Dogmatic Atheists

On our self-declared scientific atheists.— Those modern materialists who wield their atheism as a bludgeon to punish their inferiors are in effect demanding that their inability to fit something into their science be enforced as the limits of common sense for all men. This is nothing but their emotional shield against being proved wrong. The essence of true scientific thinking, by contrast, is a principled reticence ever to draw a line and say, “This is the border of Truth — nothing more can be found beyond this line.” The scientific materialists who fancy themselves atheists are therefore revealing themselves, with this declaration, to be neither genuinely scientific nor convincingly atheistic. On the contrary, they are exposing themselves as firmly in the grip of a thought-distorting dread, namely the fear of having their comfortable “scientific” presumptions — the world they think they understand — shattered by the appearance, or even the possibility of the appearance, of something materially incommensurable, irreducible, or profoundly unknown. 

In short, our scientific materialists who dogmatically declare themselves atheists are, paradoxically, the modern men of whom it might be most literally correct to say they have the fear of God in them.