ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology. Donald W. Musser
Читать онлайн.Название New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781426749919
Автор произведения Donald W. Musser
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство Ingram
F. WILLIAM RATLIFF
Bibliography
Diogenes Allen, Christian Belief in a Postmodern World.
Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics.
Jerry H. Gill, Faith in Dialogue.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.
D. Elton Trueblood, A Place to Stand.
Cross-Reference: Culture, Epistemology, Feminist Theology, Hermeneutics, Philosophical Theology, Postmodern Theology.
APOSTASY (See HERESY.)
ATHEISM
The term “atheism” is as slippery to define as it is fraught with emotion. Doubtless, these two facts are intimately entwined. In part the problem in defining atheism rises from its relativity—as a negative term—to the denial of varying positive religious frameworks in which God or the gods are differently understood. This makes atheism dependent on historical setting and community belief. In part, the problem of definition also rises from emotions stirred against a perceived challenge to deeply felt community beliefs: “Atheist” has often been used as a term of abuse.
Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–500 B.C.E.) was widely reviled as an atheist for poking fun at the anthropomorphic foibles of the Olympian deities accepted by the orthodox in his day. It did not alter his classification as an atheist that he affirmed a single, motionless, nonanthropomorphic god, cited approvingly by Aristotle two centuries later. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c. 500–428 B.C.E.) was prosecuted and condemned to exile for atheism because he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies and, instead, insisted that the sun and moon were glowing stones, the sun even larger than the Peloponnesus. Socrates (470–399 B.C.E.), too, was condemned and was executed as an impious atheist despite his acknowledgment of personal spiritual guidance from a divine agent.
Other examples of the protean character of atheism abound. Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), though the “God-intoxicated philosopher,” was excommunicated as a Jewish heretic by his synagogue (1656) and was denounced by Moses Mendelssohn for his “atheism.” Paul Tillich, though a Christian theologian, was considered an atheist by some for his rejection of any belief in God as “a being over against other beings,” but he was not so considered by others, because of his affirmations of the “God beyond the god of theism.”
Recognizing the inescapable dependence of the term on historical setting and circumstances and avoiding any abusive overtones, our definition will be explicitly relative to what might be called “minimal Jewish and Christian theism.” Atheism in this sense is defined as rejection of belief in the existence of a cosmic reality—whether literally infinite or merely vast beyond human conception—of whom religiously important personal attributes like knowledge, purpose, action, goodness, or love can be at least analogically or symbolically affirmed. This rejection can be of two sorts: first, rejection as disbelief, in which arguments may be given for the logical impossibility, empirical improbability, or theoretical implausibility of belief in such a cosmic reality; or, second, rejection as dismissal, in which theistic utterances are held to be cognitively meaningless, not qualifying for belief or disbelief and thus not a fit basis for ordering policies of life or for worship.
Arguments for Disbelief. 1. Arguments for the logical impossibility of the existence of God depend, like any a priori argumentation (that is, arguments from the necessity of ideas rather than from evidence of experience), on a careful definition of the God-idea that is held to lead to the logical contradiction or necessary incoherence that rules out belief. The dual task of a priori atheist arguments of this sort is to show that the definition offered is legitimately derived from genuine religious theism and, at the same time, fatally flawed.
Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, observes that the God of theism must be believed both to possess a maximum of secure reality, that is, a maximum of “being” of the strongest conceivable sort, and simultaneously to possess a maximum of interiority—of freedom, thought, love, and self-awareness to an eminent degree. If God were lacking in either of these aspects, God would not be the God that theists adore. But, Sartre points out, the two aspects are mutually incompatible. Secure being is the sort of phenomenon that can be “in itself” only by being entirely solid, ponderous, closed to possibilities of being in any way other than it is. Self-awareness, on the other hand, is the sort of phenomenon that can be “for itself” only by being a sort of nothingness, pure possibility, radical freedom. But to try to combine them constitutes a contradiction! What we want in a God is a projection of our own thirst to link impossibly the two aspects of ourselves between which we are torn. We are dangerously free, like it or not, and we wish—passionately—that we could at the same time be something solid. We attribute such an ideal, unreachable unity to God, but this projected God of our existential anguish is a “useless passion.” Sartre’s atheism, in consequence, is theoretically necessary. If the underlying Sartrian categories of “being” and “nothingness” can be shown not to be compelling, however, then the impossibility of belief in God on this ground vanishes.
Another example of an a priori argument less dependent on special background assumptions for the logical impossibility of belief in God is John Findlay’s ontological disproof. He points to the religious requirement that God—to be worthy of worship—be absolutely perfect in all ways, including the way in which God exists: God must not exist merely contingently (the possibility of God’s not being would be a terrible imperfection), but necessarily, as Anselm recognized and made the basis of his ontological argument. But, Findlay asserts, modern logic has shown that since all existential statements are contingent, “necessary existence” is an oxymoron. God must be conceived as enjoying necessary existence, but necessary existence is ruled out in principle. Atheism is required, therefore, since any God worthy of worship turns out to be impossible. This a priori argument for disbelief in God, like the first, rests on a theoretical framework, though an even wider one than Sartre’s. Its key theoretical assumptions are that all existential propositions are included within the class of empirical propositions and that all empirical propositions are contingently true. This fundamental framework is no less open to rejection than the first if, for example, synthetic a priori propositions can be defended or if some existential propositions simply do not share the logic of empirical ones.
2. Arguments for disbelief in God may, in addition, be grounded in a posteriori modes of reasoning (that is, arguments from the evidence of experience). Assuming the inconclusiveness of the so-called theistic proofs, the atheist position pushes beyond indecision toward a negative judgment. In the foregoing section we saw how the traditional ontological argument can be reversed in an attempted a priori disproof of the existence of the allegedly Necessary Being. Likewise, but in an a posteriori mode, the traditional cosmological argument, arguing for the existence of a First Mover, can be counterattacked with an appeal to modern empirical science in which motion is no less self-explanatory than rest, and in which cosmological theory has come to depict the universe’s origins in an impersonal Big Bang rather than in divine purpose. The traditional teleological argument (from design), from an atheist’s perspective, is even more vulnerable to counterattack. Not only does evolutionary science offer an alternative, impersonal explanation for orderliness and mutual adaptation within the biological world, but also close observation reveals maladaptations, extinctions, and vast domains of suffering.
The problem of evil, raised in one of its sharpest forms by this counterattack against the argument from design, is a mainstay in the atheist’s arsenal against the probability of an all-powerful and all-benevolent God. Given the evidence as a whole, containing not only adaptation and beauty but also plague and earthquake, birth defects