Arguments for Atheism, Bases for Belief | Fr. Bonaventure Chapman & Fr. Patrick Briscoe

February 13, 2025

Fr. Patrick: This is Father Patrick Briscoe.

Fr. Bonaventure: And this is Father Bonaventure Chapman. 

Fr. Patrick: Welcome to Godsplaining. Thanks to all who support us. If you enjoy the show please consider making a monthly donation to us on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever you listen to your podcasts. Father Bonaventure. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Father Patrick. 

Fr. Patrick: We are here to talk about something. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Oh great. I’m excited. 

Fr. Patrick: It’s not Homestar Runner.com. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Aw, shame. 

Fr. Patrick: Which could have been the topic of this episode easily. Father Gregory does a mean Homestar Runner. Welcome to Homestar. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Strong bed. Man, that was really. That was early. That was early. Yeah, that was early 2000s, right? That was my college time. Yeah, that was really really 2000s, right? That’s pretty nice. That was my college time. 

Fr. Patrick: Yeah. No, I was in high school. Yeah, yeah, sort of almost I was being being a teenager. Oh, gosh, terrible time. But like homestarrunner.com, it seems to me that that certain kind of trend has happened in religious belief that the kind of new atheism movement of the early 2000s has also gone the way of the world. 

Fr. Bonaventure: It’s kind of, yeah, kind of think about that. It’s a thing you remember. Yeah, it was exciting. The four horsemen, the apocalypse, Daniel Denitz, Sam Harris, Roger Dawkins, and oh, who was that fourth guy? 

Fr. Patrick: I don’t know the last one. You named the three that I could have named. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Darn, I forget him. I’m sorry about that man. Come on the show. We’ll talk to you. And that, yeah, that kind of disappeared. And I can’t tell whether, let’s put it this way. I don’t think it’s because people are less atheistic today. I think it’s, you get worried that actually like they were popular because it was interesting to say God doesn’t exist or God is a delusion or this kind of stuff. Whereas today it’s like, yeah, there’s crazy religious people and then there’s, you know, the rest of us just being more like why. Yeah, like you couldn’t imagine that sort of thing happening over in France, you could say, I suspect this kind of virulent attacking atheists and this kind of evangelical atheism, you could say. In America, it seemed like a thing you could do, but then it quickly, I don’t know, kind of fizzled a bit. 

Fr. Patrick: Yeah, the comparison of France is interesting because there are then those movements in France that have risen and fallen. I’m thinking of the anti-clerical movements in France of the late 19th century. It’s a right around the time that Lords was beginning to occupy the French imagination. There was this very strong anti-clericalist current that’s tied up in a really complex situation of French politics. 

Fr. Bonaventure: The French have great atheists- 

Fr. Patrick: Leading in the 2020-20s. No, they really did. They really did. 

Fr. Bonaventure: They really did. But they’re not. Yeah, Laplace is like this, of course. I mean, they’re not atheists in the way…

Fr. Patrick: They wanted to fight about Lourdes… 

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, Sartre, a Foucault or something. Or it’s just, it was a different kind of. 

Fr. Patrick: Well, then that’s those guys that you’re mentioning. That’s all downstream of that more cultural movement. And that those are particular thought leaders. But the whole, the whole early 20th century atheism thing to me seemed more of a cultural phenomenon than an intellectual one because books like Letter to a Christian Nation or The God Delusion are not especially rich texts. I remember reading The God Delusion because I lived with an atheist, my freshman year in college. And so he would swap these things to me and then I would give him books like Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and these other things. And we would sort of fight about the back and forth. And it was fun. Generally it was. And because he was a philosophy major and we went to a very small school, we spent basically all of our time together. Despite disagreeing on the fundamental principles of what life was for. So I think, I think, so the reason I bring this up because I think this movement is, it’s important that it’s kind of waxed culturally, that it’s a waxed and went in that way and culturally. Sam Harris’, you got this as a great quote, he says, “Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.'” “Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.” And I love that quote because it just captures how scornful that movement was. And I think today non-believers are in a different spot where they’re no longer I like that term used where they’re kind of evangelical atheists. That seems to have kind of fallen off the wayside So it seems to me like we’re kind of we’re kind of hitting hitting something else hitting a different movement. But of course atheism can can pop up In many people’s lives. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah. Thanks, right. 

Fr. Patrick: Were you ever intrigued by it? 

Fr. Bonaventure: I was thinking about this. You know, I feel bad that I never was. It just never seemed– I remember when I was growing up, I read, I was 14 A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking, of course, not more of agnostic than atheist, some point. But you’d read this thing about everything being determined. And I just– when I was physics major, it just never occurred to me. Like I just thought, well, whatever we say about the physics, I guess we’re just to find a good doctrine of God that some or Christianity. So I remember reading that, I think it was his second one, Black Holes, Baby Universes after A Brief History of Time. And he ends with it saying, you know, of course, is everything determined? Yes. I’m thinking of myself, cool. I guess that means physically determined. Nice. Let me find a God that works with Christianity. So I became a Calvinist. But like, it never, like the option of like, everything’s determined, therefore, it’s just all materialistic stuff. It just never, ever seen plausible to me. And I feel like as there’s this, there I put this way. There seems to be a presupposition that if you’re a sensible person, or like a rational person or a smart person, that you have at least have dealt obviously, the atheism is the default option. If you’re a Christian believer, it’s in spite of, we have these things like Francis Collins as the great geneticist and this sort of thing, and he’s also an evangelical Christian, and this should be this big kind of thing. And then just never, I never occurred to me, just obviously seemed that, well, God exists, of course, and Jesus seems like he’s right. So whatever else we say about stuff, let’s just do that. So I never had, I mean, I had like points where I was wondering about the scriptures and about an errands here is something that’s a Protestant, but I never, the idea that God didn’t exist, and this is all just for nothing, just kind of bang around, cosmic, you know, never occurred. There’s this great line where in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. So he has this great experience where…

Fr. Patrick: Fr. Bonaventure, reader, listener, viewer. This is Father Bonaventure’s favorite Dostoevsky novel. Okay, go on. 

Fr. Bonaventure: It is. It’s a great novel because it’s big enough that it gets kind of the kind of Brother’s K experience of the world and all this stuff going on, but it’s not But it’s not too big in a way that Brother’s K is just kind of ever expansive. The Brother’s K is better but The Idiot, I think is the height of like tight but good and there’s a point where he’s the prince michigan is telling a story about He’s been talking to this atheist just railing on about arguments against God or something. And he just says, he just seemed like he was eternally missing the point. He just, he was never landing and he, they were all great things. He was very happy to hear them. I always feel like that’s with atheists. I’ve always felt like good arguments. Yeah, that’s, that’s fascinating. Yeah, interesting. What have you, I mean, like of course, everything’s at some point. I’ve been determined or like, hey, nothing matters. Meaning is something we could strike, blah, yeah, that’s fascinating, yeah, interesting. But I mean, obviously in God and Jesus, it just never occurred. Now you were debating with this, you had more experience with this sort of thing. 

Fr. Patrick: But that was an until college. I mean, in high school, I went to a totally normy Catholic high school, like a great foundation. And it never, it legitimately never occurred to me that there could be a tension between religious belief and science. Because we were taught evolution, we were taught…

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah you did bunsen burners and beakers. 

Fr. Patrick: Yeah, we were taught all the same kind of normy scientific. Which I think are true, but you know, but I think there’s seems to work. Uh, like it seems a reasonable account…

Fr. Bonaventure: Lights turn on. 

Fr. Patrick: Yeah. It seems a reasonable account of the universe that something like this, if not, you know, one needs to precise this theory. Of course, one talks about them. But something like this is a reasonable account of the universe and doesn’t it all defy belief in God or the or doesn’t demean or diminish God’s providence. It’s simply the mechanism through which God’s providence works. OK, that’s an easy resolution. That did not… 

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, beating out the details and the outlines of the imminent frame doesn’t do anything to transcend in frame. It just seems like two different totally. It’s quite a different question.

Fr. Patrick: So yeah, so I was just like living my living mind. I’m going to leave that. Living my normy discourse. And it wasn’t until college though that I had this roommate that some of these things kind of cropped up. And I, so I like, I like this other quote that I wanted to share this episode from Chesterton, because I think it gets at this point. Chesterton says, “if there were not God, then there would be no atheists.” “If there were not God, then there would be no atheists.” 

Fr. Bonaventure: Ooh, it’s a transcendental argument. 

Fr. Patrick: Yeah, it’s cool! So it’s really fun. 

Fr. Bonaventure: The possibility of atheists is our God. So you can prove God’s existence if you can find atheists because they only exist if there is a God. 

Fr. Patrick: It’s really fun. And I think there’s something too, and insofar as that atheists are like vegetarians. They can’t shut up about it. You know who they are because they’re going to tell you where they are. 

Fr. Bonaventure: I feel like there’s no Catholic Church, you don’t have Protestants. 

Fr. Patrick: I like that too. I like that too. But I think there’s something to it in the sense that there’s a kind of clamor that has a sort of juvenile or revolutionary spirit about it that’s like that, you know, not to be too nasty, but sort of like the misfit teenager. Without which we sort of say, okay, well, you know, this, this otherwise may not be a big deal. So I think there’s something to that. Now, what about, so, but let’s take these, let’s build the stronger argument from the other side. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Well, it is a natural, let’s put this way… 

Fr. Patrick: Why do people come up against belief and say, no, I’m not gonna choose that.  

Fr. Bonaventure: Well, this is the thing, it’s not, it takes a lot of truth to flow in error. And whenever we look at something that does exist in the world, you might wanna say instead of like, oh, get rid of it. So like, what is causing it? Like, what’s the root here? And I suppose to give atheism it’s due, it is the case that God is not like other things in the universe. Right? Like, if you say, you know, the classic case, like, why don’t believe in Thor? I don’t believe in unicorns. I don’t believe in this fine, it’s big atmosphere. So obviously, I don’t believe in the tri-personal God. OK. And you say like, well, one, they’re not like, it’s not like those things and here’s why. But two, they are like those things in the sense that I don’t have physical contact with unicorns, a flying spaghetti monsters, Thor, or the tri-personal God. I don’t have physical contact. You could say I’m not, I can’t go and look at him, qua, tri-personal God. So in that sense, there is a natural, there’s a natural sense of, uh, he’s beyond our sight. And you might think, well, beyond our site are things that, um, that require some extra work. And you might say, let’s hold back on them. I mean, I think this is the, well, let’s put this way. Um, I mean, Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae on his question about God, right brings up, I think the two, and we’ve bet around one of them already, the two major objections. And the reason why you might countenance some form of, form of atheism, right? When he deals with the question, two, or the three does God exist, right? And he usually brings up three objections. He likes three’s, except for a turn to the world for historical reasons. He brings up 10. But as of the medieval concert, you get to write it about that. But he only brings up two in the in the Summa Theologiae. And they’re kind of the two key objections, right? You know, the first one, of course, is the is the moral argument, which we haven’t mentioned yet. The fact that if God is all good and there’s evil in the world, then he’s either not powerful, right? This is the modern formulation, or he doesn’t exist. And evil seems more apparent to people than God. Like I can see someone dying tragically or horribly, as Ivan’s argument, but I can’t see God. So that’s, that’s the moral one. And then to piece out the other one before we get into them, I suppose, because I think these are the two main objections is, well, we don’t need him. That’s Laplace? Determinism, right? I don’t have no need of this hypothesis. Because Thomas says, “Principles of nature explain things. If I want to know why the bird does this, I ask, what is it to be a bird? I don’t ask, what did God command the bird to do?” Right. So if I have all of my natural, you would call natural explanation of things. Why do I need a supernatural explanation for them? 

Fr. Patrick: So let’s take those in terms of the first one, the moral argument, because I think I, of the two, I honestly think. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Which one do you think is the most difficult? 

Fr. Patrick: This is the most difficult. I think. 

Fr. Bonaventure: I have no qualms about this one. 

Fr. Patrick: Really? 

Fr. Bonaventure: That’s great because we’re both playing the two differences. 

Fr. Patrick: I think this is a lot more difficult and maybe it’s because of the difference in our sense of justice- 

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, fair enough. 

Fr. Patrick: But I think the best formulation of this is in Brothers Karamazov in the parable of the Grand Inquisitor and their Dostoyevsky is asking the point about why innocent persons suffer. Why are there, why are there starving children, why are there natural disasters that cause horrendous things? This is the thing that Ken D. does all about when Voltaire gets and gets in his spirit of things. Why is there mass destruction? Why is there, because those things are different than war. You know, war we can point to them, we can say, okay, human beings do bad things. So war can be attributed to human beings. And that’s not a mystery to me. But tectonic plates shifting and causing the destruction of Lisbon, that’s a problem. Or tsunamis washing over, you know, great island nations in the Pacific. That’s what sparred, or spurred David Bentley, hard to write his beautiful thesis. Yeah, Doors of the Sea, and which I think has one of the best tyraids against, against atheists, you know, hard to tell. He just goes off. He says, “you really think that no Christian has ever thought about any of the suffering?” Anyway. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah. But a duelist, of course, is tricky.

Fr. Patrick: He’s going to be just as if he was always sitting there. But yeah. Yeah. That’s what I used to take him seriously. But I do think that problem of the suffering of innocence is a very serious one that a lot of people grapple with. 

Fr. Bonaventure: They do. A lot of people do grapple with that. 

Fr. Patrick: And you say, okay, uh, therefore the, the, um, for some people, the thing, you know, obviously not my end resolution, but for some people, the easiest, the easiest resolution is the, okay, well, God, must not exist. Yeah. Now why is this problem for you, Fr. Bonaventure? 

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah. This argument is never done at any purchase on me whatsoever and I think it’s probably because I’m coldhearted. No, I mean, maybe accidentally, but because I think we did an episode in this with Father Gregory, the physical evils, like the tectonic plate-shifting stuff, I mean, that’s like saying, you know, how dare light appear. You know, that’s just what the sun does, tectonic plates are just what an earth-made and particular place does, why we are on those particular things, well that’s human choice, or it’s another example of again, kind of, well this is what animals do when they want to warm themselves, they go to these particular parts of the universe and put your parts of the planet and they go blah blah. So I think that those, the physical evil ones, like reduce down to the naturalistic explanation, principles of nature, right? Like I’m in so far as I’m blaming tectonic plates for like earthquakes, particular times, what I’m really doing is explaining an app- blaming a natural phenomenon for being a natural phenomenon. So that does nothing for me. The suffering of individuals, like the moral suffering one, seems to be like whoa, freedom, blah, blah, blah, but here’s the thing. I’m going to run a transcendental argument on that, right? Transcendental have this form. The possibility of x entails or it means y. And so in this case, just before the possibility of suffering of evil entails goodness. Because if there was no goodness with which to notice there was evil, there was no good to notice there was evil, then we wouldn’t call it evil, it would just be something. Like we’re not going to protest random occurrences. You just get up on your high horse. This is why…

Fr. Patrick: So you have to have Hell to have Heaven? 

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, well, we have to have Heaven to have Hell. Right? It’s the other way. It’s the good is the transcendental condition of the evil. And so when someone’s protesting like moral evils, I always want to say like, well, sure, what’s the other alternative, that nothing matters? It’s not like the alternative is, well, there’s a God and therefore there can’t be God because there’s evil in the world. Well, if there’s no God and there’s no goodness, there’s no evil to be seen in the first place. It’s just all fact. And here’s the deal. If you think that it’s evil, there’s no goodness, there’s no evil to be seen in the first place, it’s just all fact. And here’s the deal. If you think that it’s evil, that there’s the suffering, now the explanations of it have that’s a different question, but the mere fact of what you take to be suffering or evil means that you also recognize there are things that are non-evil. And I think if anyone is sophisticated enough to think about goodness, the relationship and goodness and evil between light and darkness. You realize that one has a priority in semantic or conceptual realm. And that’s, goodness has this. We know something is bad because we know something being good and the lack thereof. We know something’s broken because we know what it means to be fixed and behold. So the moral one, so the moral argument there, one of the physical evils, who cares, that’s just like playing in the line. 

Fr. Patrick: Okay, well thank you, Ebenezer Scrooge. I just heard blah, blah, blah, are the no prisons, are the no work houses, blah, blah. 

Fr. Bonaventure: They’re there, but like we wouldn’t – but see the thing is you wouldn’t even see them. It’s like we wouldn’t notice there was dark unless there was light. 

Fr. Patrick: Okay, well let’s take the second argument then because that one’s more compelling to you, which is just isn’t that interesting to me. I sort of look at science and I think like, oh, mystery, it’s take the second argument then because that one’s more compelling to you, which is it just isn’t that interesting to me. I sort of look at science and I think like, oh, mystery, it’s all magic, whatever. I just kind of set it aside. Yeah, because I’m not a scientist. I never claimed it for enough. Yeah, whereas, uh, uh, whereas I suppose I’m just more just more moved emotionally if I have to admit it. So the second is that the second argument is that you don’t need God because you can demonstrate the the workings of the universe and possibly it’s of origins from natural reason alone. That is that it suffices, it offers its own principles. For that explanation. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah. It offers its own principles for that explanation. Yeah, and I think this is a decent one in the sense that I think a lot of people, we don’t need to do a history of religions, but a lot of people have a sense of God, God like fills in gaps, he does things like he is, God’s my co-pilot, the sort of thing like that, that God is only God and he only exists insofar as he does things for me or with me or around me or this kind of stuff. So we have this, yeah, again, we don’t have the cycle analysis of history of religions, but you have this conception of God as like a big force, you know, a powerful being, what have you? And this is where the scientific one of the natural one says, well, we don’t need that kind of God, right? We don’t need God to be doing anything. We don’t need the God to be doing like on the ground, you could say he doesn’t need to do title waves. Now miracles are different, right? But let’s assume we got natural world kind of stuff because if someone, if an atheist believes in a miracle, then you don’t have to worry about the natural argument business. Cause I mean, you could, I guess, well, yeah, I mean, obviously miracles happen, but I mean, you know, and that’s by God, but I mean, the natural stuff, that’s why I don’t believe. But the sense of like, wait a minute, what? Yeah, that’s, I mean, you know, and that’s by God, but I mean the natural stuff. That’s why I don’t believe. But the sense of like, wait a minute. Yeah, that’s, I mean, anything’s possible. I suppose modernity and postmodernity, but this one, this idea that God is actually doing things on the ground, boots on the ground and doing things, that science’s job is to figure out what reason is and what’s going on in natural causes and not natural causes against supernatural, but how things work. And so if God is the explanation for any of your natural phenomena, like it backs, stops, and God, like, oh, the lights, look, the sun’s revolved around the earth again. Well, that’s obviously God pushing it. Or like, I got up on time today because God tickled in my inner is the sort of thing. What have you? No, it could be lots of explanations for things. In that way, you might say, man, it’s like the Maytag man. This is I think the more problem, I don’t know if it’s more pressing one. They’re equally pressing to most people, but that God’s running out of things to do. And the question is, were those things that God was ever doing? Or was that a sort of thing that, and I think the mistake with the natural scientific one in Thomas brings up is that fine nature does what nature does, but why does nature do what nature does? Why nature at all? Like what is the, what is one, the origin and source of nature is, oh, randomness, uniform it doesn’t come from randomness. And two, where is it going? Was the point of it, right? And so he has this nice, signature nature between like nature as sort of just technical principles, he doesn’t use this phrase, but what do we think of natural sciences? And then moral nature in the sense of going towards intentions. And he says both of these, one, you gotta have something, or originating and determining nature, and then two, you gotta have some place for all of them, place for all going. 

Fr. Patrick: Right, I suppose the reason for that, to make logical argument, you know, my objection to this argument, the reason I never really found at that compelling would be that it’s the assertion of a universal negative, which just belays, just believe for me. You know, I just find that so hard to comprehend that someone could assert boldly, no, always in every circumstance, this is not the case. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, God doesn’t – whatever else is true about stuff, God doesn’t exist. – 

Fr. Patrick: And that for me has just never, never seemed to compare them because it just doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that a reasonable person says. It seems like you would have to say at the very least, maybe. Yeah, exactly. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Right, that’s interesting.

Fr. Patrick: It might be the case. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Whereas the moral one seems to have more of an apodictic kind of character in the sense that if you’re swayed by it, you might think like this evil would be a reason to say under no circumstances, because they’re true. Whereas under the natural ones, since we’re always kind of discovering new stuff…

Fr. Patrick: Well, insofar as we’ve seen right now. To the best of our knowledge. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, even Hawking has the sensibility about like he’s not, you know, his look, if this is how nature looks like, but maybe God did this or sort of thing, he’s always, he has his openness to the firing equations. That’s fair. 

Fr. Patrick: Now, I think, I think too. So those are the two reasons and quietest makes. I’m gonna offer mine, which I hope resonates with you. I think most people are just lazy. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Oh, yeah. 

Fr. Patrick: I really believe this. Yeah. In my heart of hearts, I really believe this. I believe that people are looking for a reason not to believe in God because as soon as you say, I believe in God, God starts demanding things of you. And it’s annoying to get up and go to Mass on Sunday, especially if you have kids. That’s a thing that people just don’t want in their lives. And so it’s much more convenient to the life of a 21st century American to say, “Well, maybe there’s some universal cause of something, and you can sort of tie yourself up in all kinds of fancy intellectual knots, and then you end up with a conclusion that is more conducive to your materialistic bland lifestyle.” I just think that most people don’t want the demands of religion. And so therefore they go back all the way to the, they go all the way back to this beginning question and they, they put God in the box as it were. And just triangulate against the question. So is to pursue a kind of freedom of life.

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, that’s sort of in sort of a Sartreurian moral argument for non-existence of God because he will constrain me and he’ll make demands on me. I think that’s right. I think I mean, the more you fill out the details about who God is, in a sense, the more demands you get. It’s like when you open presents at Christmas each time you open one, you get better stuff. When you open the faith, it also makes more demand show up, right? Because the universal God who created all things and you, doesn’t demand a lot. It doesn’t seem like he, I mean, at the end of the day, when you get at the end of the Thomas’s proofs or something or if any natural theology you’re doing, what do you have? You know, necessary being who causes all things, so what? 

Fr. Patrick: Yeah, yeah. And I guess that’s coming out of my, you know, again, my own opinion that I think the road to God from from disbelief or from doubt, the road to God, believing in God is longer than the road from God to the Church. So that’s why I think that’s a, I think that’s a core corollary view, right? The people don’t want the imposition of religion. They don’t want the demands of it. But what do you think are? You know, are Thomas’ two arguments sufficient. Do you have a kind of third like this that you would you’d like to propose? 

Fr. Bonaventure: No. Oh, to why…

Fr. Patrick: To why people don’t believe. Do you think, do you think that my description of America’s legitimate? 

Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah. I mean, laziness or something. I guess back to the earlier point… 

Fr. Patrick: I mean, we could be a little bit more positive. I mean, we could say, well, okay, freedom. 

Fr. Bonaventure: Why, well, I take it. I mean, I take it. So whoever first came up with this sort of thing, you know? But I mean, it is the case that the culture has this view. And now in America, in certain places, obviously God is still very important. But I think in the cities and the general Western civilization, that God is just becoming a thing that’s not talked about, partly because of the demands, but also I just think the social capital involved in it, right? The sort of idea that you believe in some crazy thing. Now you might think, well, it’s not crazy, but everyone else around you might think it is crazy. They’ve been told to think it’s crazy. They’ve been told to think that religious people are nuts, all this kind of stuff. So I think I take a more sociological explanation in this as opposed to a personal explanation that it’s just not the thing in the air. I think Charles Taylor and his book, “Secular Age,” kind of nails down the “Secular Age” or condition aspect or characteristic of it that in the sacred age you could could say up to the 1700s, he thinks, or early modernity, it was almost impossible not to believe in God. Whereas the conditions of the secular age are not particular is deeper than the kind of belief structures or practices, but rather he says it’s the conditions of transcendental again, the conditions of possibility. He says the secular age is defined by the fact that it’s almost impossible to believe in God as a natural disposition. And whatever we make of that, I think culturally, that’s just correct. There’s this most people, most people follow culture. It’s easy to, you know, most people are not radicals or individualists in this way. Most of us just kind of follow with whatever’s in the stream. And I tend to think that for whatever reason of arguments or science or have you, the stream now is this kind of, yeah, I mean, maybe in America it’s more agnosticism, but not taking religion really seriously. That’s immature kind of stuff. So I think, and which obviously can involve the laziness and the kind of lack of desire for demands. And that’s helpful. It’s nice, it’s a good thing that there’s no God because then I might have to do something. But I tend to think it’s just the standard human thing of, oh, I was gonna go along. If you look at so many things I do have…

Fr. Patrick: Yeah, so with all that in mind, Fr. Bonaventure,  by way of conclusion, do you think it’s worth taking atheists on in argument? And what does that look like for most people in their lives? 

Fr. Bonaventure: I mean, I think, so evangelism is always necessary. This is just a call for us. This is for the demands that God makes. ‘Cause he wants souls, he will take souls, and he wants to get to through souls through us. And so in so far as you meet atheists, I think you’ll have to dialogue with them. And I think it requires a sort of respect and nuance in a way. I think the important part is to realize that there are, you know, it’s not obvious that there’s a God. Just for those of us, some of us do think that’s pretty obvious. I do, I suppose. But you know, if you didn’t grow up in a particular circumstance and more and more people are not growing up in this, it’s not obvious. And so to be, to kind of meet them at, and this is what I think Thomas’s two, the two main arguments are helpful of seeing like these are probably the backburners or somewhere in the back of what they might have. And you might have to articulate, this is the crazy part, right? You might have to articulate to them what they actually believe. And you might have to articulate this crazy part, right? You might have to articulate to them what they actually believe or don’t believe. And then show them why there’s reasons to not be so serious or we’re more concerned about that. You might have to, like Thomas does in the scholastic tradition, make the argument stronger or like to try to piece out what is really going on, to root that thing out, not to pull at the top, but dig deep, and then sort it. But I think you’re right about the existential business of, well, you need to know someone, and you might be shadow boxing, if you’re dealing with just arguments from Richard Dawkins, because the fact of the matter is, this person picked up a Richard Dawkins book or something for a reason. Which may not have been just because it’s Richard Dawkins, there’s something going on. So the listening very carefully, I think, is also helpful in these things. But to go through the arguments and prepare yourself in the way we did probably, in the early 2000s, always be prepared with like every answer to sort of things, I don’t know if that’s helpful or necessary today. I think it’s better to have authentic witness to people. 

Fr. Patrick: I completely agree. I think that it’s a striking thing to meet a believer today for people that were not raised with any kind of real Christianity informing the horizon of their life. So to say with a straight face, yeah, I believe what the Catholic Church teaches about the Eucharist. Yeah, I believe that people were miraculously healed at Lourdes. Yeah, I believe that sometimes for designs that are mysterious to me, God has chosen to change also the appearance of the Blessed Sacrament, that there are such a thing as Eucharistic miracles. So I think those things are striking and that it cuts against the grain of our society, I think your point about referring to a secular age is very true and that those things offer a kind of witness. And then what you add to that is by otherwise being a kind of reasonable and agreeable person, that’s a striking thing. The atheists are forced to confront something within you that he or she hadn’t met before. I think that’s interesting. 

Fr. Bonaventure: And don’t tell them about the demands. (laughing) They will find out…

Fr. Patrick: Trick them later. 

Fr. Bonaventure: But you can only, I mean like this is this thing as you get deeper, deeper, Christianity, you get closer to Jesus Christ, you find out that there’s more and more of you that needs to be fixed, and more of more of the change, a deeper and deeper conversion. But here’s the great part about it. That once you’re inside, he’s always bringing you along with him as well. So I’m not saying like don’t hide the sort of things, but like, you know, it is true that like our demands and the demands of love, right? Come out in the context of a loving relationship, and they will love those demands when they get there. 

Fr. Patrick: Well, as one person I know loves to quote, “Love alone is credible.”

Fr. Bonaventure: “Love, alone is credible.” Yeah. 

Fr. Patrick: Well, friends, thanks for tuning in to this episode of Godsplaining. We appreciate your comments in the chat. What do you think? Should we be fighting with atheists? What are the most compelling arguments to make against them? We wanna hear from you. So leave a comment there on this episode, especially if you’re watching on YouTube. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever you listen to your podcasts. Follow us on social media. Check out our merch shop. We got some fun Godsplaining things where you can show that you are a believer in Jesus Christ with your cool Godsplaining gear. But more importantly than any of that, we ask that you would pray for us and we assure you that we are praying that you would pray for us and we assure you that we are praying for you. God bless friends. Until next time.