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God and atheism




Again: I'd like to transfer here something I wrote for Quora. (How many times have I done this? Well, there will likely be more.)  

Someone there asked, "What can an atheist gain from studying Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas?" I responded:

Interestingly, Bertrand Russell -- a very outspokenly atheistic philosopher and historian of philosophy -- had great respect for St. Augustine as a philosopher. Perhaps his example answers your question.

As you may know: one of the common arguments by pagan philosophers in Augustine's day, used against monotheism and views of creation ex nihilo, was this: there must have been a specific moment when God decided to create the world, and there must have been an infinity of moments of time before that. These Christians seem to believe that God made the creation decision at any arbitrary time during His self-sufficient aloneness. How is such a view sustainable? 

Augustine answers that argument with a theory of time. He said that time is subjective. It is some being's experience of a sequence of events. Without such a subjective experience, then there is no time, So, BEFORE the divine Creator said "Let there be light" there were no events to experience and since there was nothing to be sequenced there was no time. So the whole idea of God twiddling his thumbs through everlasting time BEFORE that moment falls apart -- there was no time before that moment and so no time for twiddling.

Russell said that Augustine here makes an acute point, The subjective view of time is not a necessary one but it is a tenable one and, given such a view, that particular objection to a monotheistic Creator of the Christian sort fails. 

The example shows, I submit, that atheists and theists can learn from each other even across many centuries if they are open minded enough to allow that learning to happen.

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