Atheists & Leftists Owe Their Ethics to Christianity
Atheists need to start defending their beliefs.
After many years of study, I have discovered that when you dig into atheism’s bedrock assumptions, the system’s beliefs are most compelling on an emotional level, not an intellectual one. I can confirm this because I was an agnostic for over five years, during which I was working through a few theological difficulties of my own. Per my list of questions from my iPhone Notes app (circa 2019):
What if God has it out for me? (a.k.a. The Problem of Evil)
Is church my thing?
Is the Bible a holy text or just a historical set of documents?
Did all of these [Bible] characters really exist in history?
How much of the Bible is just universal tales (e.g. The Epic of Gilgamesh vs. Noah’s Ark)?
Is morality God-given?
Is Christianity the only correct religion, and if so, what makes it better than others?
If I am honest with myself, intellectual questions 3-7 did not take me long to find answers for; I was voraciously hungry for the truth of the matter. Questions 1 and 2 on the other hand, took longer. These were the emotional questions, and all of the syllogisms in the world could not change my feeling that God was unfair to me specifically. It was unfair that my life was so hard, it was unfair that babies got cancer, and it was unfair that random deer were dying in wildfires halfway across the world.
Eventually, through a mix of good apologetics and some growing out of my self-centered view of the world, I came to see that the Problem of Evil did not deliver the slam dunk, case-closed smackdown to Christianity that I thought it did. Even though my worldview was shattered and I had to begin the arduous process of building a coherent belief system again, I am glad I questioned my beliefs in the first place. My issue is that atheists and leftists alike do not afford themselves the same challenge.
My biggest gripe is with famous atheist
. Alex O’Connor (formerly known as Cosmic Skeptic) does not believe in free will, as far as I can tell. He also does not believe in objective moral facts, like all other philosophically consistent atheists. And yet, whenever he interacts with religious opponents, O’Connor seems quite at ease to complain about God’s supposed lack of fairness, just as I did in my agnostic years.This drives me bananas. Without a moral law-giver (i.e. God), there are no objective moral facts, thus you can’t actually be offended by what God is doing or not doing in your life. Under atheism, the universe is cold and unfeeling, without conscience, so we should not expect the world to be just. To the atheist, it is a trick of evolution that we humans all seem to have a Jiminy Cricket on our shoulders that tells us that things are unfair. Because of this, atheists are under no obligation to heed this illusory conscience.
The lack of objective facts without God is why atheists were skeptics right up until the rise of the New Atheism movement in the early 2000s. Hume, Nietzsche, and Sartre doubted that our minds were rational, reliable, and could extract true data from sensory experiences. In other words, they doubted the principle of sufficient reason. This all makes sense (ba dum tss) if you believe that the brain is just a result of random evolutionary processes. These vanguard atheists would laugh Richard Dawkins out of the room in a New York minute if he expressed his objective truth claim that science is the only (or even best) way of knowing.
I cannot say many kind words about Hume, Nietzsche, and Sartre, but they did defend their beliefs. Atheism is a belief system, not merely an absence of belief, despite what its proponents often claim. When pressed, atheists as a rule admit to believing that 1) God does not exist 2) If He did exist, He would be an evil cop in the sky and 3) He would have no reasonable justification for allowing bad things to happen to good people. Atheists differ on whether free will would be preserved or wholly done away with in the world of an all-powerful, omniscient God.
Atheists need to defend these three suppositions and why they find them compelling, without deploying appeals to Christian morals and ideas (e.g. justice, tolerance, free will, and a personal, loving God). More specifically, Alex O’Connor should also defend his view that having a personal religious experience is the only or best way to come to Christ. The vast majority of people I know have had no such experience, and even the ones who have have not necessarily believed because of it. We are not all zealots who fall into the nearest baptismal font once we have had a mystical experience in prayer.
Also, atheists need to defend their narrow view of history. Some atheists think rationalist, nominalist, and individualist atheism is the default state for man, when in reality, the vast majority of people who have ever lived have been religious. All civilizations accepted the sense of the numinous until about two hundred years ago. This is why I’m not worried about the current atheist moment we find ourselves in; it will not last. New catechumens will likely revert to Paganism or Christianity.
Generally, I am frustrated by atheists who are skeptical of everything except their own calcified beliefs, especially their Christian belief in objective moral claims like “racism and slavery are bad.” But being skeptical is easy, fashionable, and gets you lots of praise from teenagers on Reddit. You are viewed as daring, a disruptor. What atheists don’t understand is that almost every single disruptor I can think of (e.g. Gandhi, MLK, Karl Marx, Martin Luther) used Christian ethics to support their derring-dos.
The skeptical atheists do not want to acknowledge these foundations, so the skeptic questions remain: “Really? Are you sure? How do you know? Can we know?” All of these are deployed in debates without the speaker stopping to define his terms, presuppositions, and beliefs. It is the scattershot method of a two-year-old peppering his parents with questions until they are backed into a corner and mentally exhausted into expelling a “because I said so.” But at least the two-year-old can say, with feeling and objectivity, that it is unfair when his brother takes his toy. Our atheist friends cannot and should not be allowed to do the same.