the facts that the defendant himself said he was going to the crime scene together with the evidence that his fingerprints or DNA traces were found there, and thus decide that the defendant was in fact at the crime scene when the crime was committed. In no way has the defendant been empirically proven to have been at the crime scene at that moment, but the circumstances lead to the very reasonable conclusion, and it would in fact be difficult to conclude that he was not.

I venture that all of us go through our lives believing things that have not been and cannot be empirically proven: that our spouses or our parents love us, that the Pope believes in God, or that Julius Caesar was murdered on the floor of the Roman Senate on March 15, 44 BC, for example. We believe these things not because they have been empirically proven, but because various circumstances, taken together, lead us to make a reasonable conclusion that they are true.

Introduction

I was an atheist. NowI believe in God. I was an atheist for a long time, beginning in the eighth grade and continuing through high school, college, a six-year stint in the Navy, law school, and for many years while I was a practicing lawyer. By all odds, I should still be an atheist. But as it happens, I have reasons for my religious belief. It is certainly not simple, blind faith. It is based on scientific evidence and thought, historical evidence, and logic.

Arbitrary and Scientifically Unprovable Assumptions

A little over one hundred fifty years ago, scientists began to understand that the stars in the sky are not small luminous objects, but they are instead like our sun. The universe suddenly became much larger than anyone had previously imagined. As scientists pondered this new knowledge, a consensus developed that the universe simply had always existed and always would. Stars die, and others are born to take their place, over an infinity of time. Time stretched infinitely back into the past and stretches infinitely forward into the future. This infinitely existing theory of the universe explained away a lot of knotty problems. How did the universe come to be? It simply always was. How did life come to form on earth? Given an infinity of circumstances, as this view insisted was the case, life on earth is simply the exceedingly improbable but nonetheless inevitable result of infinite random occurrences. If there is an infinite number of possibilities that exist, the chances that one of them will arise over infinite time is one hundred percent. As a culture, we still tend to approach the question of how life began with that same mindset– it is an improbable event made certain by infinite time. But this is a scientifically unprovable and arbitrary assumption. It is also almost certainly wrong in all particulars. Time is not infinite, according to the best physicists of the past one hundred years. The universe, including time, space, and all matter, had a beginning. And not only did time and space have a beginning, meaning they are not infinite, but they also are not infinitely divisible– neither time nor space can be divided into fragments that are smaller than certain quantities. And, maybe most important of all, they both have form. They actually have qualities that hold everything in the universe together.

But let’s start with the beginning– How did we come to realize that the universe had a beginning? In 1915 Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity. it was an explanation of the phenomenon of gravity, which scientists had been wrestling with mightily but had been unable to explain before Einstein came along. His theory was coherent, elegant, and compelling. It was also radical. It turned Newtonian physics inside out. Einstein proposed that space and time are distorted, physically bent, by massive objects such as stars and planets. We experience this distortion as gravity. As space is bent toward planet earth, we and all other objects fall toward its center of mass. It is this distortion in space that holds us down. This is why we say that space and time are not mere emptiness, but rather they are physical entities that bind everything in the universe together.

All would agree that Einstein revolutionized physics. And he became a sensation. Everyone in the physics world was eager to study and to try to understand this new theory. One person in particular who grasped the implications of this new science was a relatively obscure physics professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His name was Fr. Georges Lemaitre. He was a Catholic priest. Lemaitre is today regarded as the original proponent of the Big Bang theory. In 1927 he published a paper suggesting that one of the implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is that the universe is expanding. Lemaitre did not, at the time, explicitly propose that the universe began with a singular event, although the idea of an expanding universe does lead inexorably to the notion that the universe had a beginning.

He did not find an enthusiastic audience. In fact, when Lemaitre brought up the idea of an expanding universe to Einstein himself at an international conference, he recalls being told, “Vos calculs sont corrects, mais votre physique est abominable.” (“Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious.”)

Two years later, in 1929, Edwin Hubble published his findings that there is an observable red shift in the color of stars in every direction of the universe. The wavelength of all stars is slightly longer, or redder, than it should be based on what we know of the wavelengths of hydrogen and helium, the primary component of all stars. The only plausible explanation for this is that the stars are moving away from us, and their motion away from us creates an apparent increase in the wavelength of the light they emit. This is known as the Doppler effect, and it is something all of us are familiar with, even if we don’t know it by that name.

When an ambulance or a car with a honking horn or a car with a loud engine approaches us, the noise coming from the vehicle appears to have a higher pitch when it is approaching than when it moves away from us. The sound waves coming at us as the vehicle approaches will have their frequency increased by the speed of the approaching vehicle. This results in a higher pitch. The sound waves as the vehicle moves away from us will have their frequency decreased, resulting in a lower pitch. The same effect occurs with light and motion: the light from a star moving away from us at a rapid speed would appear to have a lower frequency, and would be redder than it actually is, while a star moving toward us at a rapid speed would appear to bluer than it actually is. Hubble found that the stars and galaxies are redder in every direction. Everything is moving apart from everything else. The universe is expanding.

The Beginning of Everything

Most people today are familiar with the Big Bang theory of the universe. Simply stated, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that we can only explain the red shift in starlight, the fact that everything is moving away from us, by positing that the universe is expanding, just as Fr. Lemaitre predicted it would be based on Einstein’s startling theory. And if it is expanding, it must have been smaller in the past. The theory held today by nearly all astrophysicists and consmologists is that what we now observe through telescopes and what we now know about the physical laws governing the universe means that the entire universe, and indeed all of space and time, came into existence approximately 13.8 billion years ago in a single, extremely brief moment. Our universe was apparently generated, to put it in layman’s terms, from nothing, or, in Catholic theological terms, Creatio ex Nihilo— Creation from Nothing.

Does that sound familiar? To a Judeo-Christian believer, it should.

“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Genesis 1:3 RSV.

Of course, the fat that the universe had a beginning is not in any strict sense proof of the existence of God. But if the universe, all of time and space, and all physical laws had a beginning, that beginning necessarily means that the universe came about through the operation of phenomena that exist outside of time and space and outside of the scientific laws that govern our universe. That may help us to understand why this idea was resisted so strenuously by Einstein and other prominent scientists in the 1910s and 1920s. It laid firmly to rest the prevailing view of the universe. If the universe is expanding, it must have started with some sort of singular event. It must be finite. This of course creates tremendous problems when we try to answer questions such as how life could exist. We can no longer fall back on an infinity of occurrences as the explanation. The plain implication of the universe having a beginning is that somethingcaused it to come into existence. That somethingnecessarily must be outsideof space and time.

In fairness, a lot of cosmologists have developed theories or mathematical models of multiverses, string theories about extra dimensions, or bouncing universes where the universe slows down its expansion, then gravity pulls it back together into a “Big Crunch,” then it explodes again in another Big Bang, ad infinitum. We get back to a universe that always was and always will be. There are however, lots of reasons to doubt the viability of any of these theories. They all violate the second law of thermodynamics, for one, although it is possible that not all multiverses or universes would be governed by the second law of thermodynamics. Such a universe would be a bizarre place, however, as we shall see. More importantly, in 2003, the cosmologists Arvind Borde, Alexander Vilenkin, and Alan Guth developed an elegant proof, using known physics and mathematics, that shows that it is not possible for any universe that has an average Hubble expansion greater than zero, no matter what other conditions may prevail in that universe, to have an infinite past. In other words, if any universe that has any expansion whatsoever, the past must have had a beginning. There can be no such thing as an infinite past. Time must have had a beginning.

This raises the question that if time has a beginning, what was going on before this beginning? Interestingly, St. Augustine of Hippo, the great 4th century theologian, grappled with this very question. He had, as had earlier Christians and Jews, been challenged by the atheists of his day on the idea that the universe had a beginning. What was God doing in the infinity of time before he created the universe? Why did he wait so long to create it? Augustine’s answer, still beloved by cosmologists today, is that time is a creation of God. If it were not, God also would be bound by time as all creation is. There was no “then” before creation. There was no time. God stands outside of time as he does outside of space and the natural world. God is the reason time, space, and the natural world exist. The Borde-Vilenkin-Guth theorem shows that time necessarily had a beginning. It turns out that St. Augustine was quite prescient, or inspired. Because it turns out that modern science shows us that there was a moment when time started, and this could not have been a result of the operation of scientific laws or processes because those processes themselves require time and exist within space and time. There must have been a cause that stands outside of time and space, which is to say, a supernatural cause.

The Universe Is Big. Really, Really Big!

In fact, it is so big, it’s size truly exceeds our ability to imagine. Let me explain this with a little thought exercise.

The circumference of the earth is 24,901 miles. If you walked at 3 miles an hour for 12 hours per day, you would walk 36 miles per day. At that rate, it would take you almost 2 years– 1 year and 11 months to walk the same distance as the earth’s circumference. That’s a pretty long time. So let’s speed things up a bit. Let’s hop aboard a very modern Airbus A-380 double decker aircraft and fly around the circumference of the world. The cruising speed of an A 380 is about 564 miles per hour. At that speed it would take a little over 44 hours, nearly two days, to circumnavigate the earth.

That’s the earth. Now let’s equip our A 380 with the ability to fly in space– this is a thought exercise, so we don’t have to worry about practicalities. Our nearest celestial neighbor is the moon. The mean distance to the moon is about 238,900 miles. It would take our plane about 17 and a half days to reach the moon.

The planet with the closest average distance to the earth is Venus, with an average distance of about 41 million miles. Sometimes Mars is closer than Venus, but Venus is usually closer. It would take our A 380 about 8.3 years to reach Venus. Our sun is nearly 93 million miles from the earth. It would take our plane 18.8 years to reach the sun. The most distant planet in our solar system is Pluto, which is about 4.67 billion miles from earth. This is 944 years away at the speed of an A 380. A little less than 944 years ago, William the Conqueror ascended to the English throne after defeating the English army at the Battle of Hastings.

The nearest star to our solar system is named Proxima Centauri. It is about 4.22 light years away from us. That is about 25 trillion miles. It would take our plane over 5 million years to fly that distance. Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. 125 billion years in our airplane, or almost ten times the age of our universe by current calculations. That is one galaxy.

The sun is an average sized star. The sun is made almost entirely of very light hydrogen and helium gases, but despite this light composition, it weighs about 333,000 times as much as earth, and the sun could hold about 1.3 million earths inside it. That is one star. How many stars are in our galaxy? The best estimates are between 200 billion and 400 billion.

How many galaxies are in the universe? In October 2016, an article was published in Science that suggested, based on deep field images from the Hubble space telescope, that there are about 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. This is about ten times the number previously estimated.

Are there more stars in the universe are more grains of sand in all the beaches of the world? Well, how many grains of sand are there on all the beaches in the world? The best estimate is 7.5 X 10 to the 18th, seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains. But one of the latest estimates of the number of stars in the universe puts the number at 1 X 10 to the 24th, which may be a gross underestimate. That is more than a million stars for every grain of sand. But, to put things in a bit of a different perspective, there are between 6 and 7 times more molecules in an eight ounce cup of water than there are stars in the universe. 6.69 X 10 to the 24th molecules.

A molecule of water is of course made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, and atoms themselves are made up of smaller elementary particles. Without belaboring these number any longer, I will tell you that the most recent best estimate of the number of elementary particles in the visible universe is 1X 10 to the 86th. That is a one followed by 86 zeroes, or ten multiplied by itself 86 times.

To put this in perspective, the odds of a single ticket winning the powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338, or, in scientific notation, roughly 1 in 2.92 X 10 to the 8th.

What Does the Evidence Suggest?

There is another factor we have to consider, and that is that there is extremely strong evidence for an anthropic universe. The word anthropic means of or relating to human beings or the period of their existence on earth. We often hear the word bandied about today in discussions of climate change. Global warming activists insist that we are in a period of anthropic climate change that will lead to catastrophic results. They mean by that man-made climate change. We are not going to talk about climate change here. I just wanted to use word in context. When I talk about the anthropic principle, I am talking about the evidence that the universe seems to be very finely tuned for the development of all carbon-based life forms, including of course human beings.

This is not the same idea as intelligent design, a term that by the way I think is a redundancy– there can be no such thing as random design. Intelligent design looks at biological processes and infers an intelligence behind them. The anthropic principle looks at the way the universe is organized and calculates the overwhelming odds that the universe really ought to be hostile to life. Now again, if the universe was infinitely existing, or infinitely expanding and contracting, then random chance would generate an infinite set of conditions in each universe, and it could be said that we would happen to live in the version of the universe that is friendly to life.

But we know the universe cannot be infinitely old. So let’s look at the reasons claimed for the fine-tuning of the universe. Understand that we start from the possibility that the universe may have fallen together in a finite but very large number of different ways after the Big Bang. And there are certain constants in the universe that are measurable, but that are not inevitable results of the Big Bang. These include the gravitational attraction constant– the force gravity exerts is believed to be constant throughout the universe and it can be expressed as number that never changes. There is also something called the weak force coupling constant, which governs the rate of decay of subatomic particles; the strong nuclear force coupling constant, which is a measure of the attraction that binds together atomic nucleii, the rest mass of a proton, the rest mass of an electron, the electron or proton unit electrical charge, and there is something known as the cosmological constant, which actually is a measure of the energy density of the vacuum of space, or is sometimes thought of as a measure of the force of dark energy in the universe. It seems to largely govern the speed at which the universe is expanding.

Using these constants, I am going to give two examples that show how only slight variations in their values would have made the universe into a place where life could never have emerged.

First, the Australian physicist Brandon Carter has shown that if the size of the strong nuclear force, the force that binds together atomic nucleii, were to vary by as little as 2 percent, life would be impossible. If it were 2 percent weaker, then atoms with more than a few protons could not form, making the formation of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium impossible. No carbon, no oxygen, no metals at all. But if it were two percent stronger, then all elements would have been converted from hydrogen to heavier elements almost from the beginning, leaving no possibility for the formation of water, and leaving no hydrogen nor enough helium to fuel the stars, including our sun.

Second, the British cosmologist Paul Davies has shown that If the gravity constant or the weak nuclear force constant were to have varied by less than 1 part in 10 to the 40th, the universe would be drastically altered. If the ratio between them were greater, then the expansion of the universe would be so explosive that galaxies could not have formed. If the ratio between them were smaller, then the universe would have very quickly collapsed in on itself into a giant black hole or series of black holes. Now we are talking here about a range of possibilities on the order of 10 to the 40th- a number several orders of magnitude greater than there are stars in the universe.

A third example was discovered by the British astronomer, Fred Hoyle. Hoyle became interested in the question of how the heavier elements were formed. We look around the universe and what we largely see are hydrogen and helium, the two lightest and simplest of all the elements. They are the first two elements on the periodic table of the elements. Hydrogen consists of a nucleus of a single proton orbited by a single electron. Helium consists of a nucleus of two protons and two neutrons orbited by two electrons. So where does all the iron, carbon, gold, silver, oxygen, uranium, etc., that we see in the world come from? How did the universe manage to forge these heavier elements out of hydrogen and helium? The British astronomer Fred Hoyle hypothesized that this must occur as a result of some sort of nucleosynthesis during the nuclear reactions that are taking place within stars. This theory was later shown to be likely by studying collapsed stars. In the course of these studies, Hoyle discovered that the process which allows helium to convert into carbon requires the carbon nucleus to have a very specific resonance energy and a very specific spin for it to work. He was able to prove experimentally that these were the precise values that carbon has. Because these numbers were so precise and so statistically unlikely to have been generated by random action, Hoyle later wrote:

“Would you not say to yourself, ‘Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly miniscule.’ A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Hoyle was an atheist when he started his research. It led him to a belief in God.

Finally, Roger Penrose, who is a British physicist who has worked extensively with, among others, Stephen Hawking, has looked at the fact that our universe started in a state of extremely low entropy. Essentially, this means that the universe began in an extremely well-organized state. To understand entropy, think of billiard balls on a table. They are arranged in a neat triangle, until they are hit by a cue ball that sends them careering in all directions at different speeds. Are they likely to re-arrange themselves into a tight triangle without intervention? The odds are enormously against it. Entropy is the result of the second law of thermodynamics. The universe and all matter within it becomes more disordered at time passes– it does not spontaneously become more ordered. The billiard balls do not spontaneously reform themselves into a triangle.

By the way the formation of life is an apparent violation of this law– somehow matter spontaneously became more organized, and that is why we are here tonight.

Anyway, for the universe to be as it is today, it necessarily had to start in a low entropy state. Penrose, the eminent physicist, has calculated the odds of this happening by random chance to be 1 in 1 X 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power. That is the number one followed by 10 to the 123rd zeroes. Remember that we said before that the latest estimates say that there are about 1 X 10 to the 86th power. This number calculated by Penrose has more zeroes than there are elementary particles to the universe. Lots more. About 37 orders of magnitude more.

None of these examples of evidence for an anthropic universe rise to the level of empirical proof of the existence of God, nor are they even empirical proof that the universe was not randomly brought into existence. But let’s consider for a moment different kinds of evidence, and how they are used in the courtroom, and in our everyday lives.

I have already admitted that I do not offer and cannot offer empirical proof for the existence of God. Of course, there can never be strict empirical proof of the non-existence of God, either. When I say empirical proof, I mean facts that are established by observation and by experiments that can be repeated. We can empirically prove that from earth’s point of view, the light coming from the universe is red-shifted. We can empirically prove the chemical composition of various rocks. But we cannot empirically prove the existence or non-existence of God, and there are reasons for this that we will discuss in a moment.

There are those who seem to think, and who even will say, that the burden of proof for belief in God is on the believer and that if his existence cannot be proved empirically, there is no reason for belief. But the fact is, everyone, in their daily personal lives and even scientists when they are practicing their science, believe things that cannot be proved empirically. And all of us would consider those beliefs to be reasonable.

For example, I cannot prove empirically that my mother loved me. But I believe she did. I don’t think very many people would consider that belief unreasonable.

We cannot prove empirically that the Holy Father, Pope Francis, believes in God. He says that he does, and nearly everyone believes him, and believing him in this statement would not be considered to be unreasonable.

We cannot prove empirically that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the floor of the Roman Senate on March 15, 44 BC, but virtually all historians believe that, and we don’t think their belief unreasonable.

We cannot prove empirically that the surface of the earth is resting on various tectonic plates that slowly move about and collide with one another and form continents, break continents apart, build mountains and create oceans over millions of years. But most geologists believe that and this is not considered an unreasonable belief.

To support our belief in these propositions, we rely on what lawyers call circumstantial evidence. The definition of circumstantial evidence is: Evidence that demonstrates or tends to demonstrate a fact by proving other events or circumstances which afford a basis for a reasonable inference that the fact at issue is true. Circumstantial evidence is offered and relied upon daily in courtrooms all over the Western world. For example, the defendant’s fingerprints were recovered from a pistol found at the scene of an apparent murder, and the pistol was of the same caliber as the bullet recovered from the victim’s body. Or, a surgical instrument is visible on an x-ray film of the sutured surgical wound of the plaintiff. Or, cellular telephone records show that the defendant was texting on her cell phone at the approximate moment of the car wreck, which the plaintiff says was caused by the running of a stop sign.

In the examples above, we believe Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March in 44 B.C. because we are told this by presumably reliable historians. We believe the Holy Father believes in God because he is an ordained Catholic priest, because he has written many things in defense of faith in God, and, well, because he is the Pope. And we at least find the assertions of geologists about tectonic plates to be plausible and that they provide a good explanation of why there are earthquakes. None of these reasons for belief consist of empirical evidence to support what we believe, but they allow us to draw quite reasonable inferences that the propositions are true.

Right and Wrong

When I was an atheist I believed that everything must have a scientific explanation. Probably most people in our culture today share that belief to at least a degree. Certainly most people are made uncomfortable by the idea that some things occur that have a supernatural, as opposed to a scientific, explanation. When I was firmly wedded to my belief that everything must have e a scientific explanation, I was simply swimming with the cultural tide.

I didn’t think it important to consider the question of what it is that makes something good or evil. I did not know that there is an ancient philosophical theory that holds that certain things are universally right or wrong, which is to say, right or wrong for all human beings in all circumstances. A legal term that applies here is per se, which means “in itself.” I had a law professor who liked to joke that the best definition of per seis, “disirregardless.” Something that is per sewrong is something that is always wrong no matter what. Murder of an innocent person, for example. Causing serious injury out of malice, for another. Saying something that you know is not true and that you know will impugn the character of someone else. Purposely injuring someone as opposed to accidentally injuring someone. We don’t have to be taught that these things are wrong. If you were to encounter a four-year-old child who is working in a coloring book and being careful to stay between the lines with the crayons, and if you were to jostle that child’s arm so that the crayon goes skidding across the paper, wouldn’t that child be likely to look at you accusingly and say something such as, “You did that on purpose!” We seem to share certain beliefs about right and wrong without being taught them. We even have a name for people that don’t hold these ideas of right and wrong in their hearts– we call them sociopaths. The rest of us believe that these people are fundamentally flawed.

But if we consider this basic fact of human nature, we are forced to ask– how can one even begin to explain scientifically why human beings universally share basic ideas of right and wrong? If we think too much about it, we may be made uncomfortable by the notion that there exist such things as universal or intrinsic truths– because that don’t seem to have a scientific explanation. It seems to point us to something higher, more fundamental, and greater than ourselves.

Some euphemistically say that these universal ideas of right and wrong are written on every human heart. Some say that they were programmed into our consciences by God. But you do not need to start from the premise that there is a God to believe that certain ideas of right and wrong are universal. As mentioned, human beings do not need to be taught them in order to understand them. They resonate with all of us.

The notion that there are universal human standards of right and wrong is called natural law. It has been acknowledged and discussed by philosophers throughout history. Aristotle talked about it. Cicero talked about it. The medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas talked about it. The famous 19th century legal scholar William Blackstone talked about it. But despite its distinguished pedigree, natural law was not something we learned about when I was in law school (1977-1980). I never learned that the American Revolution, the Emancipation movement, the Women’s Suffrage movement, the Nuremburg trials, and the Civil Rights movement all justified themselves by explicit appeals to natural law. By the time I was in law school, a shift in our culture has occurred, and at least since the late 1970’s, the idea of natural law has been considered to be discredited. We will take up later the reasons it was considered to be discredited, but it will suffice for now that the theory has in no way been rigorously disproven. It would be more accurate to say that its implications were inconsistent with important, albeit very recent, cultural assumptions. The question of the existence of natural law therefore became studiously ignored.

As I think back, I see that ignoring ideas of natural law and its implications has underpinned much of modern culture during my adulthood. If it is true that we all hold in our hearts certain uniform ideas concerning is right and wrong, then we are confronted with the existence of universal truths, and must ask ourselves the question, how could human beings have been randomly endowed with built-in ethical standards?

Modern culture’s denial of natural law is particularly strong today. This denial of natural law reminds me of the scientific community’s reaction to the original proposal of the Big Bang theory. It is a fascinating story.

Back to Natural Law

The signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, were, at the time, all British subjects. Signing the document was a treasonous act, punishable by death. How did they justify this? They used the following words:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s Godentitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the peopleto alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. (Emphasis added)

They were very clearly asserting that there was a higher law than the king’s law, a law of nature and a law of God that gave them the right to declare independence. If there were no such thing as natural law, then the reasoning of the signers was wrong, and the United States had no right to declare itself independent of Britain.

Take the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The movement began in earnest with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. This was a lengthy campaign, often featuring non-violent protests, demonstrations, and sit-ins led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his followers, and unfortunately also featuring violent reactions to these events by those opposed to the movement. In 1963, Dr. King found himself in the Birmingham city jail, having been arrested for violating a court injunction against demonstrating. While he was imprisoned, an open letter from eight Alabama clergymen– two Episcopal bishops, a Catholic bishop, two Methodist bishops, a Presbyterian leader, the pastor of a large Baptist church in Birmingham, and a Jewish rabbi, was published in the Birmingham News. It stated, in part, “[W]e are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.”

At the time, Dr. King was being held under harsh conditions, and was not allowed access to reading materials or pencil and paper. Lawyers and supporters visiting him smuggled the newspaper and he wrote a response in the newspaper’s margins, and on toilet paper. This was smuggled out by his lawyers and eventually published as, Letter from a Birmingham Jail. In the letter, Dr. King quoted such theological luminaries as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas from memory. He justified participating in what were then illegal demonstrations by a straightforward appeal to natural law:

[T]here are two types of laws. There are just laws and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’ Now what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that isnot rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. (Emphasis added)

What he was saying could not be clearer– there is a higher law than man-made laws. And when man-made laws conflict with this higher law– what Thomas Aquinas called eternal and natural law– then our duty is to obey the higher law. This was the foundation upon which the civil rights movement was built.

During the Nuremburg war crimes trials, the common defenses were– “I was just following orders,” and, “What I was doing was completely legal under the law at that time and place.” These defenses were brushed aside with the simple assertion that the defendants knew what they were doing was wrong, whether technically legal or not. Why was it wrong? Because it violated moral precepts common to every human being– it violated natural law. Many of the defendants were found guilty despite these defenses and were hanged.

The anti-slavery movement and the women’s suffrage movement also appealed to natural law as the justification for the radical changes they sought. In today’s culture, most people will agree that racism is wrong. But why is it wrong? We cannot explain why it is wrong without saying something such as, “It violates the inherent dignity of the human person.” But what is the source of that inherent dignity if not natural law?

If we ask once again the question, how do we explain the existence of natural law, or, how can human beings have been randomly endowed with built-in ethical standards, the everything-has-a-scientific-explanation view would say that it can’t be explained. Since it can’t be explained scientifically, there is no such thing as natural law. Built-in ethical standards, which are clearly rational standards, cannot be explained by a theory of evolution, cannot be explained by bio-mechanics, or neurology, or random chance. Something that can’t be scientifically explained cannot exist. Therefore natural law does not exist. It just can’t. It must be some sort of illusion or cultural artifact.

Of course, none of those who hold this view are likely to admit that this means that the Declaration of Independence, the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the execution of Nazi officials as war criminals, and the civil rights movement relied entirely on a mistaken assumption. And what this exposes is that the idea that everything has a scientific explanation is simply an unproven assumption. We start from this assumption and then try to understand everything else in light of this assumption without questioning whether the assumption is itself true. But assuming that everything has a scientific explanation is not something that can itself be proved scientifically. Assuming that everything has a scientific explanation is, to put it baldly, an act of blind faith.

Challenging Our Assumptions

Einstein told Fr. Georges LeMaitre that the idea of an expanding universe is atrocious, and this was because he was unwilling to give up his assumption that the universe had always existed and always will exist. Brilliant as Einstein was, his thinking was bound by an arbitrary and unprovable assumption. To his credit, Einstein later admitted that the universe is in fact expanding, although he never became comfortable with the idea that the universe had a beginning. He did however become a friend and admirer of Fr. LeMaitre.

As we will see eventually, the notion that everything has a scientific explanation has its roots in the ideas of William of Occam, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, and others, but it really gained footing with the advent of Charles Darwin. It has slowly but surely become prevailing view among scientists and scholars over the last 150 years. It is the metaphysical starting point from which scientists and many others in our culture try to make sense of observed reality. Nevertheless, it remains an arbitrary and unprovable assumption.

Could the assumption be wrong? Consider the assumption’s opposite: Noteverything has a scientific explanation. What would it mean if that were true? It would mean of course that there are things that cannot be explained by the operation of scientific laws, or the known, empirically demonstrable laws of nature. Things that require some other explanation, which would necessarily be a supernaturalexplanation.

We have already discussed the big bang– the beginning of the universe as an event that may be possibly understood as proceeding from a supernatural cause. But what about things in our own routine experience? What about natural law? Do we believe that there are certain universal norms of human behavior that apply in every situation? Is murder of an innocent human being always wrong or is it not? Is racism always wrong in every situation or is it not? If we believe there are such things as universal rights and wrongs, then we have to consider how that might be. No one has been able to explain this through the actions of organic molecules, or through evolutionary biology, or through any other known empirical science.

Do we believe racism is always and everywhere wrong? Then we believe in a form of natural law– something that evades any kind of scientific explanation or theory. If there is such a thing as natural law, might we be wrong that everything has a scientific explanation? Might we consider the possibility that there are things in our experience that have a non-scientific, or supernatural explanation?

Of course, none of what I have presented so far constitutes a rigorous proof of the existence of God. But I hope it does disabuse some people of the assumption that I once held myself– that those who believe in a supernatural deity are benightedly stubborn or dull or both.

Love and Free Will

“Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.”

–Richard Dawkins, a New Atheist

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. – Hitchens 3:16”

–Christopher Hitchens, another prominent New Atheist

(Hitchens’ smarmy words provide a taste of the intellectual depth of his position.)

Hitchens was partially responsible for a series of advertisements on the sides of London buses:

Thus, about three millennia of sober thought and reflection on the existence of God, from people such Plato and Aristotle, the author of Job, the great Jewish theologians and teachers Hillel and Gameliel, St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, St. Albert the great, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Catherine of Siena, St. John of the Cross, St. Therese the Little Flower, G. K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and Pope St. John Paul II, to name a few—flippantly dismissed, without any substantive argument whatsoever as to why thousands of years of serious philosophy should be summarily overturned.

This is because, you see, you are the randomly assembled product of matter that is directed solely in accordance with physical laws; you do not have any such thing as a soul; your life is absolutely devoid of meaning; and when you die, you and your consciousness disappear forever. Don’t worry, be happy! And these are not even necessarily the most profound implications of modern atheist thought, as we will discuss shortly.

But before we do that, let’s look at the underlying premises of most modern atheism.

“I am ready to come out of the closet as some sort of verificationist”.

–Daniel Dennett, a third prominent New Atheist

Verificationism, also known as the verification idea or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine that the only things that are cognitively meaningful are statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses), and truths of logic (tautologies).

I propose that verificationism underlies the certainty with which modern atheists assert their claims. I further propose that this verificationism can be easily summed up in a sentence that is familiar to us all:

“There must be a scientific explanation for that.”

This is actually a statement of faith, as we will explore shortly. Sometimes this attitude or assumption is characterized as Darwinism, and I agree with that characterization. Now I need to clarify something here. When I say Darwinism, I am talking about an approach to almost all of the big questions of science and philosophy. This is not the same thing as Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Darwin’s theory of evolution as generally understood today proposes that if we start with a single organic molecule or perhaps some molecules that have the ability to self-replicate, and if we are given hundreds of millions of years of this replication, we can plausibly postulate the origin of any and all known species, through the inevitable processes of mutation and competition that will occur. In other words, we can explain the existence and the characteristics of complex organisms, viruses, bacteria, amoebas, plants, sponges, fish, dogs, cats, honey badgers, gorillas, and human beings, all by the blind and random operation of physical laws and known physical phenomena–and all without the necessity of any kind of divine intervention to get from self-replicating molecule A to species B. Darwin’s theory may or may not be correct. It does have a high degree of plausibility. And his theory is not, for example, considered heretical by the Catholic Church. On the other hand, there are problems with it that have not been completely resolved by scientists. For example, no one has yet been able to explain through the use of scientific laws and natural processes how an organic molecule began making copies of itself, in apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics. But for our purposes here, I simply want to point out that Darwin was only theorizing about biological processes. He never tried to say that the entire universe came into existence merely through the blind operation of physical laws.

Modern Darwinism takes Darwin’s proposal for the origin of species and extrapolates from that to propose that we can explain anything and everything that exists and occurs in the universe by the blind operation of known physical laws and phenomena, again without resort to divine action. Darwinism essentially claims to provide a framework for a universal theory of everything that eliminates all supernatural causes.

Now if we look closely at this proposal, we quickly see that it has some very serious problems. We simply don’t know how the universe itself came into being, and for various important reasons we will never be able to resort to empirical science in order to explain how this happened. Most astrophysicists today believe that the universe started some 13.8 billion years ago. Obviously, this was long before anybody was around or could have been around to observe it, or record it, or measure it. And when we talk about the beginning of the universe, we are not simply talking about the beginning of all matter and motion, but the beginning of time and space itself. To observe this beginning would require that a being with intelligence would have the ability to exist outside of time and space, and outside of the natural laws that came into being when the universe formed.

Obviously, any theories about how the universe came into existence cannot be empirically tested and verified. We cannot recreate the universe, or another universe, ourselves. Therefore, to say that I am confident that the entire universe is the mere product of the operation of natural laws is to make a claim that simply arises from a personal conviction that science can explain everything. The claim itself is unscientific and unprovable. It has no empirical justification whatsoever. The irony here is that the same charge atheists level against believers in God—the charge that belief in God must be based on personal conviction rather than science, also applies to their insistence that everything must have a scientific explanation. That is to say, the underlying premise of atheism is based on nothing other than personal faith. In this case, it is faith in the ability of science to explain everything. Or—

“There must be a scientific explanation for that.”

As a demonstration on the necessity for atheists to rely on a faith of their own, here is Richard Dawkins:

“It’s a different argument to say how did the whole process start – how do we begin with the origin of life? The origin of life — the key process in the origin of life was the arising of a self-replicating molecule. This was a very simple thing compared with what it’s given rise to. By far the majority of the work in producing the elegant complexity of life is done after the origin of life, during the process of evolution. There does remain the very first step — I don’t think it’s necessarily a bigger step than several of the subsequent steps, but it is a step. And it’s a step which we don’t fully understand — mainly because it happened such a long time ago, and under conditions when the Earth was very different. And so it’s not necessarily possible to simulate again the chemical conditions of the origin of life. There are various theories for how it might have happened. None of them is yet fully convincing. It may be that none of them ever will be, because it may be that we shall never know fully what the conditions were. But I don’t find it at all a deeply mysterious step.”

What he is saying is, we don’t know how life first came into existence, we likely will never know, but I don’t think this is a problem. What he doesn’t say is that the reason he doesn’t think it is a problem is that he has an unshakeable faith that science can explain everything, even if we may never actually be able to reach that explanation.

Let’s go back to the beginning or creation of the universe. The first law of thermodynamics (and this is an abbreviated version) states that energy and matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but can only change from one form to another (matter is a form of energy– E=MC2). But clearly there was an event that occurred when the universe began– both matter and energy were created. We cannot explain this by resort to natural laws because it obviously violated existing known natural laws. Atheists must necessarily be sublimely confident that, while we don’t have the science to explain this, and while we may never have the science, this still occurred as a result of some undiscovered scientific laws. Pure faith.

The New Atheists also tend to be dismissive of ancient thinkers like Aristotle, to the extent they engage his ideas at all. He lived 2350 years ago! He knew nothing of modern science! What could he possibly have to say to our modern, advanced, enlightened world? I wish we had time to explore this issue in a little more depth and maybe I can do that in a later talk. But we can talk about an issue raised by the great Theologian, Thomas Aquinas, virtually all of whose ideas stem from his study of Aristotle. This is a proposition that the New Atheists cannot answer, so they generally avoid discussing it.

The proposal is that everything that exists is contingent. Essentially, this means that everything has or had a cause. This should not be a controversial idea. In fact, it is obvious to anyone observing the world. Anyone here is alive because of a fusion of sperm and egg at a moment in time. Our parents exist for the same reason. A wooden desk exists because someone designed it and someone built it. The wood in the desk exists because someone cut down a tree. The tree exists because it grew from a seed. The seed came from a parent tree. One can go back in time and see that everything seems to have been caused by something that existed before. But is it really possible that there could have been an endless, infinite stream of causes caused by causes, or to put it in mathematical terms, an infinite regression of causes? Or does it make more sense that there was some sort of first cause, something that was not itself caused, but which caused everything to come into being. A creator, if you will.

There is a funny story about an ancient pagan philosopher who one day told his students that the entire world is resting on the back of a giant turtle. A student raised his hand, and said, “Master, what is that turtle standing on?” The teacher answered, “On top of another, larger turtle.” A second student raised his hand, and asked, “So what is that second turtle standing on?” The answer was, “An even bigger turtle.” These questions and answers continued for a short time before the teacher finally cut them short: “You can stop asking these same questions. It’s turtles all the way down.”

The story makes us laugh because the teacher’s answer is self-serving and quite implausible. It explains exactly nothing. But it shows us quite starkly that there are only two choices when it comes to why there is a universe. An uncaused cause– a creator. Or turtles.

Bishop Robert Barron likes to point out that, metaphysically, the New Atheists’ conception of God is that, if there is a God, He is simply another actor in the universe. An all-powerful one, an omniscient one, but in the end simply part of the universe itself. The God they want to refute is a God who is a being that shares some characteristics with any other being. So when Richard Dawkins argues that we don’t need a God to explain complex organisms, or when Christopher Hitchens argues that the concept of a god or supreme being is a “totalitarian belief that impedes individual freedom,” they clearly are talking about a God who is a being and an actor limited as we are in time and space. But I’ve got news for you. God as another actor in the universe is NOT the God proposed by the Catholic Church.

Part of the problem here is that we cannot ourselves fathom who or what God really is. Thomas Aquinas pointed out that to the extent we believe we understand God, it is not God we are understanding, but rather a projection of ourselves.

To conceive of God as simply an actor in the universe is to have an impoverished conception of divinity. As Bishop Barron has pointed out, while any explanation of who God really is will necessarily fall short of the mark, we do get a glimpse of Him when we listen to His conversation with Moses from the burning bush. When in Exodus Chapter 3 Moses asked God for His name, God replied, “I am Who am.” In other words, God is not simply some part of the universe. God is the ground and essence of all things, the things we can know and see and the things we cannot know or see. God is the force without which nothing exists.

There is nothing in New Atheist theory that rebuts this, because their conception of God cannot include this idea. It is not science. It can never be science. What constitutes the universe, what force really holds it together, how it is, as Einstein insists, that all objects in the universe are linked to one another, these are questions that science cannot possibly answer, because they transcend our ability to observe and measure them. The New Atheists seem to think of God as something within the bounds of the universe. The God the New Atheists don’t believe in, — the fact is we don’t believe in Him either.

Or as that great 20th century Thomistic theologian, Flannery O’Connor, pointed out:

“Remember that these things are mysteries and that if they were such that we could understand them, they wouldn’t be worth understanding. A God you understood would be less than yourself.”

I want to end with a discussion of some of the truly absurd implications of the New Atheism. I will start with free will. As we have discussed, New Atheists posit that everything is a result of the natural, random actions of physical laws. Pure mechanical determinism. Well, if this is true, how can you or I consciously cause something to happen. And I mean something that can be quite trivial, such as deciding whether to eat at home or go out for dinner. Or whether to cook spinach or broccoli. Or whether to come to Mass. Or whether we can actually make any of the hundreds of choices we each make every day. What is this power or force within us that allows us to influence the otherwise random action of physical laws on physical matter? The New Atheists cannot explain this. Indeed, it cannot be explained scientifically. And there you have it. If it cannot be explained scientifically, and if you have the unshakeable faith of New Atheists that everything has a scientific explanation, then free will must not actually exist. It must be an illusion. And that is precisely the position that they take.

For example, Sam Harris says the idea of free will “cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality” and is incoherent. According to Harris, science “reveals you to be a biochemical puppet.” People’s thoughts and intentions, Harris says, “emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control.” Every choice we make is made as a result of preceding causes. These choices we make are determined by those causes, and are therefore not really choices at all.

Or there is this– I am quoting from an article in the New Yorker magazine that was subsequently quoted in Edward Feser’s book, The Last Superstition. That book is listed in my bibliography.

Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. She said, “Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.”

This isn’t some cartoon caption. These are two actual philosophy professors at the University of California at San Diego, and they are advocates of eliminative materialism, which is the theory that beliefs, desires, and other mental phenomena do not exist and should be eliminated from our personal conversations.

Let’s think about the implications of this. If there is no such thing as free will, why do we put people into prison? What right do we have to get angry about what any person may have done, if all human action is physically pre-determined and governed only by random force of physical laws? How do we make moral judgments at all? For example, can we validly say make a statement that I believe all of us here, our Church, and our culture would agree with by saying racism is wrong? If our thoughts and actions are the result of physical laws and results over which we have no conscious control, then racism necessarily becomes something that can be neither right nor wrong. Do we actually believe that?

Richard Dawkins has acknowledged this as a problem, but seems amazingly untroubled by it.

“The philosophical question of determinism is a very difficult question. . . . Now an extreme determinist . . . might say that everything we do, everything we think, everything that we write has been determined from the beginning of time in which case the very idea of taking credit for anything doesn’t seem to make any sense. Now I don’t actually know what I actually think about that, I haven’t taken up a position about that, it’s not part of my remit to talk about the philosophical issue of determinism. What I do know is that what it feels like to me, and I think to all of us, we don’t feel determined. We feel like blaming people for what they do or giving people the credit for what they do. We feel like admiring people for what they do. None of us ever actually as a matter of fact says, “Oh well he couldn’t help doing it, he was determined by his molecules.”

What’s interesting here is his referral to “extreme determinists.” I think we have to question whether there can be degrees of determinism. It seems to me that it is like saying that someone is an extreme heliocentrist– an extremist in the belief that the earth and all the planets in the solar system revolve around the sun. No– there is no possibility of extremism here. Either the sun is the center of our solar system or it is not. The same with determinism. either everything that happens is governed by random action of laws, or it is not.

No wonder Dawkins can’t take a position on that. If we can blame people for their voluntary actions, then determinism is wrong and the central thesis of the New Atheism collapses. But if determinism is insisted upon, truly ridiculous implications ensue. No one actually can live as if there is no such thing as free will. No one actually believes that in their hearts.

Can there even be such thing as love if the determinists are correct? Think about it for a moment. Can we ever be said to act out of love, to truly love another person? Is our love for our children, our parents, our spouses, our friends simply an illusion? We need to decide what we really believe– do we believe that love is real? The title of Emeritus Pope Benedict’s first encyclical was Deus Caritas Est. God is Love. And if God is the essence of all being, the without which nothing, then here, as before, the Church proposes to us that it is love, and not the random result of physical laws, that is underneath everything that exists and holds everything together. We do not have the benefit of empirical evidence to help one way or another in deciding whether the Church is right about this. It is not a question that can be answered empirically. But we do have evidence. We have our life experience and we have what our hearts tell us. Do we believe in love? Our answer to that is everything.

“Naw, I don’t think life is a tragedy. Tragedy is something that can be explained by the professors. Life is the will of God and this cannot be defined by the professors, for which all thanksgiving.” Flannery O’Connor, Letters

Some who are atheists today might charge that I must never have been much an atheist if I succumbed to the lure of religious belief. Maybe that is true. The assertion reminds me, though, of the kin d of thinking evidenced by a Christian fundamentalist who insists, “Once saved, always saved.” By this he means that once a person confesses that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and his personal Lord and Savior, and becomes baptized, he is from that moment on saved from hell and will definitely go to heaven. If you confront such a person with a Christian who once made such a confession, was baptized, and then fell away from belief by asking– Did this person’s initial confession mean he is still saved, even if he now denies a belief in God? The fundamentalist answer is that he was never really saved to begin with, that his Christian confession was somehow lacking. Similarly, a fallen away Catholic who no longer attends Mass is said to have been insufficiently formed in his faith.

Perhaps we are discomfited by someone whose sincere beliefs were once similar to our own and who has now found reason to change his mind. And so we explain away the person’s new beliefs by saying his original beliefs must not have had the integrity that our own beliefs have. When it comes to the intellectual integrity of believers and nonbelievers, I tend to agree with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI), writing in his book, Introduction to Christianity: “No one can lay God and his Kingdom on the table before another man; even the believer cannot do it for himself. But however strongly unbelief may be justified thereby, it cannot forget the eerie feeling induced by the words “Yet perhaps it is true.”. . . [B]oth the believer and unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt andbelief, if they do not hide from themselves and the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, throughdoubt and in the formof doubt.” To grossly paraphrase, both belief and unbelief require a certain degree of faith, and in neither world view, if one is intellectually honest, is it possible to escape some degree of lingering doubt– that perhaps the opposite of what I believe is true.