to words like “truth,” “freedom,” “justice,” and “persons”: words which lend substance and meaning to human life. Without the thought of God such notions are empty or, at best, only convenient fictions. A completely secular society is, therefore, not simply “godless,” but impersonal and inhumane as well. Yet because practical atheism is so deeply embedded in the central institutional realities of our society and culture—in political life, in science and technology, in the economy, and in the production