Atheists and atheism BTFO!

A way of life and thought which denies or ignores the existence of God is bound to end in dissolution and self-contradiction.

If this is not sufficiently proved by the state of futility to which Humanism and rationalism have brought us, a state of inhumanity and irrationality, all that remains necessary is to reason the matter out.

From the standpoint of reason the conclusion that God exists is unavoidable; to demonstrate this truth was the greatest and perhaps the most permanent achievement of mediaeval philosophy, and in particular of St. Thomas.

The only way to escape this conclusion is to deny the validity of reason, which is merely to make argument, philosophy, and almost every form of discussion and thought impossible.

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Although our purpose here is the interpretation of Christian doctrine and not its evidences, this much must be said. Either the living God is, or he is not. Either the ultimate Reality is alive, conscious and intelligenct, or it is not.

If it is, then it is what we call God. If it is not, it must be some form of blind process, law, energy or substance entirely devoid of any meaning save that which man himself gives to it. Nobody has ever been able to suggest a reasonable alternative.

To say that Reality is quite beyond thought, and therefore cannot be designated by such small, human terms as "conscious" and "intelligent" is only to say that God is immesurably greater than man. And the theist will agree that he is infinitely greater.

To argue that Reality is not a blind energy but a "living principle," an "impersonal super-conscious," or an "impersonal mind" is merely to play on words and indulge in terminological contradictions. A "living principle" means about as much as black whiteness, and to speak of an "impersonal mind" is like talking about a circular square.

It is the result, of course, of misunderstanding the word "personal" as used of God -- as if it means that God is an organism, form, or composite structure like man, something resembling Haeckel's "gaseous invertebrate."

But the word is not used at all in that sense. From many points of view the term "personal" is badly chosen, but it means simply that God is alive in the fullest possible way.

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If the ultimate Reality is indeed a blind energy or process devoid of inherent meaning, if it is merely an unconscious permutation and oscillation of waves, particles or what not, certain consequences follow.

Human consciousness is obviously a part or an effect of this Reality. We are bound, then, to come to one of two conclusions.

On the one hand, we shall have to say that the effect, consciousness, is a property lacking to its entire cause -- in short, that something has come out of nothing.

Or, on the other hand, we shall have to say that consciousness is a special form of unconsciousness -- in short, that it is not really consciousness.

For the first of these two conclusions there neither is nor can be any serious argument; not even a rationalist would maintain the possibility of an effect without a sufficient cause.

The main arguments against theism follow, in principle, the second conclusion -- that the properties and qualities of human nature, consciousness, reason, meaning, and the like, do not constitute any new element or property over and above the natural and mechanical processes which cause them.

Because Reality itself is a blind mechanism, so is man.

Meaning, consciousness, and intelligence are purely arbitrary and relative terms given to certain highly complex mechanical structures.

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But the argument dissolves itself.

If consciousness and intelligence are forms of mechamism, the opinions and judgements of intelligence are products of mechanical (or statistical) necessity. This must apply to all opinions and judgements, for all are equally mere phenomena of the mechanical world-process.

There can be no question of one judgement being more true than another, any more than there can be question of the phenomenon fish being more true than the phenomenon bird.

But among these phenomena are the judgements of the rationalist, and to them he must apply the logic of his own reasoning.

He must admit that they have no more claim to the truth than the judgements of the theist, and that if rationalism is true it is very probably not true.

This is intellectual suicide -- the total destruction of thought -- to such a degree that even the rationalists own concepts of mechanism, unconscious process, statistical necessity, and the like, also become purely arbitrary and meaningless terms.

To hold such a view of the universe consistently, one must separate oneself, the observer, from it.

But this cannot be done, for which reason a contemporary philosopher has complained that man's subjective presence constitutes the greatest obstacle to philosophical knowledge!

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Now this is pure nonsense.

Man's subjective presence is, of course, the very condition of knowledge both of the universe and of God. It is precisely the existence of man in the universe as a conscious, reflecting self that makes it logically necessary to believe in God.

A universe containing self-conscious beings must have a cause sufficient enough to produce such beings, a cause which must at least have the property of self-consciousness. This property cannot simply "evolve" from protoplasm or stellar energ, because this would mean that mere consciousnessness is the result of less consciousness and no consciousness.

Evolution is, therefore, a transition from the potential to the actual, wherein the new powers and qualities constantly acquired are derived, not from the potential, but from a superior type of life which already possesses them.

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What is this superior type of life?

Taking as his basic principle the fact that something cannot come out of nothing, or, to state it positively, that every effect demands a sufficient cause, St. Thomas both demonstrates the necessity for its existence and outlines its general character in five ways.[1] He shows that it msut be the First Mover, the First Cause, the Being which exists necessarily, the possessor of the perfect degree of every positive property to be found in things, and the origin of order, whereby all things are directed to their proper ends.

The gist of the whole argument is simply that the universe requires an origin or cause other than itself, and that this cause must be absolutely self-sufficient.

Everything in the universe is the effect of some prior cause; every movement is the result of a prior movement; every being is derived from some prior being. The universe is always depending on something prior to itself, and at any "moment" it can only be a cause, can only exist, by virtue of being an effect.

The chain of causation cannot be extended back infinitely, for then we should have a system which is an effect without any prior cause.

This is nonsense, like the Cheshire Cat's grin suspended in empty space with no cat. It does not make it any less nonsense to increase its size, to carry the effects causing one another back and back and back. It only becomes a bigger and bigger absurdity. Carry it back to infinity, and you have an infinite absurdity -- an infinite grin without cat.

You must, then, arrive at an origin, a cause, which is not an effect, which exists in its own right -- necessarily -- and does not derive being from something else just because it is Being.

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It follows that this necessary and self-sufficient Being will have some astonishing properties.

Because it must be the sufficient cause of the whole universe (otherwise it would not be the first cause), it will have in the most complete degree every positive property to be found in the universe -- including life and consciousness.

It will be utterly free from other than self-limitation, for there is nothing prior to it to impose any limits upon it. It will not, therefore, be limited by time and space, and thus will be entirely present in every place and at every moment.

It will not be a body, because all bodies have spatial limitations and are subject to change and motion. It will not be a world-soul, considered as the form of the universe-body, because form and body are mutually dependent whereas the first cause is necessarily independent.

It will not be the universe itself considered as a Gestalt, a whole organism greater than the sum of its parts, because every organism is a dependent system which does not originate itself.[2]

It will not even be divisible into parts, since parts involve spacial and temporal limitations.

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In sum, reason can show that God exists, and that he is the unlimited fulness of life and being.

Yet he is quite other than what we normally term life and being, that is, the universe, for whereas things have life and have being, God is life and is being.

Otherwise, reason alone tells us what God is not, for beyond these great generalities its description of him is negative.[3]

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The fact that all life has its origin as well as its continued existence in a Being of this kind raises many problems, though not so many or so much serious problems as it solves.

It raises the possibly insoluble problem of evil, but solves what would otherwise be the far more remarkable problem of the existence of good.

It raises the difficult question of how an imperfect universe can be the effect of an infinitely perfect Being, but at least it gives us the exceedingly welcome assurance that there is a perfect Being.

It implies properties and qualities in this Being which bring thought to the limits of its power, not by their complexity, but by their astounding simplicity, and yet by disclosing such a property as God's entire precense at every point in space and time, it brings him from a distant realm of abstraction to a realm "nearer to us than we are to ourselves."

The argument can be shown to imply, too, that every process, every movement from the circling of stars to the vibration of a gnat's wing, is not only under the complete control of God, but also occupies his entire consciousness as if it were the only thing that was happening.

And while this makes the problem of evil even more acute, it gives the splendid knowledge that life is utterly to be trusted, however painful, and that nothing is easier than to have communion with God.

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But the argument raises one particularly serious problem which is both practical and theoretical -- a problem of the greatest importance for mystical religion and for the whole work of realizing union with God, a problem for which Christian philosophy, Thomist or otherwise, has not yet found a satisfactory answer.

It is the problem of the true relation between God and the universe, the Creator and the creature.

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From the purely philosophical standpoint the problem is that while the Thomistic argument works perfectly backwards, in reasoning from the universe to God, it does not work so well in reasoning from God to the universe.

It is shown quite clearly that the universe demands a Cause such has been described. But it is not shown at all clearly how the Cause produces the universe

Two possible solutions have to be rejected.

The first is that God created the universe out of some primordial, chaotic matter which had existed from all eternity along with but apart from God himself.

But if this matter is not caused by God he is not the first cause, and we have to look for God elsewhere, because if we are not dealing with the first cause, we are not dealing with God.

The second is that God created the universe out of his own "substance," by a process which should be called emanation rather than creation.

But if God is indivisible this involves pantheism, since every "part" of the indivisible God is equal to the whole -- is God himself. If every single creature is absolutely identical with God, all grades of perfection, all values, become illusory.

In fact the universe, as we understand it, does not exist at all.

The problem of creation, of the origin of the universe, is abolished by saying that there is no creation. There is only God.

There is also a completely unexplained illusion of a diversified universe. To say that God caused the illusion is in effect to return to the problem of creation, and we have to begin all over again, because man is God; or else it is to say that God as man became subject to the illusion.

And, again, God is not the first cause.

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Rejecting these two solutions, orthodox theology maintains that God created the universe out of nothing.[4] The universe, together with its time and space, was not. And then, by a fiat of divine will, it was.

Of course, this is not really a solution. It is simply a description of what must have happened if there was no pre-existing material and if God did not make the universe out of himself.

God caused the universe by some other means, but we don't know how. Reason has to jump a gap, seeing no way out of the dilemma.

The gap does not lie between God and the universe; it lies in reasoning, for theology knows no rational prinicple which can account for the action. It can only say that whereas creatures cause things out of themselves or out of pre-existing material, the Creator causes things in the manner proper to the first cause -- independently of pre-existing material.

But the point upon which orthodox theology wishes to insist is not just that there was no pre-existing material; it is that the universe, definitively and absolutely, is not God.

For in ordinary logical terms, the identification of the universe with God involves pantheism, which renders all moral distinctions unreal.[5]

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We could well afford to leave this problem alone as one of the unfathomable mysteries of the Godhead were it not that mystical experience, both Christian and non-Christian, glimpses, or intuits, an answer deeper than this, an answer for which theology has no proper terms of expression.

When expressed in theological terms, the answer sounds like pantheism, for which reason official theology has always looked upon mysticism with suspicion.

The mystic, on his side, is often somewhat dissatisfied with theology, because it seems to set a gulf between God and man which love cannot tolerate because it desires the most intimite kind of union.

We are raising, in fact, the crucial problem of transcendence and immanence, the One and the Many, a problem that has always been troublesome for Christian theology because the seeming dualism of God on the one hand and the universe on the other has not been adequately resolved.

While it remains unresolved the mystic must either go his own way and leave theology alone, or else he must be for ever wrestling with the adaptation of experience to theology and theology to experience, forever tempering his language with caution and taking care not to be a heretic.

For the mystic knows that in some mysterious and indescribable manner God and his universe are one.

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[1] Summa Theologica, I. Q. ii, a. 3.

[2] The Gestalt or configuration theoryof the universe is perhaps the only serious alternative offered to the various systems of mechanism or vitalism in the whole field of modern philosophy. It explains the development of organisms very satisfactorily until it tries to reach a final, or first, organism -- the universe-as-a-whole, greater than the sum of its parts. But such a universal organism would be self-originating, and therefore utterly unlike all other organisms -- utterly different in principle. Yet the Gestalt theorists assume it to be the same in principle, and reason accordingly. For a brief exposition see R. H. Wheeler, The Laws Of Human Nature, New York and Cambridge, 1932, esp pp. 1-66.

[3] The foregoing is intended as nothing more than a resume of the basic philosophical argument for belief in God. For the detailed argument see Summa Theologica, I. QQ. 1-26; E.L. Mascall, He Who Is, London, 1944; Farrell, A Companion To The Summa, vol. i, chs. 2-5. New York, 1941. Mascall's work is a particularly valuable discussion of the argument in relation to recent philosophical trends.

[4] This does not, of course, mean that the "nothing" was in any sense a material out of which the universe was constructed, nor yet should we imagine it even as an empty space apart from God within which it was made.

[5] The term pantheism is commonly used much too vaguely, and here must be taken in its strict sense, namely that God and the universe are two names for the same thing, that God -- universe = 0. Sometimes confused with pantheism is emanationism, the doctrine that the universe is a finite form of part of the divine substance. But the argument which follows assumes that the inifite is indivisible and can have no parts.

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Behold The Spirit: A Study In The Necessity Of Mystical Religion by Alan Watts, pp 118-126.