Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

NOMA, SOMA, POMA and COMA

We can almost imagine gangs of academics roving about Oxford, their professorial robes waving in the wind, graffiting the hallowed stone walls of this ancient institution of learning with NOMA, SOMA and POMA (you won’t find many COMAs at Oxford).  Reality is not that far from this imagining. Dawkins has been helping to finance advertisements on the sides of buses in London that read: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Reportedly, lawyers insisted on the word, “probably’ given that fairness in advertising requires advertisers to substantiate any absolute claims. Christian groups responded by buying their own advertisements with Biblical quotations. An enterprising individual created a web site where anyone can graffiti the side of a virtual bus. Thousands did so. The bus ads have crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific and are now popping up in major cities around the world.

Unquestioned and unreasoned belief in God, naïvely assumed or merely based on revelation in myth was never universal. The very fact that arguments for the existence of God were ever formulated is testimony to the need to answer doubts. One example was natural theology, rooted in observations of nature. We can easily trace it back to classical Greek thought. It blossomed in the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).