The world was made by God and continues to be upheld and guided by him in every atom and at every moment. Yet there are many who do not worship him and some who even deny that he exists.

Those who deny the existence of God are called atheists. There are others who do not actually deny his existence but merely say that we cannot know one way or the other; these are called agnostics. In practice, there is little difference between them and atheists. It is only in recent times that atheism has become relatively widespread in certain parts of the world.

In one of his poems, T.S. Eliot points at the strangeness of this situation: as the human race progresses in other forms of knowledge, it falls back in its knowledge of God, the most important knowledge of all.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.

Men have left God not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before. That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race or Dialectic.

The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do.

But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances progressively backwards?

We shall look first at Marxist Atheism, which is the official creed in communist countries. Then we shall see how some modern philosophers have defended atheism. Lastly, we shall consider the attitude of those who might be called practical atheists, because they are atheists in practice if not in theory.

3. Marxist atheism

The first important philosopher of atheism was a German, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). In 1841 he published a book called The Essence of Christianity, which contained an attack on the whole idea of belief in God.

Feuerbach's view about belief was this. When man looks at himself, he sees that he is a mixture of good and bad qualities. He thinks that the bad qualities belong to himself but that the good qualities must belong to a higher being. So he imagines that there is a higher being whom he calls God, and he says that God is good and loving and wise whilst man is wretched and foolish and sinful. Feuerbach said we must get rid of this idea of God and realize that our good qualities do not belong to an imaginary God but to ourselves. Religion is preventing us from recognizing our real worth and developing our real potential.

Feuerbach had a great influence on another German thinker, Karl Marx (1818-1863), the founder of Communism. Marx said that religion, as well as preventing people from recognizing their real worth, also prevented them from doing anything to improve their lot. He wrote:

Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.

The most important of Marx' followers was V. I. Lenin (1870-1924), who led the communist revolution in Russia. He described religion as "A kind of spiritual alcohol in which the slaves of capital drown their human image". It was through him that atheism became official policy in Russia and in the other countries which were later taken over by communism.

At the present time, many people live under communist regimes which teach atheism in the schools and persecute believers in different ways, According to Marxist theory, the people in communist countries have been freed from the misery of the capitalist system and so have no need of the opium of religion; therefore, religion should die away of its own accord. But even in Russia, where atheism has been official since 1917, religion shows little sign of dying away.

Much of the communist propaganda against religion is so crude that it has little effect . Moscow radio's comment on a Russian space-probe is a typical example of this.

Our rocket has by-passed the moon, It is nearing the sun and we have not yet discovered God. We have turned out lights in heaven that no man will be able to put on again. We are breaking the yoke of the Gospel, the opium of the people. Let us go forth and

Christ shall be relegated to mythology.

2. Philosophical atheism

Some modern philosophers have tried to do what Marx failed to do, that is, to provide a convincing basis for atheism. They include a number of English thinkers, such as Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer and Anthony Flew. They say that it is impossible to prove that God does not exist but they claim to show that the idea of God is unnecessary or absurd or meaningless. They use two main lines of argument.

Their first line of argument is that the idea of God involves a contradiction. For instance, how can God be good and yet permit evil? Anthony Flew writes:

To assert at the same time first that there is an infinitely good God, second that he is an all-powerful Creator, and third that there are evils in his universe is to contradict yourself.

Their second line of argument is to say that the traditional proofs for the existence of God, such as the Five Ways of St. Thomas, do not really prove anything. They admit that individual things and events in the universe need an explanation: this tree or this house or this person must have been caused in some way or another. But they deny that the universe as a whole needs an explanation. During a radio debate on the existence of God, Bertrand Russell was asked how he could explain the existence of the universe if there is no God. He answered, "I should say the universe is just there, and that's all."

Philosophy searches for explanations, but atheism stops short as soon as the search begins to lead to God. Atheism leaves man adrift upon a sea of uncertainty, with no one to tell him where he comes from or where he is going, with no one to tell him what is right or what is wrong. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher of existentialism and atheism, says that there are no longer any fixed moral values or standards on which we can rely.

Dostoievsky once wrote "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted", and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself.

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitable be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.