Solemnity of the Holy Trinity, 2005
 

    If you’ve been keeping up with much of the news in the area of science and religion, you would know that scientific atheism (if atheism actually can be “scientific”) is on the wane. Atheism has always been somewhat of an aberration: its adherents always have been a tiny, often cranky minority (like Madalyn Murray O’Hare) and some of the modern world’s most vicious transgressors of decency. The big news recently has to do with the famous and, evidently, decent, British philosopher Anthony Flew, perhaps in his prime the most articulate atheist in the world. Now, he admits, he’s probably been wrong for decades. When a single human cell, as Flew well noted, contains more data, intricately organized into a code or language of life, than the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, and is complex beyond our wildest dreams, then even science has to wonder about the possibility of God. So Flew has to some degree allied himself with that “new” school of thought that sees intelligent design everywhere in physical life.
    Yet Flew, now 81 years old, has no hopes for an afterlife and sees no real reason to believe in a personal God. Strange, that this great mind would allow the immense complexity of reality and its staggering evidential quality pointing to a Designer to move him toward a kind of theism, but he does not, it seems, really delve into yet another remarkable thing in our daily human experience. That is, if a single human cell is so much evidence for a Designer, then what on earth does he make of the human personality? I mean, surely, we are – everything is, science tells us – tremendously complex on the tiniest material level, and yet above and beyond that is the even greater mystery of human personhood: this marvelous ability we have of saying the simple word “I” and have some idea of what it means; the aspect of the human, which out of a sense of self looks to another for that fulfillment we call “love”; the mysterious and wonderful reality of the uniqueness of each human being that is not merely a matter of an unrepeatable DNA code or inimitable set of finger prints, but is most deeply reflected in the individual personality.
    Whence human personhood? How is it that we are materially designed on the minutest of levels and not also “designed” in that which is most essential to our being, our personhood? For truly it is as marvelous to speak of the human personality as it is of the quantity of data one single human cell can contain. As fascinating as DNA, genetic organization and human cell life is, it seems to me that something else is far more so: that father and mother love their children, a man lays down his life in this world in order to be a priest, friends willingly die for one another, a young man and woman fall in love with each other, whose human joy is then immortalized in a near perfect Shakespearean sonnet. How mysterious and marvelous we are – beings who love, suffer, fear, worship, reason, remember, dream, hope, believe, know, communicate, and thirst and search for meaning. If, again, a human cell points emphatically enough to make a believer in God out of the world’s most polished atheist, then surely the human personality points toward the same designer, understood more deeply and accurately as our Creator, who being personal, creates us in that image of Himself.
    Yet Flew stops short – at least for now – on this new movement in his life. But why? Why not venture further? He says that he does not believe in a personal God. But what grounds does he have for his unbelief, given the fact that he has already granted the overwhelming likelihood of a Designer of all things? What, intellectually speaking, keeps him from seeing the possibility of this God being personal? Human beings are the only creatures on this earth who rationally detect the design that all reality bears witness to, and not only detect, but mimic in our many different constructions. And we are persons – again, those who can say “I,” “I am,” “I think,” “I love”….
    Professor Flew claims that the maxim for his profession is to follow the truth wherever it leads. Then may he do so and be rewarded for his present willingness to break ranks with the dwindling number of atheists in a world that is far too complicated in its make-up to be a comfortable and intellectually secure habitat for the convinced unbeliever. Meanwhile we Christians maintain, on the basis of reason and faith, that such a Designer as Flew has so recently discovered is most assuredly personal, “tri-personal” in fact. The contrary is inadmissible to us simply because it would leave ourselves completely inexplicable to ourselves. God has, in Christ, indeed revealed man to himself. Having created us in His own image and likeness, God has made us persons, self-conscious beings who think, design, will and love – all of which are in our Creator perfectly, one eternal, infinite Being who is a community of Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Thus did Christ reveal to us the inner life of God, not only to explain to us ourselves, but to declare to us our destiny and through His death and resurrection make possible that destiny: to share in that blessed life, that eternal life, life in union with the Father, through the Son in the bond of their love, the Holy Spirit.
    It is not enough to know that the world – ourselves included – is designed; man has guessed rightly at that for thousands of years. We must want to know why. Here Professor Flew halts, having “concluded” that his view of God is very different than is Christianity’s, which in his mind depicts God as [an] omnipotent Oriental despot,” a “cosmic Saddam Hussein.” How very tragically typical of our sometimes thoughtless age: that even the philosophers, who through science can read the wonder of the human body, but do not bother, when it comes to religion, to get their facts straight. If Flew would only read the Gospels, meditate on the Nicene Creed, explore the Catholic catechism, he would find a wholly other view. He would find the answer who is God as Jesus Christ reveals Him: the Blessed Trinity who has created us persons, after the divine pattern of His own Trinitarian nature.