Why Believe in God in a Secular World?

Definitions as I can get carried off into theological language that not everyone is familiar with:

Ontology - the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality

Contingent - occurring or existing only if certain circumstances are the case - not absolute

Absolute - something that exists without being dependent on anything else (i.e. God)

Category error - a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category

Theism - the belief in God, specifically as outlined by the Abrahamic faiths

New-atheist - a modern group of thinkers who advocate the view that religion should be countered and criticised through rational argument

Apologetics - the religious discipline of defending or proving the truth of religious doctrines through systematic argumentation and discourse

First of all, thank you for being part of this new endeavour and taking the time to come to this site. I'm a theology undergraduate looking to go onto a Masters degree and hopefully PhD in theology, and ever since taking Philosophy at school huge questions to do with religion, reality, God, morality and so on have fascinated me. The topics I hope to cover on this site are really the most important questions in life as religious and philosophical questions are to do with our ultimate meaning, from which we decipher how to live our lives. I'm a convert to Catholicism from atheism, so I have done the rounds through various schools of thought, and as a student of theology spend even my spare hours reading about this stuff, so you're in fairly good hands. I am passionate about my faith, and love to debate and write about it. Whether a seasoned theologian, someone new to faith, or an atheist looking for a good debate, I hope my posts will provide what you're looking for. I should state that this site is for apologetics through theology and philosophy, and also spiritual ideas. It's not set in stone yet but I will probably do every other post on theology, and the other will be on something more spiritual within Christianity, such as prayer, music, liturgy or something of that nature - all with an apologetic focus.

So, now that's out of the way, why should you believe in God? I haven't done myself any favours with such a huge question and one that I'm sure is debated in every corner of the world every single day. However, this is the most foundational and basic belief from which all religious beliefs flow, so I feel its the perfect subject for my first post. It seems that in this day and age it is the default position among most educated people to adopt an atheist or at least agnostic position. This post won't look at why that is, but rather why I believe theism to be true.

My life was completely changed in early 2015. After 'converting' to atheism as a teenager ironically as the result of an RE lesson on God's attributes, I later began studying in Manchester (I later withdrew from that university and am now happily studying in London) where I picked up a book by an Orthodox Christian theologian named David Bentley Hart. In this book 'The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss' Hart outlines the intellectual dishonesty and vacuousness of the so-called 'new atheists' such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. There is simply not enough space on this blog post alone to unpack their arguments and why they're so vacuous but rest assured I will get to them in a later post. Hart's book also highlighted to me the conceptual poverty for what people nowadays think religious people mean by the word 'God'.

Unfortunately, people nowadays generally have no idea what religious people mean when they say God. I often get the impression they think I ignore all scientific enquiry and believe that Noah's Ark was a historical event. The new atheist phenomenon has swept the entirety of the west in a spectacular fashion ironically akin to the spread of the Gospels, and this has resulted in a general arrogance among atheists as if they know something we simple-minded theists don't, which is rather annoying, but hardly an intellectual threat. Religion has declined in the west, but only in my view as a result of the improper teaching of what the Abrahamic faiths actually mean when they utter the word 'God'. In my GCSE years I was asked by my biology teacher whether I believed in God, or the Big-Bang - this is exactly the problem. The new atheists have given rise to a massive category error which I shall discuss further below.

To begin, an approach called apophatic theology is helpful, that is, starting from what God is not, rather than asserting what He is from the outset. God is most certainly not, as most modern atheists would have you believe, some sort of higher power, supreme being, or any other figure analogous to a 'man in the sky'. Obviously, as scientifically-minded modern persons, belief in a man in the sky who can read our thoughts and is similar to belief in fairies is hardly convincing, and I have no quarrel with this. These are pagan gods, demiurges, higher beings that are firmly a part of the material world and are affected by it - Zeus, Athena, and Thor, I can say with confidence, do not exist.

What is it theists actually believe? Let's begin by looking at the world around us. Everything in it is material, all matter including ourselves is utterly contingent, meaning it depends on an incalcuable number of factors and events for its current state of existence. Our universe operates by cause and effect. We can go back and back through the history of physical events such as the Big Bang, the evolution of species and so on until we reach the first occurrence of matter. So here we are at the foundation of the material universe, all that exists are fluctuations of energy inside a vacuum governed by laws of physics. The question begs, how did energy, consistent laws of physics and so on arise if they cannot cause themselves? Why is it that there is any state of matter at all, rather than nothing? Atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss has attempted to avoid these questions by redefining the word 'nothing' to essentially mean a quantum fluctuation of information lacking space-time or matter. I'm no physicist, but as numerous philosophers, physicists and even atheists have pointed out, Krauss' definition of nothing is most certainly something, and not the true definition of nothing which means to 'lack everything'.

We have reached the crux - the difference between cosmological questions and ontological questions, a distinction that unfortunately most people and especially the new-atheists clearly have not understood. Cosmological questions are those questions which deal with the cosmos, such as how did the Big Bang occur, or how did the planet Earth arise, or why does the Earth revolve around the sun and so on. Ontological questions are to do with the nature of reality, and why there is any reality at all. This is the distinction between the natural sciences and subjects such as philosophy and theology. The former deals with the changing of one physical state of affairs into another physical state of affairs, the latter deals with why there is any state of reality at all and the implications of said reality. You might ask why these are even meaningful questions if the sciences tell us how our current state of affairs came to be. My answer is that this question is naturally asked when we come to the beginning of the universe, how could you avoid the question of why there is anything at all? This is what I meant above when I spoke about the category error that is so prevalent in modern thought. People are mistaking the question of why there is anything at all, a philosophical question of ontology, for a cosmological question of how one state of created matter gave rise to another.

So, here we are at the foundation of the material universe, the very first example of matter. Why is it there and where did it come from? There are several steps you could take next. You could suggest that the universe is absolute and uncreated, which is equating the universe to God. This is completely absurd as we know that matter does not contain within itself the reason for its existence, and does not cause itself as demonstrated throughout our universe by the law of cause and effect. Also, we intuitively know that we, and all matter, does not need to exist. To use a morbid example, anyone could die in the next hour, and although that would be a tragedy, it would not change the nature of the universe. You may also respond by suggesting that the universe created itself - I hope I don't have to unpack why that is also completely absurd.

We are thus left with theism in its proper understanding. The contingent, by definition, requires the absolute. If there was no absolute, no necessary ground of all being, how on earth could there be anything contingent, how would I be sitting here asking these questions? Laws of physics and fluctuations of energy cannot just happen to be there of their own accord by magic, matter cannot cause itself, and we know both logically and through scientifically verifiable discoveries that the universe had a fixed point of beginning, so it has not always been there, it is not eternal. I'll reiterate - matter is not absolute, it does not need to exist, it does not contain within itself its own reason for existence, it is utterly dependent. Thus, logically, through tracing the events of the universe, we come to the absolute, this is what we call God. Not some bearded man who sits on a cloud and shouts from the heavens, but rather that ground of reality which is the ultimate cause of all things and is thus absolutely immanent to all things - the All in which all resides.

A common response at this point is, 'well who created God?' This is the mindset that precisely misses the point. For God to have been created, He would have to be a contingent reality, dependent and most certainly not worthy of worship, at best he would be a pagan figure. However as vehemently demonstrated by new-atheists, such pagan figures do not exist. By its very nature, the absolute must be supernatural, which I should clarify is not to do with ghosts and ghouls on halloween and your aunt's seance club, but is rather that which is outside of and above nature and the material world, God is ontologically distinct from creation, otherwise creation would make little sense. So when an atheist asks for scientific proof of God, they are really asking for proof of a man in the sky, and have not understood that the supernatural is outside of scientific enquiry - they have fallen prey to a category error.

I could have used any quotes from David Bentley Hart's book which I mentioned above, however I shall close with this one because of its poignancy and relevance - “The reason the very concept of God has become at once so impoverished, so thoroughly mythical, and ultimately so incredible for so many modern persons is not because of all the interesting things we have learned over the past few centuries, but because of all the vital things we have forgotten.”

In future posts I will frequently refer back to these arguments and I'm sure make more of them in longer posts, this was an introduction. Please feel free to comment with any questions or comments below. Constructive criticism is appreciated.