Atheism is Impossible
Following up upon yesterday's post, "God Belongs to No Genus," I want to make a related observation about atheism. If you missed it, reading that prior post will help you understand this one.
Here's the point. If you have a proper of understanding of how God relates to existence doubting the existence of God is ruled out. Simply put, atheism is impossible. You cannot doubt the existence of God.
There is a crude form of atheism. A simplistic version. This version of atheism assumes that God is some object in the universe like Odin, a giant teapot, or a flying spaghetti monster. In these versions of atheism, God is assumed to be some piece of furniture in the warehouse of the cosmos. A being among beings, a noun among nouns, an object among objects. And this version of atheism denies the existence of that object, that being, that noun. That if you searched the universe God will not be found. Therefore, God doesn't exist. And this is true. Christians agree with atheists on this point.
However, as I pointed out in my prior post, this vision of God's relation to existence is a confusion. God doesn't exist as objects exist. God is what gives objects their existence. Therefore, God cannot be located as piece of furniture in the warehouse of existence. God is the Existence which causes existence, the Being of beings.
When it is properly understood that God is the Source of existence, Being Itself, then it should be obvious why atheism is impossible. The human mind perpetually stands at the threshold of this mystery and is forced to ponder the Origin and Source of existence. God, properly understood, points to this Mystery.
Atheism is impossible because it denies the existence of an object and thereby demonstrates its metaphysical ineptitude. The Mystery of Being persists, obvious to any child, irrespective of any odd claim about what you might "believe" or "don't believe." The declaration that "God doesn't exist" is nonsensical.
Like I said, atheism is impossible.
This idea of God being nothing(not thing) or even being beyond nothing and being tends to come up in a lot of the meditative implications in the mystical tradition. But abstracting it to the theoretical to deny that denial is possible I think is an interesting and wise way to draw upon it.
Existence is a mystery to science because it can only produce knowledge by setting up chains of contingencies derived from spacial and temporal contiguities or well defined statistical regularities that have no known exceptions. Existence per se is a precondition of such knowledge.
But then atheists who critique metaphysical faith because science does not support it and theists who try to to use the science of their day to "prove" that God exists make the same false move: attempting to prove a brute fact.
Atheists who critique faith in a Reality behind the forms of existence that science can know have not taken the time to appreciate that the question of whether the brute fact of existence includes a Reality that transcends scientific understanding is a forced, yes-or-no question, precisely because scientific knowledge does not bear on the question that our contingent existence poses for us.