1.....In a sad bind, President Clinton came out with the legalism that “it all depends on what ‘is’ means.” Well, atheism is the negation of theism (belief in God), and - in each case – it all depends on what “no” means to the particular atheist: what, specifically, is being denied?

2.....For decades my custom has been to ask professed atheists, “What deity are you denying?” Almost always it’s a childhood god now outgrown: the person grew tall, but his/her god remained small. One may argue that a small god is appropriate to a small child, as are childhood playthings. But the modern West does not help children’s small deity to grow up with them. So, when grown up, many leave their childhood’s religion and playthings and forget about them.

3.....”Your God Is Too Small” said J. B. Phillips in a 1952 book. As a London pastor during the blitz, he spent his air-raid-shelter time translating the Bible into language that those in his youth-group could understand (published, in 1958, as “The New Testament in Modern English”). He was concerned that the education they were getting was asymmetrical: the increase of appreciative awareness (“heart”) was falling behind the increase of critical consciousness (“mind”). Since religion is more of the heart, and science is more of the mind, scientism was swamping theism. (A Harris poll 23 years later indicated that only 29% of Britons believed in God as personal [2.4.75 Christian Century].)

4.....Wordsworth died more than a century before “Your God Is Too Small,” but his “Ode to Immortality” foresaw the West’s educational mind/heart imbalance and its cure: “Let knowledge grow from more to more / but more of reverence in us grow; / that heart and mind, according well, / may make one music, as before - / but vaster.” For that vaster “one music,” I am increasingly hopeful for the world despite the present aggressive anti-religious secularism in the West.

5.....Human personal consciousness is a mystery inclusive of the powers and limits of heart and mind. As our upper and lower teeth work together on visible foods, faith and reason work together on invisible foods we need and hunger for. Both are gifts of God: by faith we can believe and love, by reason we can refuse to believe or to love. If God had not made our minds free to deny or hate him, we would not be free to affirm and love him.

6.....As the corpus callosum connects our brain-hemispheres, the will to make sense and have hope connects our hearts and minds. One of the sinews of that connection is the interplay between faith and doubt. After a sermon by the eminent Protestant public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr, Felix Frankfurter – an equally eminent Jewish justice of the U.S. Supreme Court – said, “I agree with your sermon. I’m an unbelieving believer.” Two generations ago, he was one of that 21-or-so-% of American-atheist believers in God.

7.....Quiet or angry atheists, atheists of solitude or solidarity, manage little more than to evidence the God-given denial-power of the human mind. History consistently dashes their hope for dominance. In 1928 (in “The Future of an Illusion”), Freud said that “soon” there would be no more believers in God than in a flat earth. At the height of the “death-of-God” movement, the 4.8.66 TIME cover blared “IS GOD DEAD?” The current CHRISTIANITY TODAY cover – also bright red letters on black – has “GOD IS NOT DEAD YET.” The latter article’s subtitle is “How current philosophers argue for his existence.”

8.....The fact that we Americans have grown in the will to live with difference – and therefore are less dogmatic, more generous of spirit – should not be overread to mean that we are less religious. In America, the will to believe has never been stronger. But the habits of the heart have been changing faster than the habits of the mind, and the supporting data are less available to pollsters.