RITE AND REASON:MOST OF the atheism that is around assumes that to "believe in God" is to suppose there to be, beyond the worlds we know, one more strange thing, for the existence of which there is no evidence, writes DR NICHOLAS LASH.
Two keywords here: "belief" and "God". Let's start with "God". If this is a name, it certainly is not a proper name. Originally, it simply named whatever people worshipped/had their hearts set on. During the 17th century, however, the sense of the word shifted from "what-we-worship" to being the name of a natural kind (or what some people, ignorant of the history of the term, wrongly call a "supernatural" kind); a kind which some people ("atheists") said had no members, while others ("theists") disagreed.
Before long, educated people agreed that the class of "gods" was empty, and modern atheism was born. However, the fact that a culture ceases to have good uses for the word "god" says nothing whatsoever about what it is the culture worships/has its heart set on. In our society the worship of gods, "idolatry", is rife - we worship people and ideas, money, power, and self - but, fundamental to what it is to be a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim, is the conviction that human beings may worship the mystery on which the world depends while yet not worshipping the world or any feature of it, and that thus to worship is, in the last analysis, what it is to be a human being.
Learning to use the word "God" well is a matter of learning that all things are created, and created out of nothing. Learning to use the word "God" well is a matter of discovering that all we have and are is given; that our existence is the finite form of God's self-gift.
Many basic English words which now sound like abstract nouns originally expressed relationship/activity. "Truth", for example, comes from "troth", a pledge or promise.
God's fidelity, perhaps His central attribute in the Hebrew Scriptures, finds final expression in John's Gospel: "full of grace and truth", both words expressing God's generous fidelity, his "troth", the promise that God is.
As the 17th century poet, Angelus Silesius, put it: "Gott spricht nur immer Ja": "God always says only 'Yes' ".
The expression "I believe in God" has, unfortunately, become systematically ambiguous. It may express the opinion that God exists (and quite what 'exists' is doing in this sentence is a much trickier matter than most atheists and many theists suppose). On the other hand, as used in the Creed and in worship, it promises that everything we are and do is set steadfastly on the mystery of God, and hence that we are pledged to work towards that healing of the world by which all things are brought into harmony in God.
The meaning of "believe" thus underwent a shift similar to that which saw "truth" emerge from "troth": a shift from pledge or promise to expression of opinion.
If, then, a "theist" is someone who believes in God, and an "atheist" someone who does not, there would seem to be two kinds of atheism, corresponding to the two senses of "belief". The atheism which is the contradictory of the opinion that God exists is widespread. Many atheists of this kind mistakenly suppose themselves to stand in contradiction to Jewish, Christian and Islamic faith in God.
All creatures are dependent on God's creative utterance, but only human beings can be aware of this; can learn to make themselves a sharing in the "Yes" of God. This sharing we call faith.
The opposite of faith would be the refusal of such sharing, the effective refusal to have anything to do with God. Having nothing to do with God would, perhaps, be possible if we had some identity, some basis of existence, other than that of being created, and created out of nothing. But we do not. Therefore, effective refusal to have anything to do with God can only mean self-destruction, annihilation, return to the "nihil" from which all things came. Christian tradition maintains the possibility of such refusal, the possibility of enacting an effective "No" to God. But my reading of what this entails explains why you don't find atheists of the second sort around.
Dr Nicholas Lash is Norris-Hulse Emeritus Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He will deliver a lecture on "The God Delusion: Where Did it Come From?" in Dublin at 8pm on Thursday evening next at St Mary's Church, Haddington Road.