- Feb 5, 2002
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Atheists seem to accept their atheism as a matter of faith, not reason. This is not rational but merely wishful thinking.
As a young man, immersed in the secular spirit of the age, I thought I needed to choose between reason or religion. One couldn’t choose both because one contradicted the other. We could have the comforts of religion but only by abandoning reason, or we could accept the demands of reason which precluded the belief in any religion. Accept the cozy lie or embrace the cold, hard facts. That was the choice facing all of us.
It wasn’t until I was older and began to take an interest in reality on a deeper level that I began to question whether rationalism was in fact rational. It seemed to me that nobody could know that God didn’t exist. Atheists seemed to accept their atheism as a matter of faith, not reason. Most of them didn’t want God to exist and so chose to deny his existence. This is not rational but merely wishful thinking.
Then I started to wonder how we could explain the existence of the things which we knew existed. How did trees come into existence? Or, more radically, how did anything come into existence? How did nothing become something? Even a speck of dust was something? How did it come into being?
And then it seemed to me that the efforts of atheists to answer these questions were entirely inadequate. They were not answers but merely efforts to explain away the questions. They did not ask Pilate’s question, quid est veritas? (what is truth?) from the perspective of a question that needed answering but from the perspective of a question that was unanswerable and therefore not worth asking.
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
As a young man, immersed in the secular spirit of the age, I thought I needed to choose between reason or religion. One couldn’t choose both because one contradicted the other. We could have the comforts of religion but only by abandoning reason, or we could accept the demands of reason which precluded the belief in any religion. Accept the cozy lie or embrace the cold, hard facts. That was the choice facing all of us.
It wasn’t until I was older and began to take an interest in reality on a deeper level that I began to question whether rationalism was in fact rational. It seemed to me that nobody could know that God didn’t exist. Atheists seemed to accept their atheism as a matter of faith, not reason. Most of them didn’t want God to exist and so chose to deny his existence. This is not rational but merely wishful thinking.
Then I started to wonder how we could explain the existence of the things which we knew existed. How did trees come into existence? Or, more radically, how did anything come into existence? How did nothing become something? Even a speck of dust was something? How did it come into being?
And then it seemed to me that the efforts of atheists to answer these questions were entirely inadequate. They were not answers but merely efforts to explain away the questions. They did not ask Pilate’s question, quid est veritas? (what is truth?) from the perspective of a question that needed answering but from the perspective of a question that was unanswerable and therefore not worth asking.
Continued below.
Chesterton and Lewis Taught Me This: Faith and Reason Are Inseparable
Atheists seem to accept their atheism as a matter of faith, not reason. This is not rational but merely wishful thinking.
