What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
This is a time of renewed efforts by atheists to discredit humanity’s annoyingly persistent belief in the existence of God, with pop-scientists like Sam Harris and Neil deGrasse Tyson now waving the flag that Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins raised and popularized twenty or so years ago.
Perhaps to their chagrin, these New Atheists are inspiring a renewed interest in philosophers and theologians who addressed questions relating to God’s existence and the reasonability of religious belief. On RealClearReligion.org, Fr. Robert Barron takes up Thomas Aquinas’ first of five proofs for the existence of God, the argument from motion, providing the reader with an opportunity to reflect on the elegance and profundity of this over 800-year-old argument.
And at the Stone, the New York Time’s philosophy blog, Gary Gutting interviews Yale philosopher Keith DeRose on the rationality of religious belief, addressing the religious epistemology of the Reformed tradition and a reworked version of the cosmological argument for God’s existence.
These arguments are meaty and invite serious reflection, but the reader will come away with a renewed appreciation for the reasonability and timelessness of the belief in the existence of God, a belief that in the words of St. Augustine proves to be ever ancient and ever new.
- Kaitlyn Landgraf