"No" or "No"?

Greetings all.
As you may have noticed, I seem to have succumbed to a temporary lapse in blogging activity, both here and on my family's blog. While I hope to recover a steady pace of writing/posting and I do have a few other posts in the works, I thought I would break the silence with a few considerations on Psalm 14:1:

"The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God.' 
They are corrupt, they have committed abominable deeds; 
There is no one who does good."

      We are going to look particularly at the first line, and clear up a slight ambiguity that arises concerning what the fool has to say there.

     Maybe you've wondered about or heard someone else suggest the possibility that the phrase "There is no God" could or should be taken as "No God". This gives us these options: 1) The fool is denying God's existence and/or 2) The fool is refusing God. Neither one really brushes anyone backwards too much - is it hard to imagine an atheistic fool? Is it a stretch to think of a fool telling God 'no'? So neither option poses a huge problem (although it wouldn't be too surprising to hear somebody somewhere call one or both of those statements 'mean' or 'judgmental' or...)

     But such remarks aside, either one makes just as much sense as the alternative; maybe it's both?

     Well, we must consult our trusty rusty Hebrew text to conclude one way or another, and at that point it's a very simple matter. The single word translated "there is no " or, conversely, 'no' is a little particle denoting non-existence: אֵין (pronounce "Ayn"). You use it when stating that something doesn't exist, which is what the fool is doing here in Psalm 14:1.

     That's it. Very simple. So simple, it's almost surprising.

     You could say that "The fool says in his heart, 'No God.'", but that doesn't mean he's telling God "no", it means he's saying God doesn't exist. This was the fool's self-consolation in Psalm 14:1 : God isn't real. Notice we're not talking about whether or not he's publicizing this opinion of his, but the fact that he is saying this to himself, in his heart. At the very least, this is an internal atheist.

     Ironically, though, both this verse and verse 3 end by using the same particle to say something quite different. While the fool said there was no God, the Psalmist says that "There is no one who does good" (vs.1) and God says "There is no one who does good, not even one." (vs. 3). I guess God's existence didn't depend on whether or not the fool thought it was true.


     Well, now that I have proven that I myself do still exist, I'll disappear back into my little hermitage until further notice.