Vatican newspaper sees reinvigorated atheism

November 29, 2011

In recent years, atheism become less of a “pragmatic space of irreligiousness and indifference” and more of an active intellectual force, according to an essay published in L’Osservatore Romano.

Adriano Pessina, who teaches philosophy at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, sees

a return to theoretical atheism, assisted by references to scientific discourse. After the classic seasons of suspect teachers (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud), today it is the turn of neo-darwinism and neuroscience to furnish arguments for the belief that God does not exist … The second and more interesting change, perhaps, is atheism as a new form of morality … The new apologetics of atheism privileges the reference to empirical science to justify the thesis that without God one can live morally well and even more, one can and must take into one’s own hands the future of an evolution which until now has been blind, so to speak, but can now finally be governed by a human project freed from the tether of ancestral prohibitions formed under a divine authority.

“One can and must respond to the arguments of the new apologetics of atheism, which is anything but post-metaphysical, trusting in the great resources which human reason, saved by the event of the Incarnation, provides,” Pessina adds. “After a period of weak thought and fluid identities, the question of the seriousness of existence in its necessary rootedness with or against God, is raised again in the public space of culture.”

 

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Further information:

• The challenge of contemporary atheism (L’Osservatore Romano)