Dear Father, many highly educated men and women claim to be atheists. Yet anyone with even a minimum of intelligence must realise that the world just could not have started by itself. Scriptures say that ‘the fool has said in his heart, “there is no God”‘. Must we conclude that these people are fools? – Herbie.
The scripture reference you mention comes at the beginning of Psalm 14:1. You quote it accurately. However, I do not think that it entitles us to call people who do not believe in God fools. The psalm is referring to people whose ‘deeds are corrupt and vile’ and think that they can get away with what they are up to because, as they claim, there is no God to do anything about it.
There are well-known instances of men and women who do not believe in God and yet, lead admirable and upright lives. One distinguished French Jesuit, recently deceased and with a reputation for holiness, once told me that his own father had been an unbeliever all his life. When the father, universally admired for his moral courage as ambassador of his country in very difficult circumstances, was on his deathbed, he asked another Jesuit to accompany him as he faced into what he could only describe as ‘the dark’. That such a good man could find himself in such a predicament with what seems the best will in the world provides much food for thought.
Religious faith is a gift. One obvious aspect of any gift is that we cannot give it to ourselves. It has to come from someone else. I became very much aware of this simple and obvious truth one day some years ago, also in a French context, when two men – a father and a son – came to visit the Jesuit house in Chantilly, a town north of Paris, where I was then living. The father, an organist, had sought permission to play the high-quality instrument in our domestic chapel. My involvement consisted simply in letting them into the chapel and opening the door to the organ loft. I was ‘the man with the keys’ for that week.
It was only when I realized that the father was completely blind that I decided to follow them up the stairs to see what would happen. The son switched on the electricity as the father sat down, ran his feet over the pedals, pulled out a number of stops and almost immediately launched full-belt into a Bach fugue that filled the whole building. I could hardly believe either my eyes or my ears. I subsequently discovered that he had studied and worked with some of the greatest French organists of the century.
I must confess that I was in awe of this gifted man. However it was impossible to overlook the fact that there was one gift that most of us take for granted that he did not have. He could not see. Gifted musically, he had made the most of his talent, overcoming extraordinary odds to achieve the excellence which was so evident in his playing. Hard work and clarity of purpose ended in great achievement. But no amount of effort would have ended in sight. In spite of all his outstanding human qualities he was incapable of doing what the least gifted child in the nearby primary school could do effortlessly.
Perhaps for those of us who have been reared in it, the Catholic faith has had a deeper impact on our world-vision than we realize. Like yourself, it only seems to me to be common sense that there must be an Uncaused Cause – another name for God – of everything that exists. However, St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of Catholic theologians, was only prepared to say that this position is not against reason but to go further and assert that such a God really exists is beyond reason. It requires the gift of faith.
Gifts come in different shapes and sizes. Some make more demands on us than others. The gift of a bicycle requires little change in our lifestyle. It is something you can leave in the garage for a few weeks and forget about. The gift of a baby is significantly different. Forgetting about it for a few weeks would have dire consequences. Faith is more like a baby than a bicycle. It needs nourishing, care and attention; otherwise it will die. ‘You have been trusted to look after something precious; guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit’ (2 Tim. 1:14).
Faith is a form of sight enabling us to see beyond appearances to the things that last. ‘Visible things are transitory, but invisible things are eternal’ (2 Cor.4:18). Things that last, as St. Paul saw so clearly, are infinitely more important than those that pass. If there are not things that last, what future is there for us anyhow?
Recently, Benedict XVI speaking to students and staff at the Gregorian University, put starkly what is at stake: ‘Human destiny, without reference to God, cannot but be the desolation of anguish, which leads to desperation.’
This article first appeared in The Messenger (March 2008), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
