Giving Atheists a Chance to Give God a Chance
This is an excerpt from a lecture from 2015, perhaps worth repeating, in part:
As an ex-atheist, I should have at least some credentials when addressing the core issue of our age:
What can reach the atheist, who is lost and floundering out in the darkness he calls enlightenment?
The first thing to recall is that we alone can do nothing.
It is the Holy Spirit that converts the skeptic.
For reasons too mysterious to comprehend, God, who created us in His own image, gave us freedom of the will akin to His own. He will allow us freely to fling ourselves into the hellfire if that is what we freely wish.
Therefore the Holy Spirit will stand at the door of the atheist heart and knock, but not enter unless invited.
My own experience shed light on what might convince an atheist to extend that invitation.
There are two ways to reject God: the rational and the irrational. Different atheists may have a different admixture of the two.
The rational atheist suffers doubts such as mine, where a man finds he has no need to include God in any explanation of the world around him.
He has no reason to credit Jehovah with any more credit than we extend to pagan Gods, Jupiter or Buddha or Mumbojumbo. He has no reason to credit a God who is allegedly benevolent and omnipotent, but who allows the innocent to suffer.
However, the Christian God is not like other gods, all of whom are created beings or personifications of natural forces. The Christian god is at once the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle and the Tao of Lao-Tzu, the Ideal of Ideals of Plato, and the Nirvana of the Buddhists, while being above and beyond all these things. The claim being made is fundamentally different, because our god has a philosophical as well as a mythical and a historical character to him.
As for why God allows suffering, that answer can only be answered from inside Christianity. An onlooker outside Christianity looking in cannot see the answer. The answer is not something that can be put into words. The answer is a deed. The answer is a great and horrible deed called the crucifixion.
There are two ways to reach the rational atheist. First, every honest man has something he holds as his highest good, a paramount value or principle or rule of life which serves him in the place of God. The rational atheist will give God a chance once he realizes that his paramount value is arbitrary and irrational in a universe where there is no God.
Second, the rational atheist, if the arguments are put before him, will come to see that the Christian worldview was as worthy of respect as the worldview of Aristotle or Confucius or that of any other pagan sage or philosopher. This can only be done by Christians being willing, as Lewis and Chesterton were, of supporting the reasons behind Christianity.
And, once he sees this, he will see that only monotheism can support the highest value he regards as valuable.
The way to cure ignorance is through knowledge.
The ignorance of the atheist has seven very powerful allies keeping him blind: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. We for our part have very powerful allies shining light in that darkness, brighter than the lightningbolt:
The first is justice: no coherent account of life can truly be erected on a logically consistent atheist foundation. A fair examination of the various worldviews offered to the modern man will always award the Christian view the laurel.
The second is prudence: the atheist culture, and the atheist man, have no means to avoid floundering in the mire of lust and powerlust, lust of the eyes and the rat’s-race of chasing after material possessions, which, in the long run, never bring the satisfaction at first glance they seem to promise.
The third is fortitude: no atheist can stare without flinching into the utter abyss of the infinite death that confronts him, death that will one day consume wife, children, nation, race, and the whole earth.
We Christians can rejoice in the smallness of the Earth in the cosmic scheme of things for the same reason we rejoice in the humbleness of our prince being born in a smelly stable in the remotest corner of the Empire, or the humiliation of a god suffering the death of a slave.
But the atheist can only be aghast at the smallness of all human efforts: we live on a speck of dust circling a medium sized star in the smallest Arm of the Milky Way. The Andromeda Galaxy is ten times our size, and will collide with us in three billion years. At that point in time, there will be no record of anything you can name, for even the constellations will be gone. The atheist can be an atheist only one of two ways: by pretending to possess a philosophical stoicism in the face of death which no real person can long maintain, or by pretending to be a philistine who ignores the grand scheme of things to concentrate on pleasures and distractions, growing ever more frustrated as they pall.
And atheism is terribly lonely. There is no companionship with anything other than frail and treasonous fellow man to look to for comfort. There is no forgiveness.
The final is temperance: the fact of the matter is that human beings do not have the power, by exercise of their own self control, to live happy, prosperous, virtuous and peaceful lives. If we all lived like Mother Theresa of Calcutta, lives of incomprehensible joy in the face of suffering, we could conquer the current world order just as our ancestors conquered the Roman Empire, without ever drawing a sword or raising a fist in our own defense.
So much for the rational atheist.
The irrational atheist does not doubt God but instead hates him. This leaves the irrational atheist free to indulge in every vice and sin his darkened hearts can conceive, and indulge in every slander against the Church the dishonest imagination can supply, or otherwise their hatred cannot be maintained.
The only way hatred of God can be eroded is by love.
You, my fellow Christians, must be willing and able, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to live lives so remarkable for your charity and love and peace and joy that the irrational atheist will be shocked and surprised and ask you about your source of joy.
You have to live lives he envies, without abortion, without divorce, without the sins that create such misery.
Once the atheist sees that his answers answer nothing, that his code of conduct leads to barren misery, selfishness, wrath or despair, he can perhaps be lead to see that our answer answers everything and more: answers too good to be true, but which are true because they are so good. Be ready to bind up his wounds and stow him at the inn at your own expense, because eventually the sharp difference between the world and his false picture of the world will wound him.
And in the meantime, pray. We Catholics have all the seraphim, thrones, dominions and powers as our allies, not to mention the saints, including Saint Nicholas, the patron of mariners. Considering the fact that we Catholics actually do believe in Saint Nicholas, the least we can do is try to get our atheist friends to open the Christmas present Christ gave the world, the gift of infinite life and endless bliss.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
