Atheists need God to make their case against Him
Frank Turek explains how atheists depend on the very God they deny.
Are atheists rampantly committing intellectual C.R.I.M.E.S. (in areas of Causality, Reason, Information and Intelligence, Morality, Evil, and Science)? Turek argues that the very tools atheists use to debunk God make the case for his existence more compelling.
Read on for key insights from Stealing From God, by Frank Turek.
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Life is unlivable without the law of causality, but atheists will throw it away before admitting the universe needed a cause.
The law of causality is pretty important. It is the basic assumption that anything that begins to exist has a cause. This law is critical for logicians, scientists, and really any human being. We could not make sense of what bombards our five senses or forms memories without the fundamental framework of cause and effect. Human experience confirms the law of causality, and the law is the means by which we have and process our experiences. So it’s fairly important.
Atheists generally don’t call the law of causality into question. Sometimes they will build arguments against God on that premise. But when the question of the universe’s beginning comes up, the atheists have a significant hurdle. Whether the universe began to exist or always was is a question that the Big Bang’s discovery and verification has settled. The universe began to exist, and the law of causality calls for an answer: what caused the universe? Was it simply “nothing,” as noted physicist Lawrence Krauss argues (even though the quantum void “nothing” Krauss refers to is not truly nothing, utter nonexistence)?
Obviously, an unsatisfactory argument like “‘nothing’ created the universe” does not prove that God exists. Neither does the fact that other scientists working in a materialist framework have failed to come up with a compelling explanation imply that God exists. What it does suggest, however, is that “something” needs explaining since there can’t be an effect without a cause.
You can doubt the law of causality, but it would invite the question, “From where did that doubt come?” To doubt it would be to call into question so much of what we consider reality. Atheists cannot be as rational as they wish to appear if they spurn a law that makes the fields of logic and science possible in the first place—fields atheists consider their bread and butter.
It takes a lot of faith to cling to rationalism if the only thing propping it up is consensus.
Atheists love their reason. Many object to arguments for God’s existence on the grounds that belief in him is illogical. But where did the laws of logic even originate? Atheists put a lot of stock in sound logic, but one question that they have not been able to answer satisfactorily is the origin of these laws of logic. No number of future scientific discoveries will further elucidate that.
The laws existed even before minds could know them. Consider that the statement, “There are zero human beings on earth” was true millions of years ago, even without a conscious mind to form that thought or a group of beings present to form a socially-contracted consensus. Similarly, the laws of logic exist independent of whether there are beings capable of using logic. There are immaterial realities, as even some atheists have been willing to concede.
Minds, selves, laws—all of which are immaterial—exist, which means, minimally, that there’s more to reality than matter itself. To reject this in favor of a materialistic framework means committing to the belief that reason (along with free will, consciousness, and meaning) are nothing more than useful fictions and illusions.
Richard Dawkins and even some of his more philosophically astute atheist colleagues still borrow free will and reason to level attacks against the existence of God. But they can’t do so successfully. This isn’t to argue that all arguments for atheism fall short, but that all arguments for anything at all will fall short if atheism is true. In an atheistic universe, there’s no self, no “you” or “me,” just blind, impersonal forces and molecules crashing into each other at random. So a person believing in God or atheism is driven by biological stimuli and chemical reactions, not because one position is objectively more rational than the other.
If there’s just one instance of objective morality, God exists.
Imagine you are the parent of a seven-year-old girl. Little Megan’s gone missing and you’ve alerted the police, the media, and the neighbors. The police bring up backgrounds of neighbors, and it turns out that the three grown men across the street have records of pedophilia. Two have alibis, but the third does not, and the detectives find bite marks on his hands and blood in his car. As the evidence mounts, the suspect breaks and confesses to luring your little girl across the street with the promise of seeing his new puppy before he shut the door behind her and raped her. Worried that she’d talk, he strangled her and dumped her body in the nearby park.
These stories of unspeakable cruelty and evil are often abstract, and the best we can do is put ourselves in the shoes of people who have experienced them. The story above is true. It was this murder of young Megan in 1994 that led to the Megan Act, which required that the public be informed when a registered sex offender is moving in nearby.
How would you feel if you were Megan’s parents? You’d be outraged—and rightly so! A three-year study found that in a third of similar cases the culprit is never apprehended.
If atheism is true, there’s no reason that people getting away with the rape and murder of little girls should sicken us. There’s no justice—or injustice for that matter. Justice becomes an evolutionary adaptation no different than having five fingers instead of seven. As Richard Dawkins told John Lennox in a debate, “Just because we wish there is ultimate justice doesn’t mean there is.”
If there is objective morality, then God exists. Just as every book has an author, so every law has a lawgiver. The atheist frequently takes pages out of God’s book without citing the source. Atheists can, of course, have knowledge of morality because the book is an open one that we sense at a basic level, but denying its author commits the atheist to a world without objective morality.
This doesn’t stop atheists from attempting to create and ground objective morality without reference to God. Sam Harris pointed out the biological mechanisms responsible for our sense of objective morality, but that’s not the question we’re trying to answer here. The concern is not how we come to know what’s right, but what validates the standard. He’s giving an epistemological answer to an ontological and metaphysical question. Harris still needs God to get his alternative system off the ground.
It’s also worth pointing out that it only takes one case of objective morality to prove that there is a moral order beyond social contract or evolutionary adaptation. There’s no need to substantiate each and every case, as the atheist will often challenge the theist to do. The rape of children, torturing of babies for fun, and the extermination of millions of people because of their ethnic background are a few examples that seem blatantly wrong under all circumstances. It only takes one such example being universally wrong for moral reality to extend beyond materialism’s purview.
Atheists can’t slap God in the face without sitting in his lap.
People are capable of all sorts of evil. Religious people can be horrendous individuals, and, of course, people who don’t believe in God are capable of good. Religious people have done terrible things. Christianity predicts that believers will be hypocrites. In fact, that’s the whole basis for the Christian faith: we fall short of God’s standards and need a Savior.
The existence of evil is not a defeater for the existence of God. Just because some people do horrible things doesn’t negate the existence of their parents. Neither do horrible acts that professing religious people commit negate the existence of God. Both can be true at the same time.
Of course, a more basic problem for the atheist is defining evil and atrocity. What basis would you appeal to in order to ground morality if you don’t have a Lawgiver? In a materialist universe, where there are no immaterial realities and certainly no immaterial Being and Creator, where carbon atoms, firing neurons, and DNA dictates control actions and beliefs, how can the vocabulary of “good” or “evil” emerge?
There’s no justification for right and wrong without proper authority. When Christopher Hitchens claimed that he refused to be under some “divine totalitarianism,” a “cosmic North Korean dictator,” he was making a moral claim, but he’s borrowing resources from a worldview that’s not limited to the material in order to make his claim. He’s stealing from the Christian tradition.
He can’t slap God in the face over the world’s evil without first sitting in God’s lap.
It’s not the theists but the atheists who have something to fear from science.
500 years ago, the church persecuted scientists because they believed that the claims of Galileo and others belied Biblical authority. In the twenty-first century, in a remarkable reversal, atheists are stubbornly resisting scientific discoveries because they create formidable challenges to their faith in atheism.
Christians should embrace science (properly understood). The book of nature strongly indicates his existence. Those who don’t intransigently cling to a materialistic faith that necessarily excludes the possibility of God will find nature’s case compelling: the fine-tuning of the universe, the complexity of life, the intelligence-suggesting information encoded in genetic material, the fact that the universe has a birth date.
The argument here is not that science supports theism but that theism nicely supports science. The more we learn, the more we see how beautifully a theistic framework accommodates what we know about the universe. Conversely, we can’t do science well if atheism is true. Scientists rely on immaterial realities like causality, reason, and information all the time. They (hopefully) make moral decisions when designing experiments, recording the results, and interpreting findings. Doing good science involves not cooking the figures and interpreting the data in a fair-minded way—not in a way that accommodates one’s biases. Science can lead to the discovery of a new bomb, but it cannot tell us how or how not to use that.
Obviously, this isn’t to imply that atheists can’t do science or do it well. It is simply to say that to do science effectively, atheist and theist alike count on certain things being real, things that cannot be adequately accounted for without belief in God. The real war does not lie between religion and science, as many have asserted for several hundreds of years—the real battle is between science and atheism.
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