There should be a clear division between what we can and do know , through revelation , reason , etc. and what we don’t.

But as soon as you attempt to use your human experience to create an image of God , esp God the father, what you can know with certainty is that you are wrong.

There are too many men around who are angry at the white man with the beard, who sit’s on a throne and and zaps people who don’t obey him.

So i can see where they would conclude , rightly so, that no such being exists.

But that ‘image’ and for that part any other human ‘image’ is NOT God.

It is interesting how much that connects with atoms.

atoms, too, are unseen. The information that we have about them is incomplete, and possibly inaccurate in some respects.

there is a claim that atoms are themselves made up of three entities ( protons , newtons , electrons ) and yet those break down to other smaller ‘things’. But these things aren’t solid , nor are they exactly matter, as we experience having more in common with light , in the sense they are wave/particle duality then matter.
etc etc.

Worse yet most of these ideas, are derived from experiments that are nearly impossible to repeat , so we are left with the necessity of ‘the common man’ having faith in the sayings of the scientist.
Which are much more difficult to understand then anything written by any theologian.

Today I was reading a short piece by Vittorio Messori reminding the atheist Mathematics professor Piergiorgio Odifreddi that Lourdes deserves the cientific method of historical analysis as much as anything else.

All of that because Piergiorgio Odifreddi affirms that “obviously a priest told Bernardette what to say.” That is Odifreddi’s great critique! The fact that the Church fought the Lourdes apparitions tooth and nail for four years and tried to suppress the (the unauthorized) popular devotion at Lourdes does not faze Mr. Odifreddi at all.

Anyone who reads the Church documents, newspapers, opinions, records, etc. contemporary to the apparitions will find out that Bernardette was chased out of the parish by the overzealous priest and had to suffer much rejection and criticism.

To assume that the Vatican curia, the French press, the local priest, and Bernardette were all involved in a vast conspiracy to scam the whole world is to assume something impossible.

Then one would have to explain one by one all the cures and miracles (like that leg that grew in lieu of the amputed extremity) as part of the same “vast Catholic conspiracy.” But Mr. Odifreddi with the simplicity of a fin de siècle socialist assumes a conniving priest. It’s easy and he doesn’t have to read any reports or do any research.

The American counterparts of Mr. Odifreddi are the same. Some primitive tribe believes thunder is a god. We know better than that, therefore… any “god” is a false assumption, no need to look any further.

That simplicity reminds me of the teaching of the Jehovah’s Witnesses: if one old pagan cult used the cross then the Cross is and will ever be of “pagan origin” and therefore unsuitable for Christian use. The principle is applied to anything they don’t like. all you have to do is to find an old pagan relic somewhere to do away with crosses, cassocks, priesthood, virgins, Trinity, Holy Communion, or anything!

This is not putting the cart before the horse. It is putting the horse on top of the cart and asking us to pull it!

The atom is an element in one or another scientific theory. Such a theory might one day be ruled out by observation, but the theory can never be ruled in.

The atom is a useful concept, but the existence of any corresponding object in reality is not certain. Scientists 500 years from now might look back on our present atomic theories of matter as quaint but ruled out. The nature of scientific revolutions is such that the best theory of matter in some distant future might not involve the atom at all, except perhaps as an approximation, not a reality posited by the theory.

A theory may posit a reality, but the success of the theory over some period in human history does not make what is posited real.

The existence of God, however, is knowable in a way that the reality of objects posited by a scientific theory is not.