I have many friends who are atheists. They are very nice people, but there is some emptiness, void in their lives. They also feel that but don’t realize why. When we talk about God, they always use their logic, philosophy, and reasoning to prove that there is no God. And then I don’t have much to say. Once on a Christian radio station, I heard this piece of advice, “When people say that there is no God, don’t argue with them. They are right. They speak from their experience. They are too preoccupied with other things and they don’t want God to enter their hearts, therefore God doesn’t exist for them.” A few days ago I read an article that supports the same idea of not arguing with atheists. I’d like to share a few excerpts:
How can you prove that God exists?
http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/proof.htm
Personally, I never engage in arguments with atheists etc. It is waste of time and energy, sometimes doing more harm than good through exciting passions. The point is this:
Atheists argue from reason/intellect. We argue from life, living experience, from the heart moulded by daily life and prayer. So we have two completely different approaches. It could even be said that the fact that for us there is NO rational proof of the existence of God is proof that He exists. For us, He is Creator and we are creation.
How can you expect the created human reason to understand the Creator, when our knowledge (so-called science/scientia) of the Creation is still minute, even though it increases daily? If we could understand God, it would be proof that He is a manmade myth. Only the real God is beyond human reason, meta-rational (though not irrational).
As you know, this whole concept of proving God’s existence really begins in the late eleventh century, with the rationalism of Anselm of Canterbury, ‘the father of scholasticism’. So their view is rationalistic, ours is experiential. The curious thing is that atheists and ‘anselmians’ alike argue in exactly the same way, with the same tool of the reason, putting themselves outside the universal and instinctive approach to religion through the millennia, which is ‘there must be something out there’. Anselm and his followers (rationalists, atheists or otherwise) represent an Edenic fall from knowledge, an abandonment of the eternal and immortal knowledge experienced through and imparted to the heart, in favour of the tiny, limited reason. (‘There are more things in heaven and earth…’).
Atheism is irrational, because if you can’t prove that God exists, you can’t disprove it either. Atheists do not argue from theological reasons (they cannot know what real theology is, because they do not pray and, as it is said, only those who pray are theologians), they argue from psychological or sociological reasons. Thus, the man who was molested as a child by some pedophile dressed as a priest is an ‘atheist’ for psychological reasons. The Spanish or Russian peasant who became an ‘atheist’ 80 or 100 years ago because he saw some hypocritical and hard-hearted bandit dressed as a priest, taking the Church’s money and spending it on himself, is an ‘atheist’ for sociological reasons. I remember someone 40 years ago saying to me that ‘religion is a medieval con-trick’. I still thoroughly agree with him, providing that we qualify it with three words - religion ‘in his experience’ is a medieval con-trick. But, of course, this was not religion lived and experienced; he was talking about religion deformed into a manmade institution, which, of course, is not religion at all.
So, I would simply answer as below to modern, brainwashed, British children who ask the inherently atheist question ‘How can we prove that God exists’ (and it is atheist, because it presupposes that He does not exist, because throughout history, except in modern Western civilisation, everyone has always, automatically believed that God exists - the only Areopagitic question was the identity of that God):
It is impossible to prove that God exists or does not exist, because God the Creator is beyond the petty rational proofs of the creation. Live your life a little, experience, and then you will decide.
Of course, it is also true that if we continue to live in impurity and therefore will have no experience, then we will not find faith in God. (‘Seek and ye shall find’). Atheism can be defined as the result of not having a way of life according to the commandments – loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves. And love means a way of life, it is not some purely passive, verbal agreement about ‘sentimental’ love. In other words, our perception of God depends on our way of life.
Only the pure in heart shall see God and it is the dogmas of the Church, which were revealed to the Fathers, i.e. to those who are pure in heart. And what are the dogmas of the Church? They are the revelations of God about Himself, given to man to express in human language. For behold, Thou hast loved truth; the hidden and secret things of Thy wisdom hast Thou revealed to me (Ps. 50, 8).
The reason is the tool of pagans, inherited from pagan (so-called ‘classical’) Rome and Greece. That is why the Apostle Paul wrote so harshly of ‘the Greeks’ (‘unto the Greeks foolishness’). Philosophy is what happens when people stoppraying to God (i.e, doing theology, theologising) and startplaying with God (with the idea/hobby of) God. Philosophy is the history of the Western Middle Ages (1000-1500). Secularism is the history of the Western Modern Ages (1500-2000). Atheism is the history of the post-Modern Ages (2000-).
In a word, if you ask a false question, you cannot get a right answer because the way the question (does God exist) is posed, actually excludes the right answer. We Orthodox Christians, members of the Church of Christ, do not so much believe in God,
we know Him and He lives in our hearts like a flame, sometimes flickering according to our human weaknesses, sometimes burning brightly, according to our repentance.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
November 2010
http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/proof.htm