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WESTERN
Atheism in contemporary Theology
Alasdair MacIntyre, 'The debate about God: Victorian relevance and contemporary
irrelevance'
Pascal, however, in the dialogue of fragment 343
(Brunschvicg 233) of the Pensées, confronts an interlocutor who not
only does not believe but is "so constituted that he cannot believe."
Pascal, unlike Aquinas or John Locke, is able to find no arguments
in the character of the universe to address to this man. All he can confront him
with is a choice, the choice elaborated in his doctrine of the wager. Pascal's
notion that theistic belief is something to be chosen is quite new in the history
of theism.
13
'Atheism and morals'
Almost all the great skeptics and atheists of the modern Western world have been
morally conservative, often intensely so, in their lives as well as in their
teachings. To Freud and Marx, for example, who took many of the
traditional virtues for granted, the unorthodox moral behavior and attitudes of
many Marxists and Freudians would have been highly distasteful.
31
Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, the Religious
significance of Atheism (Columbia University: NY 1969)
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