I will tell my opinion on why atheism exists, and I hope I will explain myself fine because I think it's toph.
I want to start from the beginning, with philosohpy, because in order to understand the post-modern minds we have to understand the forces that shaped the Western civilization and that, in my opinion, caused atheism. Let's start, as I said, with philosohpy, and with someone that is appreciated in my religion, Plato.
For the ancient greek philosophers and especially for Plato, there is a form of cognition that is non-discursive, that means that it does not take place in lenguage. Most people are familiar with Plato's dividing line from "The Republic" where he makes a distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible or ideal world of ideas, then he divides the intelligible world into two parts.
For him, there is a higher form of cognition than mathematic reason or dialectic, this is the direct, unmediated, vision of "the good" or "the beautiful". This ultimate contemplation, or "theoria" of "the good" or "the beautiful" is the end of dialectics, but it is not something we can produce or practice as we can practice dialectics. This ultimate "theoria" comes, we can only be ready for it. We can only prepare for it, because this "theoria" is beyond our knowledge and is external from us.
This approach will be developed by the later platonists, missnamed "neo-platonists" such as Plotinus and Proclus and a deep religious outlook is formed, one that will have a titanic impact on Orthodox spirituality. While the platonists had no concept of God as a personal being and certainly no concept of creation ex-nihilo, but they believed in the ultimate transcendence of the good and the fact that it relies beyond speech and beyond dialectics and discursive reason as well as beyond sensory experience provided a way for Origen and Evagrius to express their belief in the transcendent God of the hebrews revealed in the person of Christ in the cultural idiom of their own day.
While this thought was charged with some dangers and Origen's ideas was proof enough of that it cannot be denied that when combined with a pshychological insight and exercises borrowed from the stoics provided the neptic Fathers with powerful conceptions and tools for explicating the Orthodox path to the knowledge of God.
At some point, the patristic vocabulary became standardized and the word "nous" started to referr exclusively or almost exclusively to this higher, non discursive faculty of cognition. "Theonia" came to referr exclusively to the lower, discursive faculty of cognition, and this usage, in fact, goes all the way back to Plato. This standardization stands with the fact that it corresponds with real, lived experiences in the lifes of the Fathers.
Thus, the Fathers speak of the purification of the heart of the soul, the "nous" and its descent into the deep heart of men as the necessary precondition of the inmediated encounter with Christ, indwelling through the Holy Spirit.
At some point, however, and here comes the origins of atheism, in my opinion, this form of higher cognition dissappeared completely in the Western culture, and so the possibility of knowing God by purificating yourself in order to become intuitively aware of Him.
Some Orthodox theologians as Fr. John Rommanides are to put the blame for this at the shoulders of Saint Augustine, but this would be quite unfair for the bishop of Hippo. Most recently, some roman-catholics theologians have pointed to Duns Scotus as the cause for this. Despite who is right and the truth relies somewhere in the middle, by the dawn of the modern era in the Western civilization only two forms of cognition existed: the impression or through the discursive reason. With the arise of the scientific method, combining these two a new form was created and it remains until this day as the dominant intellectual paradigm of modernity: scientific rationalism. And yet, in spite of its appearences, philosophicly speaking it's a failure. David Hume knew that it was a failure when he wrote his inquiry concerning human understanding. He began his book by asserting that when we think we think about two kinds of things: matters of fact (sensed data) and relations of ideas and the rest of his book lead him to discuss the problem that this kind of thought made.
The modern era is characterized by three distinct attitudes: first, that human beings are essentially individuals; second, that human reason—and this will later be expanded to include the scientific method—is autonomous; and third, that human reason is sufficient to answer our needful questions and solve our problems.
Let’s begin with this new-fangled belief that human beings are essentially individuals. Aristotle wrote, and more than once, that to be human is to be in community. In fact, he defines man as a political, that is, a social, animal. A man who deliberately absents himself from society is, according to Aristotle, either a god or an animal, that is, he is either above humanity or below it. The one thing he is not, however, is a human being. In fact, so strong was this belief among the Greeks that the Greek word for individual is actually “idiot.”
Now, this belief is shared by all pre-modern peoples, and even today by most non-European societies. The modern cult of the sovereign individual marching to the beat of his own drummer is a European invention. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who despised modernity for a number of other reasons, called the triumph of the individual the greatest flower of modernity.
We may wonder, then, what brought about this great shift. The introduction of nominalism into medieval philosophy certainly had something to do with it. Nominalism is the position that only individual things exist. General terms referring to abstractions such as “humanity” or “human nature” are just names. Thus, a nominalistic anthropology would aver that there is really no such thing as humanity, only individual people.
The emerging new physics may have also played a role. Thomas Hobbes thought of humans explicitly along the lines of discrete bodies in motion, that is, if the natural world is made up exclusively of discrete material bodies moving in space, then people can be defined in much the same way. Hobbes made this anthropological physics the basis of his famous political philosophy.
In addition, however, we should also consider the influence the loss of the concept of nous may have had. The noetic faculty is one of pure intuitive apprehension. Its vision of the beautiful and the good is direct and unmediated. The discursive reason, on the other hand, is object-oriented. It is directed either towards sense-data or towards its own internal structure. In either case, however, thought is mediated by symbols or language. It is not too difficult to see how this could lead to the idea that each person is an individual cognitive center. In religion, this leads to the idea that each person is an individual interpreter of the Scriptures.
As long as one assumes that the natural world that all of these individuals perceive is one and uniform and that reason itself is universal and uniform, all is well. Once, however, one begins to entertain doubts about the objectivity of the world or of the universality of reason, then the whole program begins to unravel. I call this unraveling "post-modernism".
By way of contrast, let me draw your attention to the writings of the Fathers, particularly the greatest of the 20th-century theologians, Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov). Whether discussing the life of his mentor, St. Silouan, or his own experiences, Archim. Sophrony tells us that when the nous has been purified and encounters God in pure prayer, the soul becomes consciously aware not only of the unity of mankind but of all creation. This leads to the shedding of bitter tears for the world. These tears are not the product of sentimentality or emotion, but are a divine gift enabling the one who prays to enter into Christ’s intercessory prayer for all of creation. Do you see how the Orthodox method of prayer, noetic prayer, even when practiced by a monk living alone in a remote cell, leads not to egoism and isolation but to a noetic unity with God and with all of mankind?
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