The Catholic times. [volume] (Columbus, Ohio) 1951-current, 1959-03-13
JOSEPH BREIG-
Man In Space
And Belief In God

hN'o PhAAI ~ Oh NlOSNONg lbdL l. Gil WdLCuIIR ~
re-run of a movie so old that it was made years be-
fore movies were invented.
This impression was especially strong when an
atheist propaganda in Russia, Y. T. Fadeyev, is
sued a statement about Soviet space satellites.
Fadeyev alleged the existence of God had been
disproved because rockets have neither encountered
angels nor discover a Supreme Being"
This, of course, Is godlessness in its most ignor-
ant and juvenile form. ! would be unfair if | did not
note that there are better-although still unconvinc-
ing arguments for atheism.
AT THE MOMENT, however, | am not concerned
either with attacking a proposition as pitiable as
Fadeyevs, or with discussing the more able objec-
tions to belief in God.
What strikes me forcibly is the fact that the doc
trlnalre communists seem to be going through q
phase very like the intellectual confusion that pro-
duced the 10Th century's atheists.
For a period that extended into the early 19OOs,
European scientists-most particularly in France
did not dare to say publicly that they believed in the
Creator.
SO blindly biased was opinion among the intel
lectuals that any one who questioned the iron dogma
of atheism was dismissed as a fool, an obscurantist,
and no scientist.
THE REASON for this intolerant, and indeed
stupid, attitude was essentially simple. Gross relig-
ious ~illiteracy was the fundamental cause.
Theologians were helpless to correct the situa-
ton, because they were automatically discredited in
advance. They were silenced because nobody would
listen to them.
an ak to grind. He was convicted of prejudice by the
mere fact that his field of study was theology.
Thus the scientists, and above all the followers
and popularizers of scientists. were guilty of the
worst sort of anti-intellectualism while priding
themselves upon being intellectuals.
MEANWHILE, philosophers were in a state of
intellectual shock. With a few honorable exceptions,
their minds had been overwhelmed by the sudden
advance of experimental sciences.
They were incompetent to fit the new discover
les into the magnificent body of thought handed
down, and refined, since the time of Aristotle.
Thus the 10Th century was the period that pro-
duced, ultimately, the village shoemaker atheist as
a kind of type for the time.
Little by little, as they learned more and more,
the real scientists retreated, shamefacedly and al
most secretly, from atheisIn-but it fingered on among
the little-lettered.
MEANWHILE, godlessness, with its inevitable
~inhumanlty was erected into a philosophical, and fin
ally a political system by Marx and Lenin, and by
the ~frightful tyrant Stain.
1t was forced upon the long-oppressed people
of the Soviet Union in the chaos after World War /,
and then was thrust upon others by the ~bayonets Of
the Red army.
-t. But atheism remains a product-and an express
sion of religious illiteracy. It is Intellectually almost
impossible for one who knows theology to disbelieve
firmly in the Supreme Being.
The God whom the atheists deny is almost invar-
iably not God at all. but a c%aricature of God dredged
up out of their ignorance.
LITERALLY, the average atheist is one who knows
less than nothing about God-because the things he
thinks he knows are erroneous. He imagines he
knows what we mean when we say God, but he
doesn't. $50
His mind in inhabited by a host of weird mis-
apprehensions. And almost always, it is overwhelmed
by the discoveries of the scientists. The mind is SO
paralyzed by material fact that it cannot see spirit
ual truth.
Fadeyev, of course, is an extreme case. Appar-
emily he does not so much as understand that God
is not a huge material being, but pure spirit, outside
space and time.
Still. Fadeyev's religious initeracy is different
only in degree, not in kind. from that of other athe-
lists. He is in the village shoemaker stage of goddess
ness.