The Temptation to Practical Atheism

” . . . one of the most consequential ideas embedded in modern institutions and traditions and habits of thought is theological. Stated bluntly, it is the assumption that even if God exists he is largely irrelevant to the real business of life. To put this somewhat more tactfully, contemporary society and culture so emphasize human potential and human agency and the immediate practical exigencies of the here and now, that we are for the most part tempted to go about our daily business in this world without giving God much thought. Indeed, we are tempted to live as though God did not exist, or at least as if his existence did not practically matter. In short, one of the most insidious temptations fostered within contemporary secular society and culture, a temptation rendered uniquely plausible by the idea and assumptions embedded within modern institutional life, is the temptation to practical atheism.”

~ Craig Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World (Grand Rapids, Mi.; Eerdmans, 1998), 2.

Bertrand Russell on The Purposelessness of Life in an Impersonal, Random-Chance Universe

Atheistic philosophers like Bertrand Russell are sometimes completely honest about the necessary implications of their basic assumptions. It is sheer folly to suggest that one can discover meaning out of  ultimate meaninglessness. Ponder the sad and terrifying implications of Russell’s atheistic materialist worldview:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

~ Bertrand Russell, quoted by Carl Becker The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT; Yale University Press, 1932), 13-14

Ideas Have Consequences

“If we present man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment — or, as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”

~ Viktor Frankl, quoted by Ravi Zacharias in The End of Reason (Grand Rapids, Mi.; Zondervan, 2008), 62-63.

Atheism & the Origin of the Universe

“The very starting point for an atheistic universe is based on something that cannot explain its own existence. The scientific laws by which atheists want all certainty established do not even exist as a category at the beginning of the universe because, according to those laws of science which atheists want to measure all things, matter cannot simply ‘pop into existence’ on its own.

The silence from atheistic science on why there is something rather than nothing is deafening.”

~ Ravi Zacharias, The End of Reason (Grand Rapids, Mi.; Zondervan, 2008), 32.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): Prophet of Postmodernism

“No one comprehended the stark contrast between belief and unbelief like Nietzsche, and therefore none of the secular prophets depicted the implications of atheism as clearly as he did. Nietzsche brought the tradition of the secular prophets to its conceptual end by proclaiming that atheism was extremely costly. After Nietzsche, easy belief and easy unbelief proved impossible. As the culminating voice of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche foreshadowed the postmodern tradition that effectually eradicated the easy confidence in human nature and in rationality that was trumpeted by his Enlightenment predecessors.”

~ Richard Lints, “The Age of Intellectual Iconoclasm: Revolt Against Theism,” in Revolutions in Worldview, ed. W. Andrew Hoffecker (Phillipsburg, NJ; P & R Publishing, 2007), 301.

The Stupidity of the Intelligent

Consider this testimony by J. Budziszewski in light of Romans 1:21-22 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 . . ..

“[E]verything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things He’s given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I’ve been given is a stronger than average mind. I don’t make the observation to boast; human beings are given diverse gifts to serve Him in diverse ways. The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God I didn’t do any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren’t responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students; now that’s sin.

It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself — well, if you are like I was, maybe you can — what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense. St. Paul said that the knowledge of God’s law is ‘written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.’ The way natural law thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structures of our minds. That means that so long as we have minds, we can’t not know them. I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, and how can one’s will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that commitments are in his control?

Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all the components that have God’s image stamped on them. The problem is that they all have God’s image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how much he pulls out, there’s still more to pull. I was that man. Because I pulled out more and more, there was less and less that I could think about. But because there was less and less that I could think about, I thought I was becoming more and more focused. Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was smarter and braver than the people who didn’t believe them. I though I saw an emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. Of course I was the fool.”

~ J. Budziszewski, “Escape from Nihilism“

The Key to Understanding the Struggle Between Science and the Supernatural

Harvard biologist, Richard Lewontin, speaks frankly about the way in which a prior commitment to materialism functions in much of the scientific community. Refreshing to read such honesty.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

~ “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books, January 7, 1997, 31.

The Existence of Evil & the Reality of God

“Could there really be any such thing as horrifying wickedness [if there were no God and we just evolved]? I don’t see how. There can be such a thing only if there is a way that rational creatures are supposed to live, obliged to live. . . . A [secular] way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort . . . and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness (. . . and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful . . . argument [for the reality of God].”

~ Alvin Plantinga, quoted by Timothy Keller in The Reason for God (New York, NY: Dutton, 2008), 26.

The Danger of Evidence Divorced from Revelation

“In evading the knotty problem of revelation, the strategy of adducing evidence for faith from human experience only reinforced the typically modern suspicion that the Christian religion was simply the product of the human imagination.”

~ Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1998), 311.

The Hopelessness of Atheism

I do appreciate it when an atheist is honest enough to state the necessary implications of his atheism. Imagine trying to “safely” build your life on the “firm foundation of unyielding despair”? If talk like this were not so tragic and destructive, it would be funny.

That Man is the product of causes which had no provision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his love and beliefs, are but the outcomes of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

~ Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship” quoted by Thomas V. Morris in Making Sense of it All (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1992), 27.