Birds of a feather

It is a wondrous irony when atheists excoriate theological proofs for the existence of God because they are nothing but unlawful reifications that jump from things visible to things invisible while they themselves, in a colossal snit of unselfconsciousness, hypostasize their arguments for the inexistence of God based on an improvable faith in the “transcendental” truths of science. In short, both arguments are faith-based. In the positivists’ case, their worldview is based on “scientism” and its cognate “evidentialism”, both of which are doctrines that cannot be proven. For the theists’ their case for the invisible is held to be of the “things hidden since the foundation of the world” and as such can only be seen —in a refreshing and unpretentious honesty—with the eyes of faith. So, for both, it is a faith that surpasses understanding that founds and informs their points of view. Yet, surely, it is more tragic when the gods of these philosophers are founded in such sophistry, on a blindness that cannot see that theirs too is a faith seeking understanding.

If by religion one means, in part, an abiding faith in the unseen as the ground of the seen, then, verily (so to speak), our nouveau atheists are religionists in disguise and unwitting ironists who do not even realize the irony that besots their claims to truth.