There are no atheists. At least no thinkers are atheists. “Freethinkers” rise to that bait more surely than a trout to the fly and
snap at it more viciously. But it is equally axiomatic that freethinkers do not think freely. Proof? Well, suppose a freethinker
thinks himself into religion. Ipso facto he is rated a renegade and apostate. He is free to think atheism, but not free to think
theism.

Sometimes a freethinker lets the cat out of the bag. For example, John Stuart Mill says in his autobiography, “It would have
been wholly inconsistent with my father's ideas of duty to allow me to acquire impressions contrary to his convictions and
feelings respecting religion.” So! Papa is a freethinker, and Sonny must not think otherwise than Papa. The same phenomenon
vastly magnified so that all may see it with the naked eye is now on exhibition in Russia. There indeed we have a World's
Exposition of Freethought. Irreligion may be taught but not religion. That statement too makes the freethinkers' gorge rise, for
oddly enough the breed is predominantly pro-Bolshevik. Religion,” they declare, “is not banned in Russia. A man may be
religious if he will.” Yes, he religious and starve. He is free to think, but if he thinks the wrong way, he dies. This is Liberty Hall.
Here a Man does what he pleases. And if he doesn't we make him. Stalin and Co. now do the thinking for the Russian people
more tyrannically than the Czar or the Patriarch in the old Orthodox days. Under the Church a professor or a general or a
diplomat could be an avowed unbeliever and hold his job. Under the Soviets, no one in office may go to Mass, pay pew rent,
or even make the sign of the Cross—visibly. It is ever thus. There is no freedom under Freethought.

But let us get back to the primary proposition: No thinker is an atheist. Herbert Spencer said atheism is “unthinkable.” True, he
also said that theism is unthinkable. In particular he said God is unthinkable. But thereupon he proceeded to do a great deal of
thinking about the Unthinkable. Before he finished thinking, he had enumerated the attributes of God as confidently and as
completely as St. Thomas Aquinas.

These remarks are by way of preliminary to the declaration that I have recently read a wise and eloquent volume that is to all
intents and purposes a commentary upon the text, “No thinker is an atheist.” It might be called an elaboration of the equally
familiar statement of Lord Kelvin that lie had investigated a great many ostensibly atheistic systems of thought and had always
found a god of some sort concealed somewhere. The Unknown God by Alfred Noyes is packed with profound and searching
thought beautifully and stirringly expressed. Its author, one of the leading poets of our time, turns out to have been a philosopher
from his very teens. Indeed so successful is he in the role of the philosopher that I rather think his prose—a beautiful, sensitive,
imaginative, virile prose—may surpass his poetry in survival value, as, conversely, Chesterton's poetry will probably outlive his
prose.

In The Unknown God Mr. Noyes reveals and comments upon many startling passages from the works of recognized agnostics
and reputed atheists in evidence of God—not merely “a god of some sort,” as Lord Kelvin says, but substantially and essentially
the orthodox God, the God of Catholic theology, the God of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Mr. Noyes was an agnostic and is a Catholic. He came from agnosticism to Catholicism, not like Chesterton by revulsion from
the inanities and absurdities of “liberal” thought, but by following hints and clues that he found in his agnostic authors. He has
read widely and deeply—so deeply that he has dug up many a passage that had been buried—perhaps purposely buried—in
Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, Spencer, Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, Spinoza, Helmholtz, and a dozen others generally thought to be
anti-theological, anti-Christian, and anti-theistic. He read the agnostics as an agnostic, sympathetically. One and all they had
their part in leading him to Catholicism. It is a novel and interesting narrative.

Take Darwin, who though himself no philosopher was the inspiration of Huxley, Spencer, and a hundred other more recent
evolutionistic thinkers. Mr. Noyes evidently has read his Darwin. Of not many contemporaries can that be said. The Origin of
Species and The Descent of Man are, I suspect, no more read than Newton's Principia or Calvin's Institutes. Every one says,
“Oh, yes, Darwin!” just as they say, “Oh, yes, Don Quixote!” But who reads the one or the other? But Alfred Noyes used
Darwin's Origin of Species as an outdoor book, a companion of his recreational rambles as an amateur naturalist. I for one
never knew there could be such a Darwinian in our day. Well, knowing Darwin intimately, Mr. Noyes quotes from The Descent
of Man a passage which he thinks Darwin's “friends and enemies have both forgotten to read.” Darwin says of the evolutionistic
process, “This grand sequence of events the mind refuses to accept as the result of blind chance. The understanding revolts from
such a conclusion.” Nonetheless, atheistic evolution must accept blind chance. The only thinkable substitute for blind chance is a
superintending intelligence. But once an intelligent directing power is admitted you have God. For as St. Thomas Aquinas says,
“We see that things which lack intelligence nevertheless act for an end not fortuitously but designedly. Now whatever lacks
intelligence cannot move towards an end unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence. And
this Being we call God.”

There is many a hard nut for the professed atheist to crack. And here is the first one on which he may sharpen his teeth—or
more likely break them: “The understanding revolts from blind chance”; very well, if not blind chance, what? Any alternative will
be, as Aquinas says, “what we call God.” It is entertaining as well as enlightening to find Charles Darwin and Thomas Aquinas
expressing the same truth, one negatively and by implication, the other positively and directly.

Darwin, as we have said, and as all the world admits, was no philosopher. He was not even a logician, that is to say a close and
relentless reasoner. If he had been, he would have followed his own lead. “If not blind chance, what then?” Pursuing one “And
then?” to another “And then?” he would have come to “what we call God.” Darwin, with what he thought intellectual humility,
said, “Into these questions we cannot enter.” But reason bids us “nor sit nor stand but go.” When reason urges us on it is not
humble to refuse to follow. And if we follow reason we end with God.

We need no theologian from the Middle Ages to return and tell us that. Socrates was no Scholastic, nor Aristotle, nor Seneca,
nor Marcus Aurelius. For that matter neither was Francis Bacon who is called—perhaps inaccurately—”the father of modern
science.” He said he “would rather believe all the miracles in the Koran than believe that this universal frame had no Maker.”
Belief in the absurd yarns of the Koran is not more superstitious than the acceptance of blind chance. Between the devil of
chance and the deep sea of God a true scientist will not hesitate. He cannot choose chance, for chance means accident, and the
first article in the creed of the scientist is that there is no accident in nature. So the horns of Darwin's dilemma were blind chance
and God. His understanding revolted from blind chance, but he could not bring himself to speak the immemorial word. . . .

In Alfred Noyes' youth (I am still following him, though reserving my liberty to wander considerably), Spencer loomed large.
Noyes, like every one else in those days, read him, but, unlike almost every one else, Noyes got out of Spencer much that he
afterwards discovered had been said by St. Thomas Aquinas. The casual reader may be tempted to think that Noyes' discovery
of the Catholic hidden away in the agnostic is a mistake or a trick. But, in spite of Spencer's familiar declarations that God is the
Great Unthinkable, he has made an amazingly complete and accurate assemblage of the attributes of God. He reasons thus:
First there must be a cause of impressions produced in what we see, hear, taste, and smell. A possible cause may be matter, but
matter on the other hand may be only a mode of manifestation of spirit; in that case not matter but spirit is the true cause of
sensation. Or matter and spirit may both be only “proximate agencies.” If so, some first cause must lie behind them. Spencer
even uses capitals for the First Cause, says it is “impossible to consider it as finite” and therefore “it must be infinite.” That would
suffice for us. “Infinite First Cause” is a fairly complete designation for God—indeed surprisingly complete for an agnostic who
professes to know nothing about God. But the Darwinian philosopher goes on. “The First Cause must be independent. It exists
in the absence of all other existence. It must be in every sense perfect, including within itself all power and transcending all law.”
And he concludes, “To use the established word, it must be Absolute.” Noyes adds with wit and point: “To use the even more
firmly established word, it must be God.”

Even yet, however, Spencer is not done with his amazing asseverations—amazing I mean from an agnostic. In his stilted way, he
says that the existence of the transcendent Absolute is “a necessary datum of consciousness.” More simply and more
epigrammatically he might have said that the act of our thinking proves God. That goes further of course than Descartes' Cogito
eigo sum. It approaches Newman's “two luminously self-evident beings—God and my soul.”

Finally, as if to give the lie to his own agnosticism, Spencer says “the belief which this datum constitutes has a higher warrant
than any other whatever” and in “this assertion of a reality utterly inscrutable in its nature, religion finds an assertion essentially
coinciding with her own.” If I may venture yet once again to take some of the starch out of these stiff sentences, I think he
means, “Nothing else is so well warranted as the fact of God's existence” and “In supplying this warrant philosophy plays into
the hands of religion.” But that too had been said by the Scholastics: Philosophy is the handmaid of theology.

For those who don't see the immediate logical connection between the statements “I think” or “I am” and the statement “God
exists,” it might be well to ask Spencer's question, “Why should there have been anything at all?” Without God there could have
been nothing at all. I have sometimes amused myself by setting this little problem to over-militant atheists: Explain the origin of
the world without a World Maker. If you manage that, try another: Explain the origin of life without a Life Giver. A third stickler
might well be the one suggested by Spencer, Descartes, Newman, and Aquinas: “If there be no First Thinker, how could
anyone think?” Talk about making bricks without straw—atheism tries to make bricks without straw or clay or a brickmaker.

The supreme example of this impossible mental legerdemain was the attempt to explain the universe and all in it by supposing the
aboriginal existence of a nebula. There we have one more preposterous substitute for God. For if nebula made nebula, nebula is
God. But if something back of nebula made nebula, that something back of nebula is God. I may twist and turn and double on
my track, I may, as Francis Thompson says, “Flee him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind,” but if I think at all I cannot
escape God. “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art
there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the
sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.” “Perhaps the darkness will cover me,” but though I
create a darkness with large heavy philosophical words, “The Unknowable,” “The Ultimate,” “The Absolute,” “The
Transcendent” even “The Hidden Synthesis of Contradictions,” or “The Resolution ofAntinomties,” it is all God. I cannot escape
him. I cannot escape him in heaven or hell, in the uttermost parts of the earth, or in the mystic maze of my own mind. And so, I
cannot hide from him even behind the smoke-screen of the nebula.

Of the nebular hypothesis, Tyndall (of the evolutionistic trinity—Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall) declared with scorn, “Strip it
naked and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone
the nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human
mind itself, emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena—were once latent in a fiery cloud. Surely the mere statement of such
a notion is more than a refutation.”

“It is nothing of the kind,” says Noyes, defending Huxley against his teammate Tyndall! But Tyndall had at least apparently good
reason for scorn. For Huxley had spoken with sympathy of the proposition “that the whole world, living and not living, is the
result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive
nebulosity of the universe was composed. If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay, potentially, in the cosmic
vapor; and that a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapor, have predicted,
say, the state of the fauna in Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapor of the breath
on a cold winter's day.”

I confess I am malicious enough to enjoy seeing one leading agnostic scientist of the nineteenth century calling his confrere an
ass, and it does seem almost a pity that a Catholic should intervene and explain that Huxley and Tyndall were not contradicting
one another, but that their statements require coordination. Still I suppose we can afford to be generous. We can get fun enough
watching them both squirm away from the main question—Whence comes these “definite laws” and these “forces possessed by
molecules,” this “primitive nebulosity of which the universe is composed? Composed, did you say? And was it composed
without a Composer?

Once more we fall back on the never-failing common sense of Thomas Aquinas: “Whatever lacks intelligence cannot move to
an end unless it be directed by some Being endowed with intelligence.” The perennial philosophy is perennial because it is the
philosophy of all normal, sensible persons. And no normal, sensible person believes that the flora and fauna, to say nothing of
the humana, of Britain in 1869 came out of a fiery cloud of incalculable eons ago, without a superintending intelligence. Only in
atheism does the spring rise higher than the source, the effect exist without the cause, life come from a stone, blood from a
turnip, a silk purse from a sow's ear, a Beethoven symphony or a Bach fugue from a kitten's walking across the keys. In
comparison with these prodigies, the ridiculous miracles of the Koran would be reasonable. O vous incredules, says Pascal, les
plus credules!

Unbelievers believe more than believers and on less evidence. “Skeptical as I am,” said Voltaire, “I declare such to be evident
madness,” speaking of some silly theory broached in his day to explain plus by minus and produce something out of nothing. No
wonder he couldn't be an atheist....

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Gillis, James M. “There are no Atheists.” The Catholic World (September 1934).

THE AUTHOR

James M. Gillis, C.S.P., was a popular author and lecturer and for twelve years was a member of the Paulist mission band.

Copyright © 1934 The Catholic World