Thomas Merton in
The Seven Storey Mountain reflects on his concept of God as an atheist::
I never had an adequate notion of what Christians meant by God. I had simply taken it for granted that the God in Whom religious people believed , and to Whom they attributed the creation and government of all things, was a noisy and dramatic and passionate character, a vague, jealous, hidden being, the objectification of all their own desires and strivings and subjective ideals.
The truth is, that the concept of God which I had always entertained, and which I had accused Christians of teaching to the world, was a concept of a being who was simply impossible. He was infinite and yet finite; perfect and imperfect; eternal and yet changing-subject to all the variations of emotions, love, sorrow, hate, revenge, that men are prey to. How could this fatuous, emotional thing be without beginning in the without end,be the creator of all? I had taken the dead letter of Scripture at its very deadest, and it had killed me.
I think one cause of my profound satisfaction with what I now read was that God had been vindicated in my own mind. There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know him and to see him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise. I know that many people are, or call themselves, "atheists" simply because they are repelled and offended by statements of God made in imaginary and metaphorical terms of which they are not able to interpret and comprehend. They refuse these concepts of God, not because they despise God, but perhaps because they demand a notion of him more perfect than they generally find: and because ordinary, figurative concepts of God could not satisfy them, they turn away and think that there are no other: or, worse still, they refused to listen to philosophy, on the ground that it is nothing but a web of meaningless words spun together for the justification of the same old hopeless falsehoods. What a relief it was for me, now, to discover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of him.
At a recent Men's fellowship meeting we talked a bit about what types of proofs are required for people to see God. In the end, we discussed how Belief must come first --
then you see God. Peter Kreeft addressed this concept of coming to know God in a lecture on Beauty. In talking about beauty he described it as an aspect and sign that points towards God.
So the more you see the beauty of God, the more you love Him. Well how do you see the beauty of God, how do you open your eyes? Unfortunately the only way to open the eyes is love. So you could only see God when you love Him and you can only love him when you see Him. So where do you start? Well with both, because they reinforce eachother. It's like the relationship between the mind and the senses. If you have no sensory information then you have an empty mind, but if you have no principles and concepts, you don't understand your sensory experiences. So the more sense knowledge you have the more conceptual knowledge you have, and the more conceptual knowledge you have, the more clear your sense knoweldge is. Each feeds the other and starts simultaneously, it's not like the chicken and egg dilemma.
Likewise loving God and seeing the beauty of God reinforce eachother and each is the most powerful means to the other. I know of no more effective way of loving God than seeing His beauty, and no more effective way of seeing His beauty than to love Him. And that is true of human beings too. Why did Dante perceive the beauty of Beatrice when to everyone else in the world she was a 'plain Jane'? Because he loved her. Why did he love her? Because he suddenly by divine grace had the vision of her beauty. It's the same with God.
Sometimes though, people don't believe in God for altogether different reasons. Some, because it would require them to change their views and behavior. If there is no God, then I am god. Some others are scandalized by the disconnect between the way some 'believers' behave and the what it is that they believe.
