The fol­low­ing thoughts will start from the uncon­test­ed exist­ing real­i­ty, from our human nature, that all of us expe­ri­ence. We want to remind the fact that our deep­est inten­tions and long­ings con­tain in them­selves a final aim that real­ly can ful­fil them.

We expe­ri­ence life as a con­tin­u­ous search. Every goal in this world can offer only a tem­po­rary sat­is­fac­tion. This can be explained only if we accept that there is a final goal and with­out reach­ing it man can not be sat­is­fied with pro­vi­sion­al solu­tions. There­fore the final goal of our search should be beyond this world.

1 Final Aim of Life, Happiness—Longing for Fulfilment

Every man strug­gles day by day for things he con­sid­ers impor­tant in his life. Youth strug­gle for suc­cess in study­ing, adults for earn­ing mon­ey for main­tain­ing them­selves and their fam­i­lies. Some invest a lot of time and ener­gy in improv­ing sci­ence or serv­ing the ben­e­fit of soci­ety in oth­er areas. These are good things in them­selves but what is the final sense of all these? Although peo­ple can be sat­is­fied by these claims find­ing tem­po­ral joy nev­er­the­less they can not find final ful­fil­ment and secu­ri­ty in them. An earth­quake can anni­hi­late every­thing that a man builds up all his life, a death of a beloved fam­i­ly mem­ber can dri­ve some­body into depres­sion. There are many cas­es when man is forced to be con­front­ed with the finite­ness of his life and of the things of this world.

There is also anoth­er out­look on life, which pro­claims amuse­ment and enjoy­ment as the real sense of life. Every hon­est man can recog­nise that this think­ing and man­ner of life caus­es peo­ple to go emp­ty los­ing the abil­i­ty to appre­ci­ate the actu­al val­ues of life. This ide­ol­o­gy is the best source of licen­tious­ness, immoral­i­ty and aggres­sion. Con­se­quent­ly this can not be the real aim of life either.

All the peo­ple would like to pos­sess a sol­id base that they can lean on. What can it be? Jesus Christ said:

Do not lay up for your­selves trea­sures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.…

Even if some­one does not accept him as Son of God, nev­er­the­less can see that His words are true. How many peo­ple find­ing mate­r­i­al wealth or great rep­u­ta­tion com­mit­ted sui­cide? How many of them who put their whole trust in man became human wrecks after get­ting dis­ap­point­ing in them? What can a man dis­cov­er in this world at all that could sup­ply absolute secu­ri­ty for him? Who could give sat­is­fac­to­ry answers to the great­est ques­tions of mankind? Jesus fin­ish­es his state­ment like this:

…but lay up for your­selves trea­sures in heav­en, where nei­ther moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.… But seek first the king­dom of God and his right­eous­ness, and all these things will be added to you. (Matthew 6:20,33)

Each man has a cer­tain claim for find­ing the aim of his life, joy and love. Though many peo­ple try to repress this claim, yet it seems that mankind search­es the ful­fil­ment and those who failed to find their aim sink in them­selves. Thus long­ing for full­ness is a nat­ur­al human need but find­ing it is log­i­cal­ly and prac­ti­cal­ly impos­si­ble if there is not some­thing or some­one pos­sess­ing that full­ness in itself. Since as far as we know man is the being of the high­est lev­el in the uni­verse, it can be log­i­cal­ly exclud­ed in advance that his long­ing for full­ness could ever be com­plet­ed mere­ly by mate­r­i­al things—which are on low­er lev­el. Of course one can find joy in oth­er peo­ple or mate­r­i­al things, too. This joy, how­ev­er, derived from its nature, is only pro­vi­sion­al and par­tial and the quest for full­ness based on them is a self-cheat and illu­sion. Man is unable to ful­fil anoth­er man com­plete­ly since they stand on the same lev­el and they “strug­gle” with the same needs. Thus the exis­tence of an absolute being above man able to com­plete his needs is a prime neces­si­ty for life.

2 The Basic Need of Man for Relationship in Love

Accord­ing to per­son­al­is­tic phi­los­o­phy ( e.g. Mar­tin Buber), the basic need of man is rela­tion­ship: open­ness and mutu­al love towards oth­ers. Love is the deep­est man­i­fes­ta­tion of the essence of our per­son­al­i­ty. Man, by his nature, is a social being. There­fore all the pos­si­bil­i­ties of our human nature can be realised not only regard­ing the indi­vid­ual but brak­ing the frame of our own exis­tence and refer­ring to our place among the oth­ers. This means that for the real­i­sa­tion, open­ing and ful­fill­ing our per­son­al being a rela­tion­ship between “You and me” is indis­pens­able. Main­ly our need for the oth­ers and our devo­tion to them can form in us the sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty and the right assess­ment of our­selves and of the oth­ers. Only relat­ing our­selves towards oth­er per­son­al beings we can attain self-reflec­tion, self-dis­po­si­tion, self-con­scious­ness and so the sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty. Because man has the need of being in com­mu­ni­ty, the main obsta­cle in per­fect­ing his per­son­al­i­ty is self-con­tent­ness, with­draw­ing in him­self. Self­ish­ness can serve only appar­ent­ly for gain­ing one’s own inter­ests, because the one who does­n’t take into con­sid­er­a­tion the oth­er’s needs, who does­n’t know sac­ri­fice (renounce­ment) for the oth­er one or who is mis­trust­ful towards oth­ers, iso­lates him­self from the com­mu­ni­ty and so iso­lates him­self just from what he is look­ing for: find­ing ful­fil­ment for his own being. A man who lives for him­self or wants to gain pow­er over the oth­ers can not be free, only serv­ing oth­ers can make one free. Only in devo­tion one can be sat­is­fied with his life and his real­i­sa­tion.

But man can see always the human lim­its: he can­not get nor give per­fect love. The love we can receive from anoth­er man will have an end when we lose him. There­fore the nat­ur­al need of man for receiv­ing eter­nal love can be ful­filled only by an eter­nal per­fect being who is the inex­haustible source of love.

Once man’s long­ing for per­fect love is ful­filled he him­self will own the source from which he will be able to give love to oth­ers. Every­body can expe­ri­ence that he can­not sat­is­fy per­fect­ly the oth­er one by his own pow­er because the oth­er one’s needs go beyond one’s human lim­its. A right rela­tion­ship with anoth­er man is pos­si­ble only through tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion his whole nature, all his needs, that often sur­pass one’s own abil­i­ties. This is the way some­one has to regard the oth­er one in order to see him not only as a tool for his own hap­pi­ness but in his com­plete real­i­ty as a being hav­ing need for absolute love. In this way man’s nat­ur­al long­ing for rela­tion­ship in love can not be ful­filled per­fect­ly with­out an absolute source of love that is God.

3 Wish for Righteousness

Every­body has a nat­ur­al sen­sa­tion of right­eous­ness. This can be eas­i­ly seen by the fact that bad deeds of “ene­mies” are strict­ly assessed. Peo­ple are usu­al­ly much more sen­si­tive towards their “ene­mies” than towards them­selves. We have the wish that peo­ple are treat­ed right­eous­ly, or at least the wish that they them­selves are right­eous­ly treat­ed.

Now evo­lu­tion­ists try to explain this phe­nom­e­non as a result of com­mon life of human beings because it is advan­ta­geous for the col­lec­tive to be right­eous. How­ev­er, the sense of right­eous­ness can­not sim­ply devel­op, there is no more or less of it. It does not seem to be a sen­si­ble thought that mankind decid­ed at an ear­ly stage to be right­eous and con­se­quent­ly it was trans­mit­ted to the descen­dants. Such phe­nom­e­na, abil­i­ties can­not be inher­it­ed but every indi­vid­ual has to decide to be right­eous or not. Sec­ond­ly, right­eous­ness does not ask for being advan­ta­geous for one­self or oth­ers. A right­eous deed is done inde­pen­dent­ly of its con­se­quences. So how can our long­ing for right­eous­ness be ful­filled?

Our world has always been full of unright­eous­ness and it is not real­is­tic to think that this will com­plete­ly change. Fur­ther­more we are not sat­is­fied with par­tial right­eous­ness which peo­ple strug­gle for like politi­cians (some­times), human­ists and reli­gious peo­ple. Real all-embrac­ing right­eous­ness that is valid for every­one can­not be found with­in this world.

So is the long­ing for right­eous­ness only a sense­less char­ac­ter of human being or does­n’t it just hint at a tran­scen­dent being who can pro­vide it eter­nal­ly?

4 Beauty and Harmony

If the rea­son of the com­ing into exis­tence of the uni­verse and man is just the sequence of extreme­ly rare events, where are beau­ty and har­mo­ny from? Why does man have abil­i­ties that are com­plete­ly unnec­es­sary from the point of view of sur­vival and race preser­va­tion? Where are the artis­tic gifts, poet­ry, lit­er­a­ture, and music from? If life is just a cru­el strug­gle for sur­vival, where are these val­ues from and why have they sur­vived?

There was a child who liked to paint, and indeed he paint­ed nice­ly. One day he sat in his room and start­ed to paint a beau­ti­ful land­scape. After sit­ting many hours with his uten­sils, he became tired and went out. He looked up at the sky and at the trees and spon­ta­neous­ly shout­ed out: “Oh, this is more beau­ti­ful than what I paint­ed and I can ever paint ! But who is the one who paint­ed all these?”

Man has a nat­ur­al wish for beau­ty, which reflects per­fec­tion, the ide­al. Beau­ti­ful is what approach­es the ide­al or the per­fec­tion of itself. The rhythm of pro­por­tions, lines, colours, sounds does not have usu­al­ly mate­r­i­al or bio­log­i­cal worth, even if it can be con­nect­ed, we like it because of oth­er rea­sons. We have joy when we see beau­ti­ful things because they bring us near­er to the infi­nite beau­ty we have wish for and we love. We like to see the wav­ing sea, the high moun­tains because they sug­gest great­ness, infin­i­ty, majesty. So the attract­ing pow­er of beau­ty leads us to an infi­nite source, to the per­fec­tion which can sat­is­fy our long­ing for it.

An illus­tra­tion con­cern­ing the love of beau­ty, belong­ing to the nature of man:

The expe­di­tion led by Ralph Solec­ki of Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty in the rugged Zagros Moun­tains of north­ern Iraq exca­vat­ed in 1960 in the Shanidar Cave the bones of an old Nean­therthal man who died 60.000 years ago. His bur­ial was pre­pared in a spe­cial way: He rest­ed in a bed with bun­dles of woody horse­tail branch­es. Fes­toons of yarrow, hol­ly­hock, ground­sell, grape hyacinth, corn­flow­ers and oth­er flow­ers were woven among the ramose stems of the woody horse­tail. Solec­ki wrote about this “flower bur­ial”:

We are brought sud­den­ly to the real­i­sa­tion that the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of mankind and the love of beau­ty go beyond the bound­aries of our own species. …No longer can we deny the ear­ly men the full range of human feel­ings and expe­ri­ence.¹

5 Morality (The Argument from Conscience)

Why does moral­i­ty exist and why is there a basic long­ing for good in man and why is there con­science?

5.1 There Is an Objective Moral Law

Even if some peo­ple are not aware of or con­scious­ly do not admit the real­i­ty of a uni­ver­sal moral law, gen­er­al­ly every­body agrees in some basic moral prin­ci­ples nec­es­sary for our life as indi­vid­u­als and as col­lec­tiv­i­ty.

It is true that there always exist­ed dif­fer­ences con­cern­ing the moral prin­ci­ples but these dif­fer­ences were always small­er than their con­sent. If some­body com­pares the moral teach­ings of dif­fer­ent cul­tures from dif­fer­ent times among dif­fer­ent nations, will see the great sim­i­lar­i­ties among them and the great sim­i­lar­i­ty to our moral pre­cepts.

C. S. Lewis proves in his book, The Abo­li­tion of Man, that the ancient Egyp­tians, Baby­lo­ni­ans, Hin­dus, Chi­nese, Greeks and Romans had very sim­i­lar moral teach­ings. In no cul­ture were trea­son, cheat, impos­tors or self­ish men admired. There are dif­fer­ences in dif­fer­ent cul­tures con­cern­ing the num­ber of wives in an offi­cial mar­riage, but no cul­ture has ever glo­ri­fied the act of adul­tery or shown as a virtue to take away the wife of the oth­er man. In no cul­ture was per­mit­ted to mur­der any­body with­out any rea­son, not even among can­ni­bals, who also have their laws and they don’t mur­der any­body they want either. The fact that Nazis con­sid­ered their supreme aim to root out some oth­er nations does­n’t show that this can be also part of the nat­ur­al law. Just the fact that we may crit­i­cise them shows that there is a supe­ri­or truth in this ques­tion to which all are sub­mit­ted and by which all can be judged.

Let’s exam­ine the devel­op­ment of this inner law in the life of the indi­vid­ual. The real­i­ty of the devel­op­ment of con­science of the indi­vid­u­als is observ­able from their child­hood on. This change is influ­enced by sev­er­al things but the most impor­tant influ­enc­ing aspect is per­son­al deci­sion. Man can deny his con­science and every such a deci­sion affects our inner law. They influ­ence the work of our con­science regard­ing what things and to what extent it draws our atten­tion to. This is the main rea­son of the dif­fer­ences that we see in peo­ple’s moral assess­ment. But these influ­enc­ing per­son­al deci­sions do not change the real­i­ty of the exis­tence of a com­mon start­ing point and puri­ty of our con­science deter­mined by the objec­tive law of moral­i­ty.

Every­body expe­ri­ences the oblig­ing char­ac­ter of the word of this inner law. Even if man does not con­form to it, he knows “it should be”, “it would be good” or “it would have been good”. These inner warn­ings have supe­ri­or author­i­ty because even if I don’t like it, I must face its mes­sage. The assess­ment of the voice of con­science is at work before, dur­ing and after our actions, accus­ing or jus­ti­fy­ing us. Its uncon­di­tioned oblig­ing char­ac­ter is for the pur­pose of edu­ca­tion. Its task is to cor­rect the sub­jec­tive devi­a­tions cre­at­ed by our bad motives and deci­sions and to direct us back to the puri­ty of the objec­tive and the high­est good. It means that even if indi­vid­ual con­science changes in the course of time its ori­gin is shown by its task to lead peo­ple to the absolute truth and objec­tiv­i­ty supe­ri­or to them.

5.2 What Can Be the Source of the Objective Moral Law?

Can con­science be only the prod­uct of social edu­ca­tion or envi­ron­men­tal influ­ence? If con­science may be only the prod­uct of these out­ward influ­ences then the strongest influ­ence, name­ly the par­ents’ life would always nec­es­sar­i­ly deter­mine the moral ori­en­ta­tion of the child as well. But a child of mur­der­er par­ents will not nec­es­sar­i­ly become a mur­der­er. For­tu­nate­ly, we also often see young peo­ple who have not become vic­tims of the var­i­ous forms of immoral­i­ty offered by our mod­ern soci­ety but try to escape from it. It would not be pos­si­ble if also their con­science were pro­duced by the con­tem­po­rary soci­ety. That is why we think that although these aspects indeed influ­ence the form­ing of con­science of peo­ple, nev­er­the­less these ways of expla­na­tions in them­selves must be regard­ed as sim­pli­fi­ca­tions of a com­pli­cat­ed ques­tion.

Here we don’t intend to deal with the mate­ri­al­ists’ pro­pos­al for the evo­lu­tion­ary com­ing into exis­tence of human con­science. Let us only refer to the gen­er­al opin­ion of Nobel- sci­en­tists regard­ing the enor­mous gap between human con­science and forms of spir­i­tu­al behav­iour and the high­est man­i­fes­ta­tions of instinct com­bi­na­tions of the ani­mal king­dom. Since the dif­fer­ence is not just the mat­ter of the lev­el of devel­op­ment of the same fea­tures but of unique and new qual­i­ties, the answer of the ori­gin of our con­science must be found some­where else. We have col­lect­ed some quo­ta­tions of famous sci­en­tists of this field in a sep­a­rate part, see Sci­en­tists con­cern­ing spir­it.

If the objec­tive moral law can not come only from the mate­r­i­al world through evo­lu­tion­ary process­es, nor can it be explained by some indi­vid­ual or col­lec­tive psy­chi­cal influ­ence of the soci­ety, then it must have a source exte­ri­or to our world. This supe­ri­or Law­giv­er must be some­one whose nature is in per­fect accor­dance with the moral laws he gives. We call this per­fect, supreme and per­son­al Law­giv­er God.

5.3 Other Arguments Based on Morality

In a lat­er peri­od of his life Kant reject­ed the tra­di­tion­al proofs and con­sid­ered that the exis­tence of God and the immor­tal­i­ty of soul were mat­ters of faith, not of rea­son, which, he claimed, is lim­it­ed to sen­sa­tion. Out of many argu­ments he accept­ed only the moral argu­ment, but not in the form pre­sent­ed above. Kant rea­soned that every­body’s aim is per­fect hap­pi­ness and every­body should seek the sum­mum bon­um (high­est good) by obey­ing the moral law. But mor­tal men can not reach a pro­por­tion­ate hap­pi­ness through striv­ing for moral­i­ty, there­fore there must exist a per­fect God who will reward us with per­fec­tion after death.

“The argu­ment from damna­tion” giv­en by Peter Berg­er in his Rumour of Angels is in fact a neg­a­tive ver­sion of the rea­son­ing with moral­i­ty. His idea is thought-pro­vok­ing even if it is not a strong argu­ment because it assumes a pos­i­tive turn of mind, accord­ing to which every­body must receive what he deserves. It starts from the fact that some deeds like slav­ery, geno­cide or holo­caust are so evil that they deserve not only an earth­ly pun­ish­ment but a super­nat­ur­al con­dem­na­tion, oth­er­wise there would be no jus­tice.

6 The Freedom of Human Will

The free­dom of will means the accom­plish­ment of acts con­sid­ered the most expe­di­ent on the base of one’s own dis­cre­tion, obey­ing his own sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty with­out any exter­nal force. Thus it can be con­clud­ed that the free­dom of one’s ideas and deci­sions can not be deter­mined by any moral, bio­log­i­cal, chem­i­cal or phys­i­cal law nor can it be described by any for­mu­la. Man can always weigh con­scious­ly the choice from among numer­ous pos­si­bil­i­ties of actions while the mat­ter behaves always accord­ing to the qual­i­ties by which it is deter­mined. Man is able to form him­self by his deci­sions, he is able to devel­op his abil­i­ties and he has the pos­si­bil­i­ty to decide oppos­ing his instincts, dis­po­si­tion and fea­tures. More­over man is able to make the mate­r­i­al world serve him through his mind both in good or bad direc­tions and he is able to inter­fere into the law of nature though some­times at the expense of grave con­se­quences. All these show explic­it­ly that the attrib­ut­es of human intel­li­gence and will are in a rad­i­cal oppo­si­tion to the char­ac­ter­is­tics of mat­ter. So it is obvi­ous that the rea­son of the com­ing into exis­tence of voli­tion­al free­dom can­not be found in mat­ter which is unable to act in a rea­son­able and pur­po­sive way by itself. The orig­i­na­tor of intel­li­gence and will has to pos­sess these fea­tures as well and to be able to pass them on. It implies that the rea­son which caused—and so possesses—the intel­li­gence and voli­tion­al free­dom has to be a per­son, too, for these attrib­ut­es pre­sup­pose con­scious­ness and can be con­nect­ed only to a per­son.

7 The Dynamism of Human Spirit (Longing for the Infinite)

The con­scious phe­nom­e­na in the case of ani­mals are always the prod­uct of inward and out­ward infor­ma­tion tak­ing place at the present moment. The human self-aware­ness is not moti­vat­ed only by instincts or infor­ma­tion com­ing from out­side, which we can see from sev­er­al spir­i­tu­al activ­i­ties. The life and inter­est of ani­mals are deter­mined and com­plete in the frame of their exis­tence.

The real­i­sa­tion of human life is char­ac­terised by the unlim­it­ed open­ness and free­dom of our knowl­edge and aspi­ra­tions.

Man is inter­est­ed and open not only towards his own every­day life, but he asks some basic ques­tions con­cern­ing the ori­gin and final rea­son of his exis­tence: “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where do I go? What is my place in the sur­round­ing world?” Fur­ther­more, he has also ques­tions con­cern­ing the whole exis­tence: “What is the world? Where did it come from? What is the truth? How can I get to know it? What is the final aim of the whole exis­tence?” Ques­tions like these show that human mind strives to under­stand the total­i­ty of the infi­nite exis­tence. It sur­pass­es the sens­es and con­cepts and wants to grasp the total exis­tence. Man’s per­son­al­i­ty con­tains the long­ing to break out from the lim­its of space and time. Human spir­it does not con­nect only to the present point of space and time. Peo­ple can be in spir­it (in thoughts) at any point of space and time of the world, which shows that our mind is not depen­dent only on mat­ter. Man’s spir­i­tu­al activ­i­ty and intel­lec­tu­al ori­en­ta­tion and moti­va­tion go beyond the finite world and are direct­ed towards the infi­nite and com­plete real­i­ty.

This nat­ur­al abil­i­ty and striv­ing of man must have an object that is beyond the sen­su­al expe­ri­ence of real­i­ty. Oth­er­wise this long­ing for the infi­nite would be base­less. How could man realise the finite­ness and imper­fec­tion if the infi­nite and per­fec­tion did not exist?

8 Wish for Immortality

Life is a great sur­prise. I don’t see why death should not be an even greater one. (Vladimir Nabokov)

Man is the only liv­ing being who is aware of his death.

The wish for immor­tal­i­ty is at least as old as the human civil­i­sa­tion. We can see already in the ear­li­est cul­tures that peo­ple pre­pared and equipped their dead care­ful­ly for their life in the oth­er world. Dif­fer­ent tribes and nations had dif­fer­ent bur­ial cus­toms but usu­al­ly all of them reflect some kind of belief in the exis­tence after death. This shows that the belief in life after death is so close­ly con­nect­ed with the nature of man that we might con­sid­er this fact as hav­ing a real base. The fact that many peo­ple nowa­days accept so eas­i­ly the idea of anni­hi­la­tion often shows rather the lack of think­ing than a deep con­vic­tion. If we accept that human spir­it is immor­tal then it can not be the prod­uct of evo­lu­tion­ary process­es (which lead only to ephemer­al things) but sup­pos­es an immor­tal Cre­ator.

9 The Argument of Universal Consent

Reli­gios­i­ty, the idea of the exis­tence of a kind of supe­ri­or author­i­ty has prov­ably accom­pa­nied the his­to­ry of mankind every­where in the world for mil­len­nia, from the ear­li­est ages up to nowa­days. Peo­ple’s belief in God could not be dis­proved or abol­ished even by lots of rad­i­cal social, cul­tur­al and ide­o­log­i­cal changes. How could a sup­po­si­tion have sur­vived in spite of all these changes absolute­ly base­less and unre­al?

It is true that there has always been a large vari­ety of dis­fig­ured reli­gious beliefs and super­sti­tions and many peo­ple have accept­ed Poly­the­ism, Dual­ism, Pan­the­ism or oth­er kinds of erro­neous under­stand­ings. But this fact does not dis­prove our argu­ment because by uni­ver­sal con­sent we do not under­stand the way peo­ple exact­ly under­stood deity and what they believed about it, but we speak about the gen­er­al belief in the exis­tence of a supe­ri­or being or beings on whom the mate­r­i­al world and man him­self are depen­dent. Even if peo­ple often dis­tort­ed their recog­ni­tion, the com­mon ger­mi­nal truth from their belief can­not be explained in anoth­er way than that it is the result of the nat­ur­al com­mon sense of man that draws con­clu­sions from the exist­ing evi­dences.

There are many expla­na­tions for the ori­gin and the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of reli­gion but gen­er­al­ly anthro­pol­o­gists and philoso­phers of reli­gion agree about the above stat­ed con­sent of mankind. More­over, there is a good deal of pos­i­tive evi­dence for sup­port­ing the the­o­ry that the first reli­gion of mankind was Monothe­ism and dur­ing the his­to­ry it degen­er­at­ed instead of pro­gress­ing. But even if it became in many cas­es very obscure, the core of the orig­i­nal truth was not com­plete­ly abol­ished.

Con­cern­ing athe­ism, we can not say the same. His­to­ry proves that athe­is­tic phi­los­o­phy is a “mod­ern achieve­ment” and it is not char­ac­ter­is­tic in the nor­mal human soci­ety but is a rather abnor­mal reac­tion of a rel­a­tive­ly few num­ber of peo­ple. Its present form is close­ly con­nect­ed with the sud­den and intense improve­ment of human knowl­edge by mod­ern sci­ence from the last cen­tu­ry on and although sci­ence has real­ly devel­oped con­sid­er­ably in this peri­od, it should hon­est­ly be acknowl­edged that the great­est ques­tions of life are still open. From the writ­ings of many ancient so-called athe­ists we can see that they were rather against the abuse of reli­gion and against the rejec­tion of ratio­nal­i­ty than against the exis­tence of all kinds of divin­i­ty. In some cas­es it could be con­sid­ered as an admirable virtue of the non­con­formists who do not adhere on the mind of the large mass just because of the fact that they are in the major­i­ty, if their con­tri­bu­tion has real bases and have a supe­ri­or aim like uncov­er­ing the truth and a bet­ter way of life. But this is not the case with athe­ism where many exam­ples show rather the con­trary. There­fore nei­ther the ancient nor the mod­ern oppo­nents of reli­gion can uproot the belief in God which is so deeply implant­ed in man’s heart.

10 What Do Scientists Say About the Human Spirit? Is the Human Spirit Merely the Result of the Evolution of Matter?

Sev­er­al mate­ri­al­ist sci­en­tists try to explain the high­est spir­i­tu­al process­es, includ­ing self-aware­ness and con­scious­ness, as being only the result of bio­chem­i­cal reac­tions. They are called reduc­tion­ists, because they reduce the whole real­i­ty to the lev­el of mate­r­i­al process­es. But there are many oth­er sci­ence experts who do not belong to this cat­e­go­ry, who are aware of the lim­its of sci­ence, who speak about “the won­der and mys­tery of the human self with its spir­i­tu­al val­ues, with its cre­ativ­i­ty, and with its unique­ness for each of us”, like John C. Eccles, Nobel prize win­ner neu­ro­sci­en­tist.

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1. Sci­ence 190/1975 ↩