Many atheists mistake materialism for science. It is true that you cannot prove the
existence of God by deduction. You
cannot put God in a test tube or under a microscope and subject Him to various experiments. You cannot prove the existence of an
immaterial being by material means.
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| Induction by Aquinas |
You can, however, prove that God — or a god — exists by
induction. This is the basis of
Aquinas’s five proofs of God’s existence.
A creation necessarily implies a Creator. An effect necessarily implies a cause, and,
ultimately, an uncaused Cause to start things off. And so on.
The fact is that many atheists do, in fact, recognize a
supreme being: themselves. This may be
humble or arrogant, but it is always egocentric. They recognize only themselves as the be-all
and end-all of existence; they are the cause, nature, and purpose of the
universe. (A common mistake many atheists
and even theists make is to assume that “religion” necessarily concerns a
belief in an afterlife. Not all
religions have that doctrine. Even
Judaism, the parent religion of both Christianity and Islam, developed the
concept relatively late. The Sadducees,
who were always trying to trip up Jesus with questions intended to show that
belief in an afterlife is nonsense, are a case in point.)
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| When the Dumb Ox bellows, people listen. |
This is what G. K. Chesterton characterized in Orthodoxy (1908) as a belief in the god
within, the Inner Light. Unfortunately,
this sort of egoism is rampant today not only among “atheists,” but among
religious believers who insist on trying to force faith to do the job of
reason. This is a tendency that
manifests in many ways, such as trying to make charity do the work of justice, “gift”
do the work of “exchange,” or of nonsense do the work of common sense.
This is why, in my opinion, Chesterton repeated his admonitions
regarding the dangers of using faith in place of reason in the introduction he
wrote to Fulton Sheen’s God and
Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925), and then again in his own sketch
of Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The
“Dumb Ox” (1933). As Chesterton
cautioned, in what comes across to me as a very pointed, even barbed warning to
his own followers, we must argue “not on documents of faith, but on the reasons
and statements of the philosophers themselves,” a quote he took from the
conclusion of Aquinas’s On the Unity of
the Intellect Against the Averroists.
