Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Kennzeichen des modernen Atheismus; Napoleon, Laplace; Atheismus der Akademie, der aristorkratische Atheismus

Kurzinhalt: First, it gives the appearance of being a conclusion of reason: "Therefore there is no God." The appearance, however, is deceptive

Textausschnitt: 97a The foregoing analysis of the aristocratic atheism of modernity reveals two characteristics. (Fs)

First, it gives the appearance of being a conclusion of reason: "Therefore there is no God." The appearance, however, is deceptive. Behind the seeming rationality of the conclusion lies the dynamism of a radical decision for which no rational justification can be offered. Only in virtue of an original act of freedom, the will to atheism as a project, could the atheistic conclusion have appeared. The decision was to make a separation where the tradition had made only a distinction-between faith and reason. The order of faith, said modernity, is as separate from the order of reason as the order of fantasy is from the order of the idea, as separate as the order of myth is from the order of fact. The further decision was to postulate a univocity where the tradition had proved analogy in the order of truth as it is related by the manifold powers of intelligence to the order of being. There will be only a single truth, said modernity, not a unity of truth. The final decision was to posit a dichotomy, God or the world, where the tradition had proposed a synthesis, God and the world. In these fateful decisions, and not in any process of argument, the root of the atheism of the modern Academy is to be found. (Fs)

97b Second, the full verbal formula for this atheism runs thus: "Because we have no need of God in order to understand and explain the world, there is no God." Here the modern project comes to view more clearly. This is what modernity willed to do-to explain the world without God. The fundamental refusal had fallen on the "God of explanation," as he was called, though his proper Name is the Creator, the Craftsman of the Book of Wisdom (13:3), who is also He Who Is, without whom nothing is intelligible because without him nothing is. (Fs) (notabene)
98a The essence of the modern matter appears in the famous interchange between the great astronomer, Pierre Simon Laplace, and his friend Napoleon, then First Consul. On its appearance in 1796, a copy of Laplace's Exposition du systeme du monde, a book destined to make history, was presented to Napoleon by its author. After reading it, Napoleon complimented his friend. This explanation of the world, he said, is admirable. "But," he added, "I find in the book no mention of God." Laplace replied, in a sentence that contains the distilled essence of the atheism of the modern Academy, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese."

98b The formula also states the point of similarity between this aristocratic atheism and the later bourgeois development characteristic of the nineteenth century. In the Marketplace, said les gens de bien (whether they spoke French, English, or any other vernacular), we have no need of God; therefore he does not exist. The project of these men was not to explain the world but simply to make a living in it. To them the sole realities of life were economic. The business of business is business, they might have said (the lapidary axiom was operative long before it was coined). And to the business of business, God is irrelevant. He is not needed for the success of the economic enterprise, which is the only enterprise that matters. (Fs) (notabene)