At the Wednesday General Audience, speaking about atheistic unbelief, Pope John Paul II noted that several of atheism’s roots can also be found in the realm of scientific thought: “Undoubtedly, atheism is often a pragmatic attitude resulting from carelessness or from a lack of interest in religious matters. In many cases, however, this attitude finds its roots in the whole mentality of the world, especially of scientific thought. If it is accepted that the source of cognitive certainty is exclusively the experience of the senses, then all access to reality which transcends the senses is excluded. Such a cognitive attitude is found at the basis of that particular notion which in our time has taken the name of ‘the theology of the death of God.’ So then the motives of atheism and still more frequently of agnosticism today are also of a theoretical-cognitive nature, not merely pragmatic.”