There are no Atheist in Foxholes…

I recently heard again this familiar idiom “There are no Atheist in Fox Holes”, which in a snarky way is intended to say when facing death even Atheist cry out to God.

Atheism, as it is understood today is a belief that there is no God or deity of any kind; and I’m not sure of its origins, but my guess is that it came out of the period of The Enlightenment and the emergence of Rationalist Philosophy and an attempt by the Christians of that day to represent in some academic way, the Bible and God, to complete with the prevailing views of that day.

One of the collected writings that make up the Bible says that all creation reveals the nature of God the creator of all things, For God’s invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made (Romans 1:20)

While many Scientists assert that they “do not believe in God”, Science began discovering and naming the “invisible attributes” of God when Isaac Newton discovered Gravity and began describing the clockwork design of our solar system.  Today we know that in the Galaxy we are in called the Milky Way, Gravity somehow keeps billions of planets spinning around millions of stars at 10’s of thousands of miles per hour; and that there are perhaps 10’s of billions of Galaxies spinning around the universe at 100’s of thousands of miles per hour. Further scientific evidence of these “invisible attributes” include the constant speed of light (186,282 miles per/second), the Laws of Physics (including Thermodynamics & Quantum Mechanics), and DNA, a genetic code in all life forms which determines if you have brown eyes, if your dog has a long bushy tail, or that male Sea Horses get pregnant and bares the young of their species.    

Throughout history ancient peoples in tribal cultures concluded that there was a creator revealed in the “invisible attributes” in the created world around them; and in humility, used their own words, images and cultural ways to acknowledge that creator and passed that along from generation to generation.      

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Monk, makes a point in his book Falling Upward, that If the invisible attributes and patterns that are evident throughout creation, including the mystery of life itself, were understood to be the evidences of God versus the socially constructed religious beliefs and ideologies that emerged from Western European thought and the period of the enlightenment; we, like the ancient peoples and cultures, would conclude, that there is a creator that exists based on our experience with the invisible attributes of creation, and there would be no Atheist, in Foxholes or perhaps anywhere else…