What we think is the right road
I don't know and, frankly, I don't care if God exists. I leave that to poets, priests and preachers. Anyway, it's not as though I see God and talk with Him every day. It's not as if He gives me a raise at work or sorts things out for me when I have a tough time with my friends and family. If God exists – and you can't prove it by me – then He is utterly irrelevant to me. I don't get my joy from God, and I don't have to obey some ancient stuff about doing His "will," whatever that is. I have more important things to worry about.
But it's the wrong road
There is no such word as "deusapathy" – meaning indifference about and lack of concern over the question about God's existence and meaning for us – but there should be. Persuading people that God exists means far more than citing Psalm 14 (or 53) that the fool says in his heart that there is no God. Modern atheism and agnosticism now increasingly concede the existence of God, but refuse to accept God's sentience. That is, they accept a kind of unconscious and uncaring God – a god (deliberate lower case) whom they see as, well, "the Force."
This "modern god" sits in the heavens utterly unconcerned about the fate of human beings. Because that god doesn't care about us, why should we care about him? This is the old notion of Deism on steroids, for these people accept reason up to a point, but deny the revelation. They accept the scientific but deny the miraculous. They accept the natural but deny the supernatural. They accept the historical but deny the providential.
Deists thought of God as a clockmaker. He wound things up and then let them run, without governing or intervening. Heresies have a way of cropping up again and again, and deusapathy is just another iteration of Deism, which was popular in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Cardinal Robert Sarah writes, "Contrary to what we may think, the greatest difficulty of men is not in believing what the Church teaches at the moral level; the most difficult thing for the postmodern world is to believe in God." He continues, "Western societies are organized and live as though God did not exist. Christians themselves, on many occasions, have settled down to a silent apostasy."
Cardinal Sarah teaches that "we no longer know who man is once he detaches himself from his Creator." In separating himself from God or in expressing disdain for the divine, he says, "Man intends to recreate himself; he rejects the laws of his nature, which become contingent. Man's rupture with God obscures his way of looking at creation. Blinded by his technological successes, his worldview disfigures the world..., and man is the one who must give them meaning."
In fact, we are not architects who design the world and its meaning. We are, rather, archeologists who discover meaning (see, for example, Judith 8:12-14; Job 38:4-7). There will always be a war in own souls, for we either become God's or we seek to become gods. When, in the corruption and moral stupor of deusapathy, we no longer care about God, about doing His will and about living according to His teaching (defined in and by the Church), then we are effectively seeking to make God conform to our wills and our ways, to make Him in our image.
Remember how God calls Samuel, who wakes and says, "Speak; your servant is listening" (1 Sam 3:10). We have superciliously replaced that passage by telling God: "Listen; your master is speaking." And so the psalmist tells us of God's judgment: "My people would not listen to me: Israel would not obey me. So I let them go their stubborn ways and do whatever they wanted" (81:11-12 GNB).
Again, there is nothing new under the sun. The core of modern political ideology is the ghost of the centuries-old heresy known as Pelagianism, which denied original sin and taught that human beings can achieve salvation through our own sustained efforts. That is a lie (cf. John 8:44). It is certainly true, though, as Our Lord teaches, that "without me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). A corollary is that, without God, we can (and will) do anything. As the Russian writer Dostoevsky put it, "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted."
Catholic philosophy has long held that we can demonstrate God's existence through natural reasoning. Properly taught, political science teaches its students that, without God, there are no moral and practical standards to guide, guard and govern us. Without cathedrals to worship God, we build gulags and concentration camps and abortion facilities to butcher humans.
Cardinal Sarah writes that "the most profound misery is the lack of God." We are – it is stunning to realize this – stronger than God: if we tell Him to depart from our lives, He obeys! That is precisely what deusapathy and sin are: telling God that we do not care about Him and that we will believe and behave according to our own wishes, constructing our personal Tower of Babel. Is it historically demonstrable that the wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23)? Yes, it is. In God's will is our peace – a key reason never to be apathetic about the One who is Love.
Deacon James H. Toner serves at Our Lady of Grace Church in Greensboro.