I've seen not a few Facebook posts over recent days about atheists -- how they're wrong, how to confront them in truth, how to defend against their "assaults". And, each time, I'm tempted to ask: Which God don't they believe in?
Because, let's be honest: To some folks I'm an atheist. In much the same way that early Christians were called atheists by their Roman neighbors. They refused to worship the deity of the emperor. (How I wish the Religious Right still had that problem.) Jurgen Moltmann once said, "It takes a faithful Christian to make a good atheist". And he's right!
A lot of my best friends are atheists, too. And for good reason.
This tends to be something lots of Christian apologists -- particularly conservatives -- miss. All sorts of people refuse to believe in all sorts of gods for all sorts of reasons. Theology, in many cases, comes down to biography -- to the lives we live -- more so than to logic.
More to the point, the god in whom many Christians seem to believe actually deserves the sneering dismissal of so-called "protest" atheists (to use Moltmann's phrase) like Marx, Nietzsche and Camus, who deny the existence of God precisely because they take God so seriously. Theirs is a "purifying atheism" (Simone Weil). They accurately see what these true-believers themselves don't. Namely, that their god is merely a reflection and projection of themselves, meeting their needs and satisfying their longings (again, the tribal deity of the Religious Right comes to mind). They thus stand in the idol-smashing tradition of the great Old Testament prophets like Jeremiah.
As for the comical notion that you can "prove" God's existence by argument (ontological, teleological or moral), well, you can't. Those demonstrations are self-defeating.
They reduce the statement "God exists" to a hypothesis. And hypotheses are hypotheses precisely because they can be denied.
What we Christians ought to affirm is that the non-existence of God is inconceivable (which is what the ontological argument really says). That's not a statement of fact. Because the statement "God exists" is an affirmation of faith to be affirmed. Try reading Anselm's argument again. It's a prayer, not a proof.
God is, to use the language of my college logic class, a presupposition, not an inference. From nature, or anywhere else.
Or, to put this the way Kierkegaard provocatively put it: "God does not exist; he is eternal".
As for all those arguments from experience, those are non-starters. To the person who says, "God spoke to me in a dream", the skeptic responds, "You mean you dreamt that God spoke to you".
How do we even know that two people talking about experiences about God are even talking about the same thing? That would require verification from the object -- which we, by definition, don't have.
As Wittgenstein observed, we can only determine whether two people mean the same thing when they speak of God by examining, not their experiences, but their lives -- and that too is a matter of witness, not proof.
God, then, is not a being, not even the greatest being among beings, the "Supreme Being"; nor (as Tillich put it) is God the "Ground of Being", or even Being itself. Against these gods we must indeed declare ourselves atheists. Rather, with the brilliant French theologian Jean-Luc Marion, it is best to think of God as the "God without Being", i.e. the God who is love, whom we know only in love, the God who is mystery, whom we know only in ignorance. The God, in other words, who discloses himself to us in Jesus Christ.
That's why I thank God for atheists. They offer me opportunities to witness to the truth of the faith. As Chesterton wittily comments, "If there were no God, there would be no atheists".
Do I have proof? Hardly. But I have known love in ways that mean for me to share that love with everyone else.
Not much of an argument, is it?