Part Three - Atheism and Salvation
Some Initial Considerations
Twisted Reasoning Leads Away from God
Wisdom 1:1
The distinction between atheists and theists is not easy. Two things are at play: what is meant by the word God and what is the right concept of God. In this regard, taking this into account, it can be said that there are certainly some who are undoubtedly atheists. But some seem like atheists but are not actually. Others are unquestionably theists. Still, others may appear theistic, but in reality, they are atheists.
Someone who never speaks of God is not necessarily an atheist, while a religious person or an academic theologian who always has the name of God on their lips may be essentially atheistic, not believing in God and not obeying God. But does anyone who speaks of God have the right concept? It is not always guaranteed. And can one have a correct concept of God without naming Him?
Theism and atheism certainly oppose each other as two opposing views on God. However, the substance of their opposition lies not so much on the theoretical level but rather on the practical level: one is a theist who obeys God; one is an atheist who disobeys Him. Everyone knows that God exists, even those who deny His existence.
The decisive opposition to salvation, therefore, is not on the theoretical level but on the practical one. It is pointless to admit that God exists if one does not do His will. Conversely, it is not excluded that someone denies that God exists but, when put to the test, obeys Him.
This fact can be demonstrated by considering that the mutual opposition between Christ and the Pharisees depended on the fact that, although both Christ and the Pharisees spoke of God, in essence, Christ was a theist, while the Pharisees were crypto-atheists and pretended believers.
The decisive differentiator, therefore, between theism and atheism can certainly be the explicit and formal opposition that separates Adam, Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Solomon, David, St. John the Baptist, Christ, Saint Paul, Saint John, Saint Augustine, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, Saint Bonaventure or Saint Thomas, from Protagoras, Sextus Empiricus
[Greek, Pyrrhonist philosopher and Empiric school physician, who lived in the 2nd century, with Roman citizenship. His philosophical works are the most complete surviving account of ancient Greek and Roman Pyrrhonism, the first Greek skeptic philosophy. He doubted the validity of induction long before David Hume (Ed.],
Pyrrho, Lucretius, Feuerbach, Helvetius
[Johann Friedrich Schweitzer (1630 – 1709) was a Dutch physician and alchemical writer of German extraction. (Ed.)],
D'Holbach
[ Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723 – 1789), was a Franco-German philosopher, encyclopedist, and writer, and a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. (Ed.)],
La Mettrie
[ Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709 –1751) was a French physician and philosopher, and one of the earliest of the French materialists of the Enlightenment. He is best known for his work L'homme machine (Ed.)],
Spencer
[ Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) was an English polymath who originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined after reading Charles Darwin. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet he saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics (Ed.)],
Büchner
[ Karl Georg Büchner (1813 – 1837) was a German physician, dramatist, and writer of poetry and prose who in German literature intersects between romanticism and naturalism. He is considered part of the liberal and revolutionary Young Germany movement(Ed.)],
Moleschott
[Jacob Moleschott (1822 – 1893) was a Dutch physiologist. He is known for his philosophical views regarding scientific materialism. He stood, in fact, in the center of the public debates about materialism in Germany in the 1850s. He taught as a professor of physiology at Zürich, and then, called by De Sanctis - minister of Education -, at Turin, and Rome, where he died. “In controversy with J. Liebig's attempt to reconcile theology and science, Moleschott expressed a materialistic positivism hostile to any anthropomorphic or teleological concept. He aimed to emphasize, often in a dogmatic and rigidly reductionist manner, the role of material determinants in human life. In opposition to idealists and spiritualists, he understood force as an inseparable property of matter and life as a state of matter. He viewed the mechanical models of science as the only valid explanatory frameworks. His influence in Italy, especially on the anthropological school of C. Lombroso, was noteworthy.” (Ed. Cf. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/jacob-moleschott/ )],
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Comte, Stirner
[Pseudonym of the German philosopher Johann Caspar Schmidt (1806 - 1856). As a representative of the left Hegelianism (dealing mainly with the Hegelian notion of social alienation and self-consciousness), he fought against any real or abstract entity (from the State to religion, from morality to law, to new liberal or socialist ideals) that claimed to position itself above the individual. He considered the individual as the only true reality, sovereign of their world, and creator of their values. His most famous work ("Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum") influenced J.P. Proudhon and F. Nietzsche; the theorists of anarchism, nihilism, existentialism, psychoanalytic theory, and postmodernism drew also inspiration from him. Cf. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/max-stirner/ Ed. ],
Strauss
[ David Friedrich Strauss was a German liberal Protestant theologian and writer, who studied in Tübingen, where he attended lectures by Hegel, and by Schleiermacher in Berlin. His work (pioneer of the so-called historical-critical method), connected to the Tübingen School, revolutionized the study of the New Testament, early Christianity, and ancient religions. He applied the principles of Hegelian philosophy to the study of Christian origins, especially in "Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet", In this work, he denied the supernatural character of Jesus' mission and interpreted miraculous events as myths (following the Hegelian contrast between "myth" and "concept") aiming to represent the immanence of the divine in the human. According to Strauss, the "historical manifestation" of God could be found not in a single individual (Jesus) but in humanity as a whole. (Ed.: Cf. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/david-friedrich-strauss/?search=Strauss%2C%20David%20Friedrich )],
Schopenhauer, Carnap
[German philosopher (1891 - 1970). He studied mathematics and physics in Freiburg and Jena, where he attended the logic lectures of G. Frege. After an extended period devoted to studying the works of E. Mach, G. Frege, and B. Russell, he moved to Vienna as a philosophy teacher at the University. In Vienna, Carnap published works that revisited and developed some characteristic themes of the emerging neo-positivism, such as the emphasis on the importance of symbolic logic, the almost exclusive interest in the languages of empirical sciences, and the rejection of metaphysics as a collection of meaningless discourses. During this Viennese period, he also published "Der logische Aufbau der Welt" (1928; translated into Italian in 1966), which systematically presented a phenomenalistic conception reducing the entire edifice of sensible language and empirical knowledge to the logical structures and immediate data of lived experience. During his Prague period, he published "Logische Syntax der Sprache" (1934; translated into Italian in 1961), where Carnap, abandoning the claim to reduce language to a single privileged form, asserted the multiplicity of logical structures capable of accounting for the discourse universes of empirical sciences. He left the choice among the various possible forms to a free convention (principle of tolerance). Having moved to the United States in 1936, Carnap's philosophical production aimed at proposing a reconciliation between the neopositivist heritage and the ideas of American pragmatism. (Ed.: Cf. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/rudolf-carnap/?search=Carnap%2C%20Rudolf ],
Freud, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Mao Zedong, Vattimo, Margherita Hack, Piero Angela, and Odifreddi.
But the essential differentiator that allows us to make the distinction with certainty beyond appearances is how they speak of God, the concept they have of God, “the attributes they give to God,” seeing who speaks of God in the right way and who does it in the wrong way, who worships an idol instead of God, who worships his idea of God instead of the real God, who rejects the true God and who rejects the false one, believing it to be the true one.
Many who speak of God, in fact, such as Scotus Eriugena, Ockham, Marsilio Ficino, Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel, make us doubt, from the way they talk about Him, whether they are truly theists or rather atheists, or at least whether they do not lead to atheism. As for agnostics, who assert that they do not know whether God exists or not and do not pronounce themselves, they too actually have to reckon with God, and it is possible, from the study of their thought, to see which god they believe in.
On the other hand, someone who considers themselves atheist without actually being one is saved. Someone who is truly atheist is damned because they can't do the will of God. Someone who is a theist, if they do the will of God, is saved. Someone who knows who God is but does not put His commandments into practice is as if they were atheists and do not save themselves. Everyone knows that God exists. The alternative between theism and atheism about salvation exists only between those who do the will of God and those who do not, even if they are theologians at a Pontifical University and memorize the “Summa Theologica” of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Regarding the question of the essence of atheism, in addition to explicitly denying the existence of God, there are two other possibilities: either calling something God that is not God or having a false concept of God, or at least an insufficient one to have a right relationship with God and achieve salvation. The concept of God may be defective, and yet it is not useless for saving oneself. However, it must have minimal requirements, below which, due to its falsehood, it is useless for salvation.
The problem of atheism is connected with the concept of God and the use of the word “God.”
What meaning do we attribute to the word? What does it mean? Here the matter is not difficult: just consult a dictionary under the word "God," and we all agree. Otherwise, what would dictionaries be for? In this sense, everyone knows who God is
The issue is not so simple. Even if one accepts the dictionary definition, it doesn't make him a believer in God, not a theist, but he may be an atheist. He might say: I accept that the word God means a supreme being or the first cause, but precisely, I do not admit a supreme being or a first cause at all. There are no degrees of being, only different entities at the same level, more or less important. And as far as the causes are concerned, one can go back infinitely. Or if you want, for me, the supreme being or the first cause is not God but man, nature, or consciousness.
Others say: Why bother with such problems? Such abstract problems? What's the point? What do we know? Can't you see the continuous conflicts on this for millennia among philosophers? Let's pay attention to our daily needs instead: they pose real, solvable problems useful for our normal living.
However, we must say with certainty, based on Sacred Scripture (Psalm 14:1 and 53:2), that denying the existence of God is not wisdom but foolishness, which consists of the misuse of reason. Faced with an effect, reason questions its cause, searches for it, and is not satisfied until it finds it, assuming it is findable. But God allows Himself to be found by those who seek Him with a sincere heart (cf. Deuteronomy 4:29; Wisdom 1:2; Jeremiah 29:14). This is wisdom.
As the Book of Wisdom affirms, "from the beauty and greatness of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator" (13:5). The secret taught to us by the Bible, from the first verse of Scripture, to discover the existence of God is a reflection on our artistic work.
We realize that things cannot be made themselves but are made by someone similarly endowed with intelligence and will, someone infinitely more powerful than us. While we produce work using something pre-existing not made by us, Who produced things must have produced them in their “entirety,” thus in their very being or existence. In other words, He must have created them out of nothing.
Getting stranded, as happened to Kant, on the problem of the existence of God, limiting oneself to admitting only the idea of God, or even going so far as to say, as he did, that it is impossible to rationally prove His existence, is not a sign of wisdom, not a sign of philosophical greatness, but of mental narrowness. This Kant inherited from Hume, without denying Kant's nobility of thoughts and moral and speculative intentions in other respects.
Indeed, foolishness as a vice of the will as well as of the intellect is an expression in a myopic, narrow, carnal, captious, sophistical, double, and insincere reason, which, moved by bad will or pride, indulges in earthly matters and refuses to admit the existence of God despite having the evidence. And why does it refuse? Let's be honest: not for scientific or theoretical reasons that do not exist, but because the search for God weighs too much and is annoying because God commands things that the atheist does not want to do.
So, to feel justified in doing them, the atheist says that God does not exist, perhaps with the pretense of proving that He does not exist or that it is impossible to prove that He exists while knowing very well that He does exist. We are inclined to deny the existence of a truth that bothers us. All of us, atheists included, will one day have to appear before God to give an account of our deeds.
However, it must be kept in mind that an atheist is not only someone who explicitly denies the existence of God, perhaps with a bold and arrogant tone, but an atheist can also be a fake or false theist who procrastinates and when the conclusion of the reasoning looms, stops, pulling out vain pretexts not to be obliged to acknowledge the truth. And it is clear that if one does not correct oneself, one does not save oneself.
On the other hand, it happens that someone who seems atheist in speech, either always silent about God or disinterested in religion, or displaying prejudices against believers, may actually be a theist and thus be saved because, in practice, they eventually do the will of God felt as a duty of conscience, the will of a God hidden beneath the dignity of the neighbor whom they love. Similarly, a theist may be an atheist and thus be damned, even if they explicitly affirm the existence of God but regulate their will not according to the will of God but according to their own.
In short, to reach true theism and avoid explicit or implicit atheism, one must be realistic, adhering to external reality, and therefore recognizing the truth, although not infallible, of sense and intellect, carrying out cognitive activity by moving from initial sensory experience to intellectual intuition and from knowledge of material things to that of spiritual realities, as well as from effect to cause, since God is the supreme spiritual reality, the creative cause of visible and invisible things.
On the other hand, for those who believe that truth does not exist, but what is false for you is true for me, who believe that today what was false yesterday is true, who believe that yes and no coexist, who believe that being is identical to non-being, who believe that two contradictory statements are both right, who believe that man is the rule and measure of things and that things do not regulate human knowledge, who believe that knowledge stops at experimental knowledge and there is no metaphysical knowledge, that the object of knowledge is its ideas or concepts, the products of its imagination, or what he does, Gianbattista Vico's “verum ipsum factum,” or what seems to him – “verum est quod videtur “- or what he decides to be true – one who believes that thinking is confusing with wanting, as in Fichte and Nietzsche, such a person remains stuck on the path that leads to God. This does not depend on factors external to their will, so they are not without blame. They do not see because they do not want to see.
In any case, to be saved, it is sufficient to have a notion of God, which may be defective, rather vague, crude, or lacking, but sincere and convinced and containing the essential perhaps in very few spontaneous concepts; one could say childishly, concepts not refined and elaborated, such as God as Truth or Justice, God as the reason for human brotherhood, as a just and merciful Lord who rewards and punishes, as the Architect of the Universe, as absolute and lovable Mystery, and the like.
Speaking of God? How?
As we know, the second Commandment orders us not to take the name of God in vain. We must be very careful when speaking of God, we must do so with great prudence because it is easy to sin in this field and attribute to God an attribute that does not befit Him or deny or misunderstand an essential property.
Therefore, God can be named; the problem is how to speak of Him as befits. However, as the Bible itself warns us, our experience of encountering God can be so sublime and intense that we lack words to express what we have experienced [1].
This is then the mystical experience that compels us to be silent. Not that we lack the concept of God; on the contrary, it is so bright and exciting that what we see is so high that, as Saint Thomas said, our words seem like "straw."
Moreover, speaking of God is learned; we learn from the Bible, we learn from good philosophers and theologians, we learn from the Saints, the prophets, and the Magisterium of the Church. We learn especially from Jesus Christ. We also learn on our own, from our educators and teachers, through meditation and reflection, drawing consequences from what has been said by others, listening, and asking for light from the Holy Spirit.
We must realize the limitations and poverty of our language. There are times when we fail to express with suitable words what we conceive, intuit, see, glimpse, hear, and experience. It is better to be silent. Unfortunately, what we enjoy most about God and what we would like to communicate to others is precisely what we cannot express in words.
Without notions and terms taken from metaphysics, it is impossible to express oneself in religious and theological language [2]. Those who despise metaphysics or do not understand it are the carnal or animal man, of whom Saint Paul speaks, who does not understand the things of the spirit (1 Cor 2:14). Jesus Christ uses metaphysical notions, as I have extensively demonstrated in a specific study [3], naturally the spontaneous notions of natural reason, not those elaborated in a scientific sense.
As for preaching, talking about God requires appropriate devices related to the art of oratory, such as knowing how to give meaning and warmth to what is said, regulating the volume of the voice, pauses, gestures, and gaze, remembering that preaching takes place in school lessons, conferences, Mass homilies, recitation of the choral divine office, and spiritual guidance.
Especially when we pray, we must express ourselves with the same cadences or modalities that we would use if we were in front of another human being. We address God in a way similar to how we address our neighbor. This is how our words gain persuasiveness, liveliness, incisiveness, and attractiveness for those who listen to us. Instead, pale, dull, monotonous, and mellifluous tones and chants bore and give the impression to those who listen to us that we do not believe what we say but say it only because we have to say it, and the choir bell has rung.
Perhaps at times, dance gaze body position gestures music singing or tears can be useful. If theology is not suitable, poetry can serve, as Heidegger observes, something that Boccaccio had already said. Scripture speaks to us through the Psalms, which are poetic compositions. We see but cannot explain what we see and how we see it.
Regarding talking about God, there are various cases. Some do not mention God because, for them, it is a word that makes no sense. Others do not talk about God because they believe He does not exist. In reality, they know He exists but reject a false image of God. Others do not talk about God because they do not want to, as they are uneasy or in conflict with Him.
It is true that with the word God, one can understand or refer to different things, and it is indeed true that this word can have different meanings. Everyone knows what the word God means. Just open a dictionary. With the word God, everyone understands an absolute, most perfect, first, highest, and supreme being, the cause, end, and ruler of the world. Everyone has the concept of God. Why is this? Because everyone understands that an effect has a cause and an agent has an end. We call God the first cause of the effect and the ultimate end of the agent.
For some, there is no first cause, but they regress infinitely. There are only caused causes. Indeed, this would seem true, based on our experience of natural phenomena. However, the cause, to be a true and sufficient cause, must explain exhaustively, totally, and sufficiently the effect. A cause that is itself an effect is not a cause in the complete sense of the word and concept.
The Importance of the Concept of Cause
Our reason, upon seeing an effect, spontaneously conceives a cause that is only a cause. The problem, if anything, is knowing what this cause is like, what this cause is, and what attributes to give it. In any case, for there to be such an explanation or foundation for the effect, the cause must not be caused but only and solely a cause. The same goes for the end.
Our reason spontaneously conceives the efficient or producing cause, hence the creative cause, noting the move, made, and produced effect. Effect means made. If there is a product, there is a producer. It is necessary, therefore, to posit a driving, producing, and creating cause: the driving force of movement or becoming, the producer of essence, the creator of being.
The cause, to sufficiently explain the effect, must produce it entirely; not only in its becoming (motivating cause), not only as made (efficient or productive cause) in its form or essence (formal or ideal cause), not only in its acting (final cause), but also in its existence or being (creative cause).
The material cause is the foundation or substrate or subject of the material entity, so there is no need to posit a prior material cause preceding the material entity, but the materially explanatory cause of the bodily entity is its matter. However, since matter is a potential being, it also needs the cause of its being, and thus, the existence of matter postulates the existence of its creative cause.
The creative cause of being cannot be material but is pure spirit, pure form, and therefore a personal intelligent substance, as the Idea of the world and willing as the one freely creating it. It cannot be material because matter, being potential-being, cannot be uncaused, that is, it cannot be the cause of being because such a cause must be a most perfect being, that is, a pure act of being. Furthermore, matter is in space-time, which are accidents of substance, therefore caused, while only the spirit, in its immateriality, is above space-time, and thus only the spirit can be the creator of both spirit and matter.
When questioning the origin of the world and things, we cannot stop at the level of essence, concept, formal or ideal cause, but we must also pose, above all, the problem of the “efficient” cause, which concerns extra-mental being and reality external to us and independent of our ideas, the cause that produces being from nothing. Otherwise, we end up in idealism and pantheism, as happened to Spinoza, by confusing God with the idea of God, or in atheism, as happened to Marx, by confusing God with matter and man.
The first cause cannot be, as Kant believed, an Idea without being Reality, but it must be the coincidence of thinking and being. To be what it must be, it must be its own thinking and must think its being, which is thought: "Thought of Thought," as Aristotle says.
The ideal, efficient, motivating, and final cause is ontologically above the effect (heaven, spirit); the material cause is below (earth, flesh); the formal cause is immanent to the effect (essence).
The initial object of our intellect in the process and temporal development of our knowledge, starting from the experience of the senses, is not an absolute, infinite, and eternal being, the being whose essence is to be, the necessary being; in short, it is not God, but His created effects, sensible and external material things, all included and implicitly contained in the broader concept of all, common or universal being, transcendental analogical being, understood as that which in any way exists or can exist.
So, we do not start from self-awareness and the idea of God, as Descartes believed, or even from the idea of being, as Antonio Rosmini believed, but from that of things. Only later, by questioning the causes of things, do we come to discover the existence of God and to form an idea of God.
Only by questioning what their first cause is do we truly come to know the existence of God, precisely as the first creative cause of things. This does not mean that, to prove to someone that God exists, we are not obliged to agree with him on what we mean by the word God according to the dictionary. Therefore, in this sense, it is true that to know the "an sit," if God exists, we must preliminarily know the "quid sit," what or who God is, in a somewhat confused and indeterminate way, the essence of God.
To know that God exists, we must stay on the plane of facts and reality because it's not about explaining an idea but the foundation and cause of the real, the world, man, and both sensible and spiritual things. It concerns not only thinking but also, and even more fundamentally, being. Then, we will discover a God-Reality, transcendent and creator, and we won't give substance to our idea—a beautiful, sublime, and lofty idea constructed at the drafting table.
Conceiving God as the most perfect being or as the "id quo nihil maius cogitari potest" or as an entity that exists by essence is excellent, as Saint Anselm did. It is a sign of a high metaphysical intelligence and abstract or speculative ability. However, it is suspended in the air, without support or justification in the reality we experience.
Indeed, where does that concept of God come from? It is not constructed to clarify the essence of the first cause discovered from the experience of sensible things but through a pure abstract mental process to clarify the concept of being about essence. Anselm noticed the possibility of conceiving an entity whose essence was that of being or existence. He believed that this simple way of conceiving God authorized him to affirm that God exists in reality.
He deduced that this supreme entity he imagined existed not because he had evidence through creatures but because his acute mind, reflecting on what being could be, had been able to conceive it. He did not realize that the existence of this entity was simply thought by him; it was his simple concept, and he was not authorized to declare it real because he did not have empirical evidence through creatures, "per ea quae facta sunt," to say it with Saint Paul.
Once we have demonstrated that God exists as the first cause, starting from created effects, to understand the properties of this cause, we can confidently assert that in it, essence must coincide with being. But here, we will say who God is because we have demonstrated that He exists. We cannot prove that He exists just because we have the concept, no matter how true and sublime it is.
When addressing the problem of the existence of God, we cannot set aside the metaphysical and analogical concept of productive cause and only stop at the notion of being, as (Gustavo) Bontadini would like, only to then find difficulties in understanding the identity of becoming, as if it were contradictory. Additionally, not understanding what creation is, resolved into a determination or finitization of the unique and univocal divine being, in the manner of Parmenides. In this way, the world is no longer external to God but only a part of the divine essence, the only existing reality.
Every person implicitly or explicitly knows, applying the principle of causality (Rm 1:20), that God exists and must account for his actions. There is no invincible ignorance about the existence of God; there is no doubt about whether God exists or not; agnosticism does not exist.
Those who sincerely love their neighbor love God even if they don't know Him (Mt 25) because the neighbor is created in the image and likeness of God, a work of God. Therefore, to love the image of the Creator and the work of the Creator means to love the Creator.
We come to know that God exists not by reflecting on our consciousness or self-consciousness but by starting from the experience of external things. There is no, as Descartes believed, the innate idea of God because no innate ideas are lying originally in our consciousness. All our ideas, even those of spiritual realities, are formed starting from the experience of sensible things.
One question is whether there is one God or multiple Gods. But, reflecting on the fact that the problem of whether God exists is the problem of whether there is a cause of all things, it is clear that the true God can only be one.
End of the Third Part (3/10)
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, November 3, 2023
Source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/ateismo-e-salvezza-terza-parte-310.html
[1] Cf The Language of Mysticism, Proceedings of the Conference on Philosophical Studies in Cortona, October 6-7, 2001, Etruscan Academy, Cortona 2002.
[2] In his book "Analytic Philosophy and Semantics of Religious Language" (Queriniana, Brescia 1969), Dario Antiseri demonstrates how the English empirical epistemology expressed in the so-called "analytic philosophy" of the last century, due to its ignorance and disdain for metaphysics, is unable to construct a rational theology to the extent that the word "God" itself becomes meaningless, and nothing can be said about God. According to them, the word "God" would not serve to express what they mean. It is worth noting that it is not inherently forbidden to call God by a name other than the word "God." However, this brings no advantage since everyone knows what that word means: just open a dictionary. The English analysts would rather say that what they mean has nothing to do with God.
[3] Jesus Christ, Foundation of the World, Beginning, Center, and End of Our Integral Humanism," Editions L'Isola di Patmos, Rome 2019.