Question of God – Today

Abstract

Contemporary atheism, which has its roots in the Enlightenment as well as in the 18^th and 19^th-century critique of religion, differs from the historically more distant forms of negating God's existence or His effectiveness in the world. These approaches assume that the human intellect has freed itself from the Dark Ages of metaphysics and theology of revelation to find its natural state in immanentism and secularism. In this way, the non-existence of God becomes unquestionable, because He is nothing more than an imaginary being, whose existence cannot be proved empirically or granted an a priori status. At the same time, some prominent thinkers challenge the conceptual viability of positivism. Their arguments pertain to the intellectual and existential questions that are inseparable from the spiritual nature of the human being. They also point to the argumentative conviction that the human being displays a predilection to investigate the transcendent origin and purpose of the world. Reference to God allows a reappraisal of the historical evidence of the historical act of God's revealing Himself through Jesus Christ. Faith in God, who is present in the world, gives hope even in the face of death, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer confessed shortly before his execution by the godless Nazis.