There’s a difference here. No, it is not ultimately our job to save people. But it is our job to evangelize.
The work of evangelization
is done, is my point. Modern atheists are not in the position of classical pagans, of people who have no knowledge at all of Christ. They have heard the truth and rejected it. They may not understand they are rejecting the truth but I don’t imagine that wasn’t true for those who refused to listen to Peter et al., whom Christ nevertheless instructed not to waste their time.
And part of our job as evangelists is to speak to people in ways they understand. How can you know that someone doesn’t want to hear “Jesus Christ is Lord” when no one has said it in a way that they may understand?
My point is that
there is no way a committed atheist can understand. The presuppositions underlying atheism are flatly incompatible with Christianity in general and Catholicism especially, and only once they are willing to repent of those presuppositions does the possibility for conversion open up. This means we are in a largely passive, receptive kind of position – praying and fasting, living saintly lives to inspire others, and answering questions when asked.
Many atheists I’ve found reject a God and religion that quite simply isn’t the God we worship and the religion we follow. They think there are no arguments for God, and that religion is just about blind obedience. Or they think that it’s just about making rules against things they don’t like. They reject the name “Jesus” but they have no idea who He is.
I agree. But it’s their fault, not ours, that they make no effort to seek out the best arguments for Christianity. There’s no shortage of them – the reason they aren’t seeking them out is because they don’t care and aren’t interested. It’s irrelevant to them. I know because I’ve been there. There is plenty out there written already, whether rigorous logical proofs from a Thomist perspective, spiritual meditations, mysticism, historical proofs (N.T. Wright’s stuff), etc. There is even a whole body of literature examining the many, serious, obvious problems with the naturalist/mechanist perspective. Yet these have done remarkably little to convert atheists en masse.
We need to consider that we do not have a grip on what we are up against. People talk like if we only had the right argument, or the right charismatic kinda person to make them, the whole world would convert. This is not true; if it were, we’d all be screwed, because none of us are even a fraction as smart or charismatic or holy as the kinds of saints who came before us and who still didn’t make a dent in the rising secularist tide. The problem isn’t intellectual, it’s spiritual – the problem is souls muddied by sin, intellects clouded by darkness and selfishness, etc. The solution is not generating an infinite permutation of meticulously detailed arguments for every possible perspective, it is praying and fasting and doing penance in the hopes of making the world worthier of receiving grace.
Like you said there is many reasons for someone to be an atheist, but most of them agree that there is no proof for supernatural beings and that they are not supposed to believe blindly, when someone says “something exists”, they have to prove the claim.
Yes, I’ve heard this before. It is to my mind a nearly perfect proof of how invulnerable the atheist is to argumentation. There is plenty of reason to believe in God, namely the fact that virtually everyone virtually everywhere for virtually all of history did. If everyone but me thinks the sky is blue, and I think it’s pink, I have two choices: I can believe that I’m wrong (that there’s something wrong with the rods and cones in my eyes, or with the way my brain processes color information), or I can believe that I’m right and
everyone else is wrong. Are these positions equally valid? Of course not – obviously it is more reasonable to conclude that I am missing something that no one else is than that I am the one special unique person who sees the true reality of the sky’s color.
Yet the atheist literally chooses the latter position every time. He would rather think he is smarter than Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, etc., even though he probably has not even read them and has spent maybe a whopping hour thinking things through, where Aquinas et al. devoted their entire lives to contemplation of the divine mysteries.
This is what I meant when I said before that
we are not up against mere ignorance, we are up against positive sin, against hubris, against a
positive will to disbelieve. And I know because, again, I have been there, and it was only by a monstrous exertion of unmerited grace that I was able to escape it.
