G.K. Chesterton (l) and C.S. Lewis (photo: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain)
By Joseph Pearce, EWTN News,
A native of England, Joseph Pearce is Director of Book Publishing at the Augustine Institute, and editor of the St. Austin Review, editor of Faith & Culture, series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions, senior instructor with Homeschool Connections, and senior contributor at the Imaginative Conservative.
Atheists seem to accept their atheism as a matter of faith, not reason. This is not rational but merely wishful thinking.
As a young man, immersed in the secular spirit of the age, I thought I needed to choose between reason or religion. One couldn’t choose both because one contradicted the other. We could have the comforts of religion but only by abandoning reason, or we could accept the demands of reason which precluded the belief in any religion. Accept the cozy lie or embrace the cold, hard facts. That was the choice facing all of us.
It wasn’t until I was older and began to take an interest in reality on a deeper level that I began to question whether rationalism was in fact rational. It seemed to me that nobody could know that God didn’t exist. Atheists seemed to accept their atheism as a matter of faith, not reason. Most of them didn’t want God to exist and so chose to deny his existence. This is not rational but merely wishful thinking. …
*Image: The Heavenly Glory [detail: central section] by Pierre Mignard, 1663 [Val-de-Grâce, Paris]. This depiction of the Blessed Trinity is the centerpiece of Mignard’s fresco for the church’s dome, commissioned by Anne of Austria, wife of King Louis XIII of France. Father, Son, and Holy Spirts are sorrounded by the faithful:
Palmsunday mass, St. Franciskus Xaverius, Catholic church, Arendal, Norway. Pater Sigurd Markussen. April 14, 2019. Own work. Author Jan-Erik Løken. Licensing... I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license: w:en:Creative Commons, attribution share alike. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work ....