The Theory of Atheism and the Faith Required

1. The Origin of Atheism

“Atheist,” like many other terms, is one that holds a variety of definitions under its umbrella beyond what might first come to mind when you hear the word. In modern times there is a strong, essentially unbreakable bond between the idea of atheism and science, but this is really more of what would be considered modern atheism, which would include the new atheist movement. Its true roots run far deeper, and are far older than that, with documented atheistic teachings reaching back to fifth century Asia. It’s interesting that, despite its highly scientific bias in modern times, atheism shares a common spirit with every other religion that runs counter to the gospel. Jesus teaches in Matthew 7:13–14, near the conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount,

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

And He says to the disciples in the upper room in John 14:6,

“… I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

There is one, singular path to righteousness, and a million others that lead to destruction, and this in and of itself is a stumbling block for some people, the teaching that the path to redemption, to virtue, to ending up in “the good place” isn’t broader and more inclusive. But the fact that man cherishes variety in his sin doesn’t somehow compromise the unified holiness that exists unblemished in God. There is one path, we were placed on that path in the beginning and we chose to deviate from it. It is only because of God’s grace and abundant mercy that we have any path to Him at all. Before we look at the different philosophies and flavors of atheism, we should establish why it exists at all, which ties into what I just mentioned – the beginning. Genesis 1:26–30 tells us,

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’ And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so.”

And we read in Genesis 2:15–18, giving us a different set of information around the creation and mission of man,

“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’ Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’”

Consider something – in Eden, before the fall, man wanted for nothing. Neither Adam nor Eve needed food, shelter, companionship – and as strange as it seems to imagine life without the constant need for these things to survive, perhaps the most incomprehensible element to wrap our minds around is that they didn’t need faith. God was there, He gave commandments to Adam directly, He walked in the garden where those made in His image lived, where He had placed them, secure. They didn’t have to trust in God’s existence, make any guesses about His holiness and power, it was there to be seen and cherished. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:12,

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

Adam and Eve didn’t see anything in a mirror dimly, they only knew face to face. But then there was the fall – man chose rebellion, Adam abandoned his duty to work and keep, to guide and defend the woman that God had blessed him with as a helper, and then when Eve was deceived and sinned, he followed after her. There was a rift opened between God and man, the world was cursed, mankind was cursed, and we were cast out of Eden. We can see the beginnings of the denial of God almost immediately afterward in the story of Cain and Abel. You may wonder what I mean by this – after all, Cain, for all his wickedness wasn’t an atheist. Genesis 4:2–7 tells us,

“… Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, and you must rule over it.’”

Abel brought an offering to the Lord – the best portion of the firstborn of his flock. Cain brings an offering as well, but there’s something wrong, the spirit of the offering, the aim of the gift is off. We can read this and understand that Cain is checking a box, he is offering a sacrifice out of ritual, pattern, obligation, but not genuine worship – we know this because God refuses the offering, and God does nothing arbitrarily. Remember, it’s not about the extravagance of the gift, but the spirit behind the giving. Mark 12:41–44 shows Jesus and His disciples observing the offerings at the temple, saying,

“And he sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. And he called his disciples to him and said to them, ‘Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.’”

So it’s not just about what Cain was giving, but how he was doing it. And so God, being immeasurably gracious, doesn’t strike Cain dead, but offers kind correction. Cain is told, actually encouraged to try again, to change his aim and his heart, and be accepted. He has a choice – he can do the thing he wants to do in his flesh, nourish the sin that is seeking to dominate him, which means bringing forth a sacrifice that regards God as it is proves convenient, or, he can give God the sacrifice and worship that He is due, and bring forth his best – Cain has a clear, contrasted option here… And Cain chooses wrong. He doesn’t deny God outright, he doesn’t scoff and say to himself, “I’m not sacrificing anything because I don’t believe there’s a God to sacrifice to,” but what he does is begin the path that leads in that direction. The atheist says, “there is no god,” but the pagan says, “there is a god, but I have determined his nature, his will, and how he is to be worshipped,” but both deny the true, Living God. To worship God on your own terms is to ignore or reject the reality of God – His power, His holiness, His worthiness to be praised above any and all things. Cain’s rebellion, his refusal to realign his heart, his indulgence of sin, his murder of his brother are all acts toward denouncing God, even if it doesn’t exactly line up with what we understand as true atheism. This pattern of devaluing the very idea of God continues increasing as we read on, seen in the words of Lamech when he says in Genesis 4:23–24

“… I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.”

If a key element of Cain’s transgression was that he refused to honor God for what He truly is, Lamech rejects this all the more, showing us a multiplying, compounding glorification of man, and the brutality of flesh. Genesis 6:4–5 tells us,

“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

We see that the Nephilim (which deserve attention as a separate subject on their own), become these mighty men of renown, but that in the age of these powerful and famed individuals evil was rampant, pouring over and perverting the world. After the flood, but before we arrive at the calling of Abram, Genesis gives us a culmination of this anti-God spirit in the story of the tower of Babel. Genesis 11:1–4 says,

“Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

In this time all mankind was unified under the banner of one language. First they seek to build structures for themselves, they pursue a path to preserve and protect through their own means. We could look at this as ignoring God and His provision, or we could look at it as responsible self-sufficiency – but what happens next can’t be framed as ambiguously. They aim to build a tower to heaven, a monument, an idol devoted to their greatness, a testament to the endurance of man. But its very design, its very aim it rejects the creator in favor of the creation. Now again, what I’m describing may sound very much like paganism. As I said before, the atheist says, “there is no god,” but the pagan says, “there is a god, but I have determined his nature, his will, and how he is to be worshipped.” But let me ask you a question – what is the difference between completely focusing your attention on man to the exclusion of the divine, and simply denying that the divine exists at all? What we’re looking at, despite how different it may seem from the form and function of modern atheism is where it begins. This is its spirit of the movement, this is its animating force, that God be rejected and His worship denounced. We run across the Greek word tied to “atheist” once in the New Testament, seen in Ephesians 2:11–13,

“Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called ‘the uncircumcision’ by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

“Having no hope and without God,” “atheos,” without God. Paul doesn’t use the word here to describe those who through critical analysis and scientific discovery have ruled out the existence of a creator, he describes those who were dying, alienated and without God. The atheist, that is so often thought of as refined, intelligent, and modern is really just another figure cast from the same mold as every sinner that has come before them – rebellious, blind, and in a state of suffering without God.

2. Philosophical Atheism – The Abstract Deification of Man

A philosophical atheist is someone who ultimately determines through their sense of reason, critical thinking, and studying natural evidence that gods must not exist. They look at the world around them and, convinced by what is visible, tangible, and definable on human terms, they reject the entire principle of the supernatural. Scripture weighs in on this path of understanding, as Isaiah 55:8-9 tells us,

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

The Bible is clear that God is ultimately unknowable, but then it also tells us that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. There’s a very practical reason why we cannot come to the Father except through the Son, because we have no hope of knowing or understanding the Father without the image and intercessor that is Christ. The philosophical atheist, rejecting God the Father as well as the resurrection of God the Son misses all of this. What is divine cannot be the arbiter of truth, only man with his five senses, and his ability to theorize and reason can determine what is real and what is not. And it’s from this framework that we get philosophical atheism and its many variations.

– The Way of the Keyboard

I started out by addressing the common conception of a scientific atheist – to be fair, there may be another kind of atheist you’re familiar with – the angry keyboard atheist. While it seems that nearly all atheists will mock religion to some extent, with Christians seeming to catch a significant portion of this, the keyboard atheist seems to exists only to mock. To be fair, in many ways it’s a challenge to consider them “proper” atheists. Atheism, for all its many flaws, is capable of some degree of refinement – a legitimate atheist is someone who has critically examined the religions of the world and, finding none of them compelling, concluded that none of them are true. They’re not right, they’ve clearly missed something, but I can give some measure of credit for the consideration. The keyboard atheist carries none of this philosophy, none of this nuance, and frankly, not even a hint of intelligence. They’re the adult equivalent of a child out at dinner who, with pitbull like tenacity, has pointed at what they want on the menu without reading a single thing, and will throw a tantrum to the point of passing out in order to get what they want, despite the fact that they have no idea what they’re asking for. They seem to trivialize everything they can about religion and blaspheme God without a shred of regard. In their description, Christians are painted as self-righteous fools, praying to their “sky daddy,” and reading an ancient, outdated, self-contradicting book. We’re dumb, and gullible, and hypocritical, and probably racist, and any attempt on our part to explain the nuances of our theology or doctrine, or to offer evidence is met with more mockery. The words of Jesus come to mind, as He sent out the twelve disciples to evangelize and work miracles among the Jews, saying in Matthew 10:14–15,

“And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.”

I am not saying that we dust off our hands (or feet), shrug, and carelessly watch as the keyboard atheists shake their fists at God while they’re swallowed up by hell. Remember what Peter wrote concerning the coming judgment in 2 Peter 3:9,

“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”

And God establishes this precedent long before Peter’s time when He says in Ezekiel 18:32,

“For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD; so turn, and live.”

We have no leave to harden our hearts to the spiritually dead and dying – though they make themselves our enemies, we are called to love them. That being said, engaging a keyboard atheist on an internet forum or in a comments section is almost never a conversation entered into in good faith. Romans 1:18–25 tells us,

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”

The state that Paul writes of is something that can be seen in every false religion, every practice that denies the Truth of God – but given their anger and their overall volume, the keyboard atheist may be the loudest of those who claim wisdom despite their profound foolishness. While you’ll often find them spouting scientific talking points, I’m addressing them as philosophical atheists because I’ve personally found that they simply place their faith in these “facts” as opposed to doing any research themselves. We’ll talk more later about the intersection of science and faith in atheism, but for the keyboard folks, and forgive me for speaking broadly, but there is a certain position of the heart that I’ve observed as applying to this particular category. We have to consider that there is a significant portion of the population that simply does not want God to be real. The perception is that in their sin, they are free and that the structure and order provided through a relationship with God, the specific morality and accountability would limit that freedom. We know the opposite of this to be true, spelled out in Jesus’ words in John 8:34–36,

“… Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

But to the pagan, or the atheist, they suffer a sort of cherished blindness, they cling to what is gratifying to the flesh as an addict might to their drug of choice. Much like an addict they make excuses for their vice, and trivialize or misconstrue the path to freedom. The keyboard atheist latches onto the scientific talking points of the broad atheistic movement, and that becomes their creed. They can give this greater credibility, partly because it supports their desires (I can do as I please with no thought for God, because God does not exist), and partly just because it’s new. Think, how many times have you heard someone discredit the gospel simply because of its age? If we were to believe the keyboard atheists, essentially everyone who lived in antiquity was a window-licking idiot who didn’t know that water is wet, fire is hot, and rocks aren’t a suitable source of nutrition… It doesn’t really do justice to an era that built structures that remain standing to this day, and produced ideas and philosophies that are still revolutionary. Peter was a fisherman, and he didn’t own a smartphone – that doesn’t mean his IQ was on par with a dog’s. Lab coats and goggles don’t somehow establish credibility more than robes and sandals, but to many (keyboard atheists among them), the newness of scientific discovery eclipses the viability of Scripture. To be clear, I’m not anti new things, but it’s incredibly shortsighted to think that just because we learned something new today, what the past established is somehow automatically wrong. This is why I place the keyboarders with the philosophical crowd, because they’re really more so the embodiment of an ideology than they are critically thinking and analyzing the world around them and coming to the wrong conclusion. But while of course they have some elements in common, the keyboarders are ultimately in their execution a far cry from the philosophical atheists who are their distant ancestors.

– The Peaceful Atheist

Perhaps the harshest contrast between modern atheism and older philosophical atheism is that while the modern is immersed in scientific clarity and evidences, there is often a spiritual, mystical element to the ancient, eastern philosophical branch of atheism. While there were different schools of thought within this sphere, they rejected the idea of any kind of life after death, the soul, or the existence of God or gods. Buddhism almost fits loosely under this umbrella, having a mysticism in the search for transcendence, and a belief in some kind of cycle of reincarnation, but ultimately rejecting the concept of any sort of creator god. If I may paint with a very broad brush, a consistent theme I’ve seen among the eastern philosophical atheists is that they seem largely to not care. There is a detachment to philosophical atheism – the material world is all that exists, and yet there is an aim of disengaging from the material world, a tilt toward nothingness. It’s an odd distinction, but in some of their teachings there’s a specification that “nothing” is not some void space, it is literal nothingness, an absence of everything. While most religions, and certainly Christianity take the world into consideration, but then aims up, and beyond the physical to the eternal, the philosophical atheist aims past the world into the nothingness they imagine lies past this life. What you end up with in all of this is a deification of man, but in a sort of abstract way. Typically, deification would be associated with glorification, with praise and worship. There is a worship of self in the practices of the eastern materialists and Zen Buddhists, but it’s quiet, it’s introspective and reserved. The doctrine that “only sensory perception provides valid knowledge,” means that the individual is the arbiter of truth, and in doing so man seeks to raise himself to the level of God – which whether done quietly or not, is equally damning.

– 20^th Century Nihilism

One thing I will give the eastern atheists credit for is that in their pursuit of transcendence, however fruitless it may prove, there is assumed meaning. They have purpose in their aim, and so we can observe a strange kind of empty neutrality. The same cannot be said of the philosophical atheism of the west. While this is not the only form, the greatest principle and influence that I’ve observed governing western atheism is nihilism. Nihilism can have different flavors, different angles of application, and it’s even a concept that can be thrown about as something trendy among the keyboard crowd – but at its core it is dark, sick, and sinister. Fundamentally nihilism tells us that the universe and all that is in it is a product of chance. There is no meaning or value to anyone or anything, from bacteria, to humans, to the planet, it is ultimately all meaningless – it came from nothing and it will return to nothing, and so there’s really no point to anything. Nihilism can operate on a spectrum – there are cosmic nihilists who would insist that the universe is cold, unfeeling, and ultimately pointless, but insist that human life has value. One of the most balanced nihilists I’ve heard speak (which to be transparent, it’s not as though I’ve heard many), simply stated that, although he believes that nothing has any meaning, he aims at actions that would create the kind of world that he would want to live in fifty years from now. The thing that I admit confuses me about nihilism is how anyone can justify setting any limits once it’s established. For example, if I say that the universe was a product of pure chance, it’s cold and unfeeling, and has no value and it’s all going to come to nothing, how can I draw a line and say that human life has any meaning? If everything is pointless, how could a simple, human desire to create a world that is enjoyable fifty years from now be a reliable guiding principle? To be clear, I don’t say as some philosophical atheists might – that it’s all pointless, but you should pretend that there’s a God because it makes the world an observably better place. It’s not that the idea of God, the practice of God, or the imitation of God somehow grants life meaning – the Truth of God is what gives life meaning. If God were not real then pretending that He exists would solve nothing – it wouldn’t be an antidote to nihilism, it would be a delusion, a sheet thrown over a serpent that you might pretend it’s not there. But because God does exist, everything does have meaning. Paul writes in Philippians 2:9–13,

“Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

The creation testifies to the Creator, it calls out to glorify the One who made it, and it does so for the good of those who serve the Creator. If we reject God, then whatever purpose we find isn’t based on Truth, but is anchored in a lie, and simply through philosophical reason it is a slippery slope for any sense of meaning developed entirely by man to fade into the nothingness of utter nihilism.

3. Modern Atheism – The Religion of Time and Science

– The Man of Science

A common term that you’ll run across in modern atheist circles is this reference to “a god of the gaps.” What this means is that humanity uses the idea of gods, to fill in gaps in our understanding, and that when we understand a thing, that “god” disappears. An example would be ancient Greeks watching the sun rise and set each day. They understand the function, and yet they have no explanation as to why or how this happens, and so they create a story around the event. Each day, the sun god Helios rides his chariot across the sky, and that is the sun we see pass from horizon to horizon. Time moves on, humanity discovers the nature and positioning of our solar system – that’s not a god in a flaming chariot, it’s a giant ball of nuclear explosions sitting more or less stationary while we revolve around it (or at least that’s the teaching – I’m willing to take the scientists at their word, but I’ll just point out that no one’s gone to the sun to verify, so … There’s that), and just like that, Helios vanishes. The god of the gaps theory puts forward that the God of the Bible is just another explanation for things we don’t understand, and that as science provides more and more answers, and our understanding of reality becomes more and more complete, God will disappear just as the whole host of pagan pantheons did. The problem with applying a “god of the gaps” framework to the God of the Bible is that it’s ultimately a complete strawman. It trivializes the historical evidence for the Bible, it takes the profound psychological implications of the Word and brushes them aside without consideration and what it ultimately does is remove God from being a supposed “god of the gaps” and inserts time in His place. I don’t want to strawman every atheist theory – there is, by all accounts, legitimate scientific evidence seemingly collected in good faith that points to things like the age of the universe, our planet, and mankind itself, and while definitely have some qualms and questions about some elements of it all, I’m more than willing to give them their due. The problem is that this all gets presented as a final argument, as decisive and case closing evidence – “There is no God, because science says –” but for all the evidence, they never account for a source. It would be like working a math problem in reverse and seeing all the work drawn out, but no answer. They can tell you (with a great deal of certainty as far as they’re concerned), how old the universe is, how long the planet has been around, how long humans have walked the surface of it, but they can’t begin to tell you where it came from. Consider that before the big bang theory was proposed in the late 1920’s and gained wide acceptance in the mid 1960’s, the idea that the universe had a beginning at all was scoffed at. The common belief before then was that the universe was in a sort of “solid state,” with no beginning or end, an infinite, unchanging structure. But with the advent of new evidence, suddenly the universe having a beginning (which Christianity, and before that Judaism had been saying forever), became a statement of fact. They began measuring times and distances with absolute certainty, and just left out the matter of accounting for an origin – a why and how the universe that they now acknowledge wasn’t preexistent but actually began, got its beginning. The problem is that they feel they’ve (and honestly they probably have) answered some questions – and setting universal timelines and origins of creation totally aside, our technological advancement and scientific discovery over the last century, has been insane. We went from dog fighting in open-topped biplanes in World War One to dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan in World War Two less than thirty years later. In my own lifetime I’ve gone from seeing pagers (kids, google that later), to cell phones the size of literal bricks, to owning a smartphone that I can have a full fledged conversation with. Whether you love, hate, or feel overall indifferent toward advancements in medicine and vaccinations, the fact that we have these things as options as opposed to leeches, and birch bark, and dragging people behind a mule until their fever broke (or whatever it is that they used to do), is amazing. But this advancement has made us arrogant – again, we answered some questions, and this has led many to an assumption that we can, or will eventually be able to answer every question. We can see this sentiment in a quote from Richard Dawkins, a central voice in the new atheist movement. For context, this was during a debate with the professor and theologian John Lennox. This quote is pulled from Dawkins explaining his criticism that while atheism offers answers, religion makes it okay to simply not understand. As part of his supporting statement he said,
“We now understand essentially how life came into being. We know that, uh, we are all cousins of all animals and plants, we know that we’re descended from, uh, a common ancestor which might have been something like bacteria, we know the process by which that came about – we don’t know the details, but we understand essentially how it came about.”

I added the italics to show his points of emphasis, but do you spot the problem that I do? They understand the concept of how life could have originated under the conditions they’ve observed. “We know,” he says with certainty, that we are all “cousins” as he puts it, of all plants and animals. How do we know this? Well, because through genetic comparison we’ve theorized that we share a common ancestor. Who or what is this common ancestor? Well, it was probably something like bacteria… So we’re absolutely certain because of a probably? That’s some Anchorman, “60% of the time, it works every time” type math. Human beings being cousins to all other life on earth is presented as fact, us sharing a common ancestor is presented as fact – but the root of this is ultimately just a theory, it’s an educated(ish) guess. And this gets us to the fact that, despite the extent they will go to to deny this, atheism ultimately has a god – inasmuch as they have something in which they place their faith, a thing beyond what they can’t see or prove in which they ground themselves. The god of atheism exists somewhere between science and time. Take the theory of evolution – there was an original lifeform, as Dawkins says, probably a bacteria, and this lifeform evolved over time in various conditions into every living thing on the planet today. It’s an interesting theory, and it pulls from some scientific observation, ranging from things like Darwin’s finches (super condensed version of this – Charles Darwin observed that there were somewhere between thirteen and eighteen different species of finches on the Galapagos islands, notably with different beak development that were tailored to the available food in the region of the islands where they lived, and Darwin theorized that they had all come from a single ancestor that adapted and then evolved into the different species he was observing), to structural similarities between the bones in a human hand, and a blue whale flipper. But here’s the problem, they don’t land. I can notice that the sun moves across the sky each day and I can theorize that there’s a guy riding a flaming chariot from one end of the earth to the other, and it might sound cool, and I can certainly observe the movement of the sun, but I can’t actually prove that Helios is up there making another pass with his team. So, still continuing with the example of evolution, the gods of science and time emerge to bolster the atheist position – the science is covered in the observation, the finches, the whale flippers, the similarities that humans may share with apes, and then they sprinkle all this with time. Imagine that you want to flip a quarter and you want it to come up heads one hundred times in a row. That’s insane, right? It’s never going to happen, it’s impossible – I mean, what are the odds you can get that quarter to come up heads one hundred times consecutively? Okay, but what if you flip the quarter over a billion times? To be completely honest, I ran the numbers (well, I didn’t, google ran the numbers), and the odds are still pretty low – but hopefully you get the point. If I do something enough times it increases the probability that eventually the thing I’m looking for will happen. And this is what the atheists would call “deep time.” The evolution that they claim has happened, bacteria to everything, couldn’t have happened over 100,000 years, or a million years, or 100 million years – but if the earth has been around for billions of years? Well then, that’s more than enough time for nature to work out its kinks and get on with cultivating every living thing on our planet today. Time is their god of the gaps – they accuse Christians of trivially claiming “God did it,” for every miraculous thing, as though there were no thought, no comprehension, no sense of awe, or wonder, or observable validation that the hand of God is upon reality, that there is a design at work in our observable world and this isn’t all just, as Wes Huff would put it, “time plus matter plus chance.” I’m not trying to trivialize here, but this idea of “deep time” makes me think of looking at a haystack and saying, “Obviously, there’s a needle somewhere in there – you can’t expect me to find it, as that’s an awfully big haystack and it’s probably an awfully small needle, but I guarantee that it’s in there.” And the scary thing is that, this isn’t where it stops, in many ways something like evolution is just the tip of the atheistic iceberg – because we reach a point where they abandon the atheist god of science and just run forward with time and treat everything as if we’re dealing with a set of facts. And on the subject of indiscriminately abusing time (and space along with it) we arrive at the subject of multiverse theory. Now, to be quite clear, every atheist doesn’t accept multiverse theory, but what the vast majority of them will tell you is that, at the very least multiverse theory is far more likely than the God of the Bible existing – because multiverse theory, they say, is at least theoretically possible, while the existence of God isn’t… So, let’s get down to multiverse theory… And I’ll try not to strawman this. The universe was not preexistent, it had a beginning – we say that God, not arbitrarily but with great intention and purpose spoke reality into being and formed the world and all that inhabits it by His will. The atheist would say that it came from nothing… That was somehow something… And that nothing that was somehow something caused everything to become everything – and now join me as I go down an unexpected but related rabbit hole, because something just occurred to me. In Revelation 17 John is shown the great prostitute and the beast – the great prostitute is a symbol of Babylon, which is a symbol of the ultimate rejection of God in the pursuit of worldly passion. The beast is Satan, bearing the same description as the red dragon that was thrown down from heaven in Revelation 12 (red, seven heads, ten horns), and he stands to represent the ultimate hatred of God, absolute violence toward righteousness, and a complete glorification of self. There’s an interesting description given of the beast in Revelation 17, that it is heading for destruction and that “it was and is not and is to come.” This phrasing is a sort of inverse of the way God is described, the One who is holy, holy, holy, who “was and is and is to come.” God is constant, eternally victorious, entirely righteous, and perfect. Satan is wicked and broken, and even in his presence there’s a sort of absence because he is already defeated and his fate is already sealed. But there’s something strange we see in Revelation 17:8,

“… And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast, because it was and is not and is to come.”

The brokenness of the beast, its discordant, unnatural nature that is so disturbing and abhorrent, is something that the world marvels at, they’re captivated by it. And this is what we see in a universe from nothing. The universe that is a creation of God, that is given order by the One who is Order, that is set of the Cornerstone of His might, that is shaped and formed and given life by His voice and His breath is, as the Lord said in the beginning, “very good.” The idea of a universe that burst into being of its own volition, something from nothing – not out of the mouth of the God who was and is and is to come, who existed before existence – but something from what is truly nothing is a dark, twisted, unnatural thing. Something that was, and somehow is not, and yet is to come – and the world looks at the creation account of Genesis with its timeless order and transcendent clarity, and they scoff at the foolish and delusional Christians, worshiping their “sky daddy,” and dreaming of a heaven full of ice cream and rainbows. They scoff and yet they marvel at creation from nothing… The atheist places his faith, ultimately, in himself, a mortal body that will return to dust, and an immortal soul he doesn’t believe in that will spend eternity in separation from holy God because that’s what he asked for – it is what the atheist demands, as he marvels at what is wicked and broken and profanes holy God… And we haven’t even gotten to the ridiculous delusion of multiverse theory yet. In short, multiverse theory states that when the universe first began, it wasn’t just our one universe that exploded out of the emptiness, but an infinite number of universes, a vast bubbling froth of existences. They apply the same logic to this theory as they do to deep time – if there are an infinite number of universes, then we just happen to live in a universe, on a planet that is perfectly suited to support human life… Here’s the thing – there’s literally no evidence. There’s not a bare scrap of supporting information, it’s not a “theory” so much as it is a fantasy – but, it’s a fantasy that they find preferable to God. There are atheists who will, without a shred of irony, tell you that God’s not real and you’re delusional, and then defend multiverse theory. There are some who will also go so far as to state that because natural laws exist (something like gravity), these laws could cause the universe to come into being. But natural laws observe and describe the universe, they create nothing in and of themselves. To use John Lennox’s example, this would be like saying that Newton’s laws of motion causes pool balls to move around the table, which makes no sense at all. It’s the player holding the pool cue that causes the balls to move, and Newton’s laws describe what is occurring. What things like this show is that atheism truly is a religion with an entire ideology and a god of its own, and it will twist and contort information past the point of reason in order to defend its position. Honestly, between time, space, scientific law, and the variety of theories to explain existence that they cling to, atheists don’t just have a god, they might actually be polytheists when you get down to it.

– The “New” Atheist

If you want a really short explanation of what “new atheism” is, take everything I just described concerning modern atheism and make it angry – congratulations, you have new atheism. New atheism developed in the years after 9/11, and whereas prior atheism was defined but rejecting and being critical of religion, new atheism went from critical to hostile. In a way, it’s not hard to understand where they got their momentum from – terrorists flew planes into buildings, and the new atheists come forward and say “religion is dangerous.” The Catholic church has a massive sexual abuse scandal break, and the new atheists say, “religion is used to deceive, manipulate, and harm.” The old atheists may have said that religion is for fools, but there could also be some allowance given for the positive influence that some religions (mainly Christianity, because let’s be honest, what nations is Islam improving?) has had on society. The new atheists took the stance that religion was a net negative, and that the world would be better off without it… There are so many problems with that I almost don’t know where to start. First I supposed, just note that there’s hypocrisy, as the focus is on the evils committed in the name of religion and completely ignores the massacres of the twentieth century that were committed under atheist regimes. The imprisonment and forced labor in Stalin’s soviet gulags, the mass starvation in Mao’s China, the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge – these were all perpetrated in the name of communist revolution under atheist dictators. Next we have to contend with the fact that every religion is not created equally. To a hammer everything looks like a nail, and to a new atheist every religion looks like a dangerous delusion. To be fair, I agree with them concerning every religion (including theirs) with the exception of Christianity. Every other path is extremely dangerous because every other path leads to eternal separation from God. But ultimately, even from a standpoint of secular practicality, you have to separate any religion from what it teaches and certain actors within its movement. Islam, despite the media bias, is not truly a religion of peace – that’s not looking at what the practitioners do, it’s looking at what the Quran says. Christianity on the other hand is truly a religion of peace, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t had people do counter Biblical things in the name of God. This isn’t even something we try to hide, it’s present in Scripture. 1 Samuel 15:20–21says,

“And Saul said to Samuel, ‘I have obeyed the voice of the LORD. I have gone on the mission on which the LORD sent me. I have brought Agag the king of Amalek, and I have devoted the Amalekites to destruction. But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the LORD your God in Gilgal.’”

Okay, you just read it, Saul said that he “obeyed the voice of the Lord.” Let’s back up a little bit and give Saul a quick fact check. 1 Samuel 15:2–3 says,

“Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”

Huh… Kinda sounds like Saul didn’t obey the voice of the Lord, doesn’t it? There are people today who claim to follow God and actively disobey Him, false teachers blaspheme His holy name, predators who come as wolves in sheep’s clothing to prey upon the flock. John writes in 1 John 2:19 concerning the antichrists of the world,

“They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.”

So when a prosperity preaching televangelist spins a false gospel and takes money from vulnerable people, he’s not serving God. When a Catholic priest sexually abuses someone, they’re not following anything in Scripture (actually, them being a Catholic priest is counter Biblical to begin with so… there’s that). It’s really convenient for the new atheists to take singular religious actors and pretend they represent the whole, but when they completely ignore the teachings of that religion it undercuts the legitimacy of the criticism. Ultimately “new” atheism is nothing new at all, but an intensification of all the doctrines and ideologies that modern atheism was already bringing to the table – interestingly it’s a branch of atheism that seems to have died or be very close to dying. A testament to this is seeing Richard Dawkins, again, a significant voice in the movement and called one of the “four horsemen” of new atheism, come out and identify as a “cultural Christian.” Admittedly, there’s no such thing as a cultural Christian, and he acknowledges that he has no faith or belief in any Christian teaching, rather he loves the “Christian ethos”, hymns, carols, and the cultural impact of Christianity over “other religions.” To be clear, “other religions” is really just Islam, and he’s saying this because he lives in England where the Muslim population has been swelling, but still, it’s quite a departure from “religion is evil,” to calling yourself a cultural Christian, and seems to be a swing back toward the older form of modern atheism.

In closing, I want to address a subject which is a sore spot in all forms of atheism and in many cases the thing that can seem like their biggest trump card, which is the problem of suffering and/ or evil. The complaint is usually couched in questions like these, “If God is good, why does He allow evil? Why are there natural disasters, why do little babies die of cancer, why are parasites, and plagues, and neurodegenerative diseases a thing? If God is good, why does he allow pain and suffering?” These are painful things, serious things, and they deserve a serious answer. Romans 12:15 tell us we,

“Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.”

We as Christians must be sensitive to the suffering of our fellow image bearers. There are two responses to the problems of pain and evil, both are relatively simple, and neither will give satisfaction to an atheistic mind – but that doesn’t mean they’re not true. The first answer is that these things are present because we chose them. I addressed this from the start – we were in Eden, in paradise with God. There wasn’t cancer in Eden, no one contracted the bubonic plague, or developed dementia – we were in the presence of God in a place that He had prepared for us, and we, humanity, mankind, messed that up. It was we who heard the command of God and allowed ourselves to be seduced down another path toward sin and rebellion. God says to Adam in Genesis 3:17–18,

“… Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.”

“Cursed is the ground because of you,” is about more than just farming – the nature of the planet was broken, and in the aftermath of our sin, the curses of the flesh were laid upon us – not because God is needlessly vengeful, but because this was the appropriate response for our transgression. In Deuteronomy 28:58–61 we read again of the relationship between sin and the punishment of suffering,

“If you are not careful to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that you may fear this glorious and awesome name, the LORD your God, then the LORD will bring on you and your offspring extraordinary afflictions, afflictions severe and lasting, and sicknesses grievous and lasting. And he will bring upon you again all the diseases of Egypt, of which you were afraid, and they shall cling to you. Every sickness also and every affliction that is not recorded in the book of this law, the LORD will bring upon you, until you are destroyed.”

Later in Isaiah 59:1–2 we read of God’s goodness and His ability to save, but the barrier that is created by our sin,

“Behold, the LORD’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.”

To be clear, this isn’t some anti-Biblical, christian science, “all sickness is manifested sin, don’t take medicine,” type teaching. It simply illustrates that suffering is not a product of God being cruel or sadistic, but is a product of living in a broken world – a world that we broke. The atheist reads these things and says that God is a tyrant, a monster, a sadistic, vengeful overlord who they want no part of, and that even if He were real, they wouldn’t serve Him. They miss the point, they miss His character – and how could they not when they don’t know Him? The atheist can come off like something more intellectual and refined that other religions, but they are ultimately nothing new – they deify man, they attempt to hide and slander God, but at the end of it all they have the same holes in their doctrines that every other wrong, false religion has – because there is only one Way to the Father, and that is in Christ and Christ alone.