“I think therefore I am.” The Atheist has absolute certainty of his own existence.
You can’t be serious.
Ah, so knowing with absolute certainty is possible?
Or is it?
I am sure you are aware of William’s and Kierkegaard’s critiques of Descartes’s argument.
Gloomy old Oswald Spengler (of all people) makes an interesting observation in this regard:
"Expression-language before witnesses merely proves the presence of an “I,” but communication-language postulates a “thou.”
The “I” is that which speaks, and the “thou” that which is meant to understand the speech of the “I.” For primitives a tree, a stone, or a cloud can be a " thou." Every deity is a “thou”.
In fairy-tales there is nothing that cannot hold converse with men, and we need only look at our own selves in moments of furious irritation or of poetic excitement to realize that anything can become a “thou” for us even to-day.
And it is by some “thou” that we first came to the knowledge of an “I.” “I,” therefore, is a designation for the fact that a bridge exists to some other being.”
Thankfully, The Dogmatic Constitution of the Catholic Faith has made it clear that, “There is one true and living God, creator and lord of heaven and earth”, and that “this one true God, by his goodness and almighty power…brought into being from nothing the twofold created order, that is the spiritual and the bodily, the angelic and the earthly, and thereafter the human which is, in a way, common to both since it is composed of spirit and body.” Morever, this God could
"be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason."
And as I have written in a previous thread:
This whole conflict between Christianity and Modern Science (Materialism) goes back to the ancient rival cosmological arguments of Epicurus and Aquinas. Everything depends on whether the things of nature are or are not eternal. If they are, Epicurus is right, and nature is self-contained, having no need of a divine source; if they are not, Aquinas is right, and nature is contingent, existing in a state of dependence on the source of its existence, a source outside of nature. The beauty of Aquinas’s argument from contigency, is that it is not based on revelation. It is not a scriptural argument. The Bible is never mentioned. It depends entirely on natural reason. And Aquinas’s argument actually has science on its side; indeed, since the advent of Big-Bang cosmology last century, it appears that the great weight of physical evidence points to the contingency of the universe. Sometimes it takes years for the scientific community to catch up with the knowledge of the Church. We’ve been saying the universe began in an instant from the beginning. Science figured this out and made it “orthodoxy” only rather recently (having been forced to abandon the most spectacularly wrong consensus in the history of science). We’ve said all people were equal, while science was toying with phrenology and eugenics. Eventually they got it and got up to speed.
Ironically, there is actually no actual direct evidence supporting the Epicurus’s “eternal atom” or the “grand unification theory” as it would be called today. In fact, none of the arguments in favor of Materialism is based on direct evidence, whereas all of the arguments in favor of an intelligent Designer are in fact based on empirical evidence that we can see and measure. When one sees design (the purposeful arrangement of parts) in Nature, it is only reasonable to conclude the presence of a Designer. Modern science (Materialism) was designed to exclude the Designer. Science, for the materialist, is not about truth-seeking. It is a about therapy, about achieving “ataraxia” (“freedom from disturbance” as Epicurus put it) from the fear of hell and the guilt of sin and the demands of the gods. Materialists are convinced a priori, by argument (rather than by evidence) that God does not exist. Unless blinded by devotion to materialism, a reasonable person could infer that the existence of a creative Intelligence as the cause of the fine-tuned universe is far less miraculous than the workings of Blind Chance. Ironically, there is nothing more likely to lead to the ultimate collapse of Materialism *than *the advance of science. Non-materialist arguments are viable alternatives as long as they explain the visible phenomena equally well or better. Thankfully, nature is independent of any scientific hypothesis defining scientific inquiry; Nature has the last say.
Now, as to the question of the identity of the Designer. The evidence is very strong that Christ was exactly who He claimed to be. Even prominent atheists like British skeptic Albert Henry Ross, who originally set out to disprove the “myth” of the Resurrection, ended up being forced to admit that all the alternatives to the historical reality of the Resurrection (conspiracy, hoax, lies, hallucinations, myth, etc.) ended up being even less credible than the even they sought to discredit. The evidence exists. You are not FORCED to accept it. Even Richard Dawkins, in his debate with John Lennox at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, was forced to concede that the Gospel accounts are reliable historical accounts.
Atheists (I prefer “Materialists” or “Anti-Theists”) have a very good case for the non-existence of a cosmic genie, but very weak one for the non-existence of the Creator. Most educated Anti-Theists that I have run into do in fact know that the one, true God exists. It is not so much that they deny His existence but rather they hate Him for their own painful, suffering existence (which is usually the result of their sinful lifestyles). Their materialism functions for them exactly has it has functioned since the time of Epicurus - as a form of therapy.
