I am a humanist and Catholic. I do not accept any claimed incompatibility between faith and reason. The humanism I profess is more “fully human” than that of the atheists. These actually diminish the power of the human intellect, indeed the uniqueness of human nature itself to align it to that of mere animal nature.

In rejecting God they impoverish the human person by divesting it of the divinity that qualifies it. The atheists’ retort - I hear it coming - what ‘scientific’ evidence do you have about this?

It is at this point that, I am sorry to say, some Christians tend to stutter. Ordinary Christians are rarely trained to address ‘scientifically’ the evidence of God’s being. For them it is self-evident that God exists and that he created us. Being Christian they simply take God for granted. Indeed it is not belief in God that ordinarily leads to Christianity but rather the other way round.

But over two millennia Catholicism has come up with the sturdiest arguments for God’s existence. Not in response to any compelling challenge from atheists but in the course of its instinctive pursuit of knowledge. Catholicism has always been and remains a leading sponsor of all kinds of knowledge, including knowledge of God.

In particular, Christian scholars have pursued the knowledge of God in the conviction that without it no adequate knowledge of the human being, and of the universe it inhabits, is possible.

One of the acquisitions of the Christian understanding of God lies in the distinction between the philosophical knowledge of Absolute Being and the spiritual (in the sense of arising from the human spirit) or transcendental knowledge of God. Both kinds of knowledge address the human intellect and guide it to postulate its own divine origins. This is a knowledge that the Bible does not deliberately offer, although it assumes and sustains it, even to the extent of almost waggishly saying that only the fool would say “in his heart” that there is no God. (cfr Psalm 14).

Catholic theology sometimes refers to transcendental knowledge of God as a knowledge that comes from the “evidence of the heart”. Every human being has access to it although not everyone, for some reason or other, actually admits it.

Those who do are usually goaded toit by the realisation that human life, so infinitely bigger than the chunk of land or time that one inhabits, would be absurd if it were to be confined to the here and now.

At this point the question about God rises spontaneously and inevitably. This question is already evidence that an answer to it must exist, an answer that cannot come other than from outside finite human existence. Catholics accept this evidence. Atheists fail or refuse to see it.

In such cases of rejection it is useless for Christians to debate the question of God quoting Scripture chapter and verse. Scripture is not and was never intended to prove anything. Not even God’s existence. For the Bible, God’s existence is a non-issue. He speaks and therefore he obviously exists.

And God, who speaks, and who is not irrational as to speak into a void, created the addressee, the hearer of his word, the human being. But again, though it can be scientifically investigated and understood, this cannot be scientifically proven. It is revelation. Period.

The ‘god’ that militant humanists proclaim the inexistence of is rarely the God worshipped in Christianity

The Bible is not concerned with scientific proof. Its concern is solely the human being’s call to dialogue with God. It transmits its message in the symbolic, allegorical, poetic and narrative forms of the time. Where it says that Christ will be coming “like the rising sun” it is not making any statement about any alleged movement of the sun, but rather about the certitude and glory of his coming.

Galileo Galilei landed himself in trouble not because he had stated, contrary to the general assumption of the time, that it is the Earth that goes around the sun and not vice versa, but because, having stated it, he went on to declare that therefore the Bible was wrong.

Galilei, an astronomer but no Scripture scholar, cited the Bible to dismiss it, ignoring the fact the Bible is not a book of science but a developing history of divine grace. Thus the Bible ignores such theories as the big bang or evolution. These are matters of scientific investigation that is autonomous from the Bible and does not need God to proceed. What the Bible does is throw its light on the human being in the universe, on its origins, meaning and destiny.

Militant atheists or humanists argue for the incompatibility between reason and faith. But many leading scientists maintain that no such incompatibility exists. From the very beginning, Christianity drew on Greek systems of knowledge to articulate its knowledge of Christ and his teachings.

The Catholic Church branched and deepened these systems of knowledge so that it now possesses a tremendous body of human information which it shares with whoever might be interested. This includes evidence concerning God’s existence which, I argue, can only be unreasonably dismissed.

It is a pity that many, including Catholics, are so poorly aware of this body of knowledge. Maybe this is because Christians have learned from experience that no argument from reason will induce anybody to believe, no argument from reason will convince anyone who does not want to be convinced.

I might be mistaken but I would say that very few atheist humanists actually reject the existence of God on the basis of thoughtful and unfettered investigation. Most would have some kind of intolerance for religion, maybe because of problematic Old Testament texts, or a disagreement with traditional religious gender norms, or resentment over the Church’s perceived power structures, or some personal grievance, real or imagined. Could it not be, at times, a case of throwing the baby out with the bath-water? Here, social mess ups and moral failings by Catholics, including priests, have not helped.

But more often than not, the ‘god’ that militant humanists proclaim the inexistence of is rarely the God worshipped in Christianity, the God that Christians encounter in Christ and whom Christians recognise from the transcendental or spiritual knowledge of him that they discover as having already had.

Mgr Joseph Farrugia is a senior lecturer at the University of Malta.

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