The astute atheist...

is forever a silencer of metaphysics.  Whenever you confront a philosophical atheist, not an atheist-so-that-I-can-have-self-glorification hater of God, their main objection to theism is that there is no testable proof of metaphysical objects.  That is, one by one, they tend to deny all that cannot be seen.  A suitable threat, indeed.

Newman once stated that the world is quickly careening toward two real ideas, those of Catholicism and those of atheism.  Bravo! for that perceptive mind; for that greatest of the modern theologians.  Really, there seem to be only two ideas worthy of our rational assent -- atheism and Catholicism.  Only those two have sufficient rational justifications for their claims, although I am convinced of Catholicism's truth because it seems more rational.

I have only ever found one atheist that I found intellectually satisfiying, and that is Friedrich Nietzsche.  Of course, I find him less satisfying than Thomas Aquinas, who puts to route every error that could ever be.  Nietzsche was an astute atheist because he knew there were two fundamental principles that were the foundation of metaphysics -- logic (it's primary instrument) and what the medievals called "demonstration quia."  That is, the ability to reason from effect to cause.  If we are going to undermine metaphysics, these are the two places to attack.  Only Nietzsche was enough of a philosopher to perceive this -- most atheists tend to be willfully ignorant through a lack of humility in the face of rational evidence.  They tend to cut themselves off from inquiry because they presuppose certain things about reality like, if something cannot be seen it doesn't exist.  What about intellectual concepts?  They have to exist somewhere.  

Aquinas sets up what is needed to find metaphysical objects in his Commentary on the De Trinitate.  We need to be able to reason from effects to cause, and we need the instruments of logic.  Now modern "scientific" atheists fail to see where there principles lead.  They want to affirm, via necessary scientific laws, that causality is essentially linked.  But in affirming an effect's essential link to a cause, they wind up affirming God's existence (which was made ever so evident by Ben Stein in his documentary Expelled.)

So the first option is to deny causality -- but then atheists are faced with some difficult logical pills to swallow like: Why is it that the human mind can recognize intentions in nature?  Why can we derive laws from experience?  Why are events able to be linked in sequence?  Indeed, why does it seem that things take place in nature almost always or for the most part?  If we deny causality its essentiality we should expect the unexpected.  Unless we deny logic too.

So, what we must do is deny that logic in some ways corresponds to reality -- we must deny that there are subject and predicates.  If we do this, then the logical conclusions that we derive from experience can also be denied.  Simply put, we can, for instance, deny the idea of a First Mover because having denied the inner logic of movement, that it must be reduced to one if causality is essentially linked, we can deny God.

What it comes down to is that reality must be unintelligible for the atheist worldview to be correct.  Nietzsche is the only atheist I've encountered to recognize this.  Nonetheless, he violates non-contradiction because to destroy logic and causality he had to employ them.  We should expect nonsense if atheism is true, but everything seems to make sense.

So the next time you encounter an atheist make sure he is astute before talking to him.