Atheism Up-to-Date

The fool says in his heart, There is no God.

So wrote the psalmist, thumbing his nose at Israel's village atheists. But in the 20th century, when the conscious rejection of God is more widespread than ever before, writing off all atheists as fools will not suffice, says Father John Courtney Murray (TIME cover, Dec. 12, 1960), best known of the nation's Jesuit theologians. The problem of God has been raised in a new way, and needs a new answer.

Once: Fastidious Doubts. Speaking at Yale University's first annual series of St. Thomas More Lectures, Murray defined the problem of God in Biblical, early Christian and modern times. Among the Jews, the problem was not whether a God existed--they believed he did--but whether he was their God, present in the world with them. "Is God our God, and what is his relation to us?'' they asked. "If he is our God, what shall we call him?" The early Christians asked these same questions, but found a different and more complete answer: God as their God, but also as Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the triune God who had guaranteed his presence in the world to men--"I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."

With this theological development, Father Murray argued, the ancient questions returned in a new form during patristic and medieval times. "Now their thrust was not toward the certainty of affirmation, but towards adequacy of understanding." This resulting intellectual search for the meaning of God reached its culmination in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, who gave system to theology through the use of Aristotelian logic.

Now: Open Opposition. In the 20th century, the problem of God has become the problem of atheism. History has always had its nonbelievers, Murray argued, but today's anti-God attitude is entirely new. "It is not simply a will to disregard, refuse and reject God; it is a new will actively to oppose God."

Opposition to God, in the name of human freedom, comes from two distinct but similar sources. One is the "godless man of the Communist Revolution," who believes that man can use his freedom to become master of history, to eradicate misery and evil. But to do this, God must be supplanted, for the belief in a God who permits evil is the source of man's impotence to "alter the conditions of misery in which he lives." Marx and his heirs, Murray noted, "were not deceived by the vacuous slogan that religion is a purely private affair. They had the genius to see that religion, even in the form of private faith, is the most public of public affairs. No fool is to be permitted to say in the privacy of his heart: God is here. Such a man would fail the revolution."

The other type of new atheist, Murray says, is the despairing existentialist philosopher. Like the Marxist revolutionary, he makes freedom the sole value in human life, and opposes God because evil is in the world. To the existentialist, man is a prisoner in an absurd world, constantly menaced by war and brutality. The overwhelming horror of this evil indicates that God, whether he once existed or not, is dead; man is left alone with only his freedom as a weapon against the world. But if freedom is man's passport to dignity, then God cannot be allowed to exist. "If God is present in the midst of men, man's exisence is transformed into a destiny he him self has not chosen. If God is so present, man is not free to make himself. The living God is the death of man."

To the Surface. Contemporary atheism, Murray argues, has brought the old problem of God up to the surface of his tory, where no one can ignore it. The question of God is no longer on the level of ideas or argument; it is, as it was in Biblical times, on the "historical, existential plane." Murray believes that Christians should be grateful to the modern atheists, for now there is no mistaking the nature of the theistic problem: Is the death of God myth or reality? Is the truth about God found "in Marx or Moses, in Sartre or St. Paul?" These are the questions for which the believer of today is being forced to find meaningful answers.

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