By DONALD DeMARCO
Is it possible to be completely atheistic? How can a person stifle the moral law within his soul and remain unmoved by the starry skies above? The religious impulse lies within each one of us. How is it possible for that impulse to be completely ignored? If there is no God, why should anyone struggle in the pursuit of his aspirations? Is not the ultimate aspiration to be with God?
George Will informs us in his new book, The Conservative Sensibility (2019), that “I am not religious at all [but] . . . I deeply respect religions and religious people. The great religions reflect something constant and noble in the human character, defensible and admirable yearnings. I am just not persuaded. That’s all.”
He characterizes himself as an “amiable low-voltage atheist.”
“I’m an atheist,” he stated in an interview for Real Clear Religion (September 22, 2014). “An agnostic is someone who is not sure. I’m pretty sure. I see no evidence of God,”
Nonetheless, he is a staunch admirer of Mother Teresa, Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Cardinal Newman. At the same time, he has little amiability for Pope Francis whose sentiments, he asserts, “possess the intellectual tone of fortune cookies.” He claims that Pope Francis “stands against modernity, rationality, science, and, ultimately the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources.”
Will studied religion in college. His grandfather was a Lutheran minister. It was a Lutheranism, however, that both Will and his father rejected. Rejecting the religion of Martin Luther, needless to say, is a long way from rejecting God.
Atheism is surely a mystery. I liken it to a situation in which a gathering of people enjoy a sumptuous meal but deny the existence of a cook. They are reluctant, if not capable of reasoning back from the meal to the one who prepared it. Someone has lampooned atheism in a jocular manner that is sure not to please atheists: “The belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs — Makes perfect sense.”
Consider Will’s line of thinking which appeared in a 1986 article entitled, “Louisville Slugger Sure Sign of a Higher Power,” in which he sounds like a medieval philosopher: “When Thomas Aquinas was ginning up proofs of God’s existence, he neglected to mention the ash tree. It is the source of the Louisville slugger, and hence is conclusive evidence that a kindly mind superintends the universe. The Big Bang got the universe rolling and produced among the celestial clutter one planet, Earth, enveloped in an atmosphere that causes rain to patter on Pennsylvania ridgetops where ash trees grow. They grow surrounded by other trees that protect the ash trees from wind and force them to grow straight toward sunlight. The result is wood with the perfect strength required for the musical ‘crack’ that is the sound the cosmos makes each spring when it clears its throat and says, ‘We made it’.”
All this is good fun, but it does not reflect the mind of an atheist. Aquinas, himself, would have been amused.
Yet, on another occasion, Will tells us that “St. Thomas Aquinas said that there must be a first cause for everything, and we call the first cause ‘God.’ Fine, but it just has no hold on me.” Reason alone might not lead a person to embrace God. Acceptance of God is a matter for the whole person.
Robert Cardinal Sarah, in his book, The Day is Now Far Spent (2019), states: “The underlying characteristic of the Enlightenment ideology is to affirm that reason, in order to be reason, must cut itself off from all divine light. The Enlightenment ideology tried to exile God as far as possible from our Earth” (p. 229). Aristotle’s God, reached through reason, is “a thought thinking a thought,” but hardly a deity that one could warm up to.
Will’s humor and atheistic assertions notwithstanding, he continues to intrigue us with suggestions of the Deity. Physicists inform us that the ratio of matter and energy to the volume of space at the moment of the Big Bang had to be within about one quadrillionth of one percent of the ideal. In addition, space, at the time of the Big Bang, had to be astonishingly flat for the universe to develop. If it had not, the universe would have come to an end in a small fraction of a second, or would have expanded so rapidly that the universe would have been too cold for stars to form and life to evolve.
Despite the overwhelming odds against the universe forming as it did, it nonetheless did happen. George F. Will, who has earned a Pulitzer Prize for his journalism, has commented on this unlikely occurrence by stating that “what is is staggeringly implausible, and that is theologically suggestive” (Newsweek, November 9, 1998, p. 88).
Despite his confirmed atheism, theological insights keep peeping through. He may be less atheistic than he thinks. Will admits, in one of his columns that “you can’t (or so I am increasingly convinced) ‘explain’ anything by citing anything. You can’t really explain anyone, period.”
Let us, then, not try to explain George Will’s atheism. Perhaps he could echo the words of George Bernard Shaw: “I am an atheist and I thank God for it.” Nonetheless, it seems to me that some atheists might be more theistic than some theists claim to be. Let us ponder the mystery and not demand too much definitiveness. In the end, God will judge us all.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a professor emeritus of St. Jerome’s University and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary. He is a regular columnist for the St. Austin Review. His latest two books, Apostles of the Culture of Life and How to Navigate Through Life, are posted on amazon.com.)
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