Atheism is the belief that there is no God.
The question is what is God?
The most ancient texts refer to the hidden forces behind the natural phenomena, both visible and unseen, as a sum of powers, a unity of universal forces, which govern the Universe. The oneness of those forces that govern the Nature was considered to be the origin of the visible part of the Nature, open to human perception and understanding, as well as the invisible part of the Universe, which perhaps could never be comprehended.
Since any force behind any natural phenomena had been viewed as a living thing, therefore the universal oneness of all forces and powers of the Universe was considered to be a collective consciences or a collective force of all forces.
That universal oneness of all forces has been viewed as a universal driving force, which governs all processes and phenomena in the world. Such perception of the Nature and the inner world of human being had been viewed in terms of personal relationship of every single person with the hidden forces of Nature which resulted in the supreme universal oneness of all forces and powers been viewed as a personified being.
The very magnitude of the idea of all natural forces’ being integral parts of one universal system should not be negated for the whole of that system being perceived as a Supreme Being, the sovereign Creator and Ruler of the universe. From the ancient as well as from our contemporary (scientific) worldview, it is impossible to give a strict definition of the idea of all those universal forces as a unified system. Meanwhile, the current scientific data increasingly points to the connections between our consciousness and the universe around us on subatomic and molecular level of the matter in ways hitherto unseen. The idea of us being one with the universe and the universe being a supreme unity of all forces that display properties of a conscious being, which is unifying all and everything into one body suddenly does not seem too outlandish.
Scientific explanations have been provided for most of the phenomena that used to be considered actions of invisible forces and powers. We have learned something about how the universe was born, and how it gave rise to the galaxies and the stars and ultimately to our planet. We have come to know a little about what life is and how it survives, reproduces and evolves. We have come to learn more about our brain, its structure, and how it works. But know very little about our consciousness and how it works. We know very little about why we feel alive, how we can feel and perceive our “selves” and even what our feelings and self awareness are.
Neuroscience can give us some clues to what generates reasoning, memory and learning. But we still have no plausible scientific theory for our consciousness. And our contemporary science has come to the point when no scientific theory of the universe can be deemed complete unless it explains what our consciousness is.
Neurology can tell us much about the brain, but it cannot explain how conscious experience arises from the brain’s electrochemical activity. Therefore it is a trans-disciplinary task to come up with a plausible theory of everything where human consciousness is explained along with the matter of the universe as a field rather that a relationship between certain particles. Physicists have discovered that electrons, for example, can behave both as waves and as particles depending on the observer's perspective. This connection between the observer’s consciousness and the subatomic realm could be extending out from a reality, which may also be said to be conscious.
There is a quantum physics law that says that once connected, objects affect one another forever no matter where they are through an invisible stream of energy which always connects any two objects that have been connected in any way in the past. Such energy streams in the form of electromagnetic potential fields could perhaps mediate the collective field of consciousness. Perhaps, such collective consciousness could be ascertained by measuring the field-related information-carrying potentials and their derivatives, the electric and magnetic fields between different individuals. The electrodynamic interaction could be a universal field connecting human consciousness with the subatomic nonlocality thus establishing a universal medium that connects all beings into one universal collective data base and communication field, which has the properties and characteristics of a unified consciousness at a certain level. This is just a supposition, but it sounds now less than a baseless fantasy and more like a science fiction, pretty much like many other former science-fiction ideas had sounded before they have become reality.
Therefore, the idea of the supreme universal oneness of all forces as one system, and that conscious, uniting and governing everything in a very complex way, turns out to be not so ungrounded. We call that universal system a Supreme Being, All-in-all, the One.
In order to understand what that means or how that works we need to look into our own consciousness in connection with other individuals and the universe. In order to do that we would need combined efforts in various fields of knowledge including neuroscience, neurophysiology, biology, and physics. To sum all the possible discoveries up we need a cross disciplinary approach of the philosophy of science. But, since we are dealing with the most ancient notions of universal unity of all forces and that in their relation to our consciousness, thus we need to approach these issues from a different standpoint, that of theology, which takes seriously and accepts those most ancient viewpoints and observations.
The fundamental characteristic of the ancient view of the Universe as a Supreme Combined Consciousness makes it not less but increasingly more relevant to our contemporary knowledge of the universe including its subatomic structure and human consciousness.
Therefore, atheism’s belief that there is no God, which is how the Universe as a unified system of acting forces in their relation to human consciousness is perceived, is at the least immature and superficial.
The word God, no matter how many definitions it might have, does not even begin to encompass what has been revealed to us in the Nature, including Human being as its integral part, and most significantly in the person of Jesus Christ.
P.S.
Atheists do not assault Christmas because they care that much if there is God or not. Atheists do not assault Christmas because they are opposed to God. They assault Christmas because they are opposed to Christianity. They are opposed to Christianity as a social organization, which unites large masses of people and turns them into a political reality. That political reality poses threat to political forces, which usurp and abuse political power for their own goals and view any moral or ethic boundaries as a hindrance on their way to totalitarian dictatorship.
