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By far, the most direct and radical challenge to the Christian faith is to deny the existence of any God. In the 20th and early 21st centuries, atheism achieved influence far greater than at any time previously.
While atheists remain a minority in all Western countries, they have had an inordinate influence on the culture as the most forceful advocates of the secularization of society.
Who Says God Is Dead?
A Gallup survey in 2022 showed that belief in God in the United States had dropped to an all-time low, with young and liberal Americans leading the decline. Although 81% of Americans reported belief in God, this represents a six percent drop from 2017.
International numbers are hard to come by since most surveys deal with the frequency of religious practice rather than belief, but the available evidence suggests a growth in irreligion, defined as atheism, agnosticism, and those who do not identify with any religious tradition.
In 2020, approximately 1.1 billion people globally were irreligious. China and other former communist countries such as Czechia and Estonia are among the most irreligious countries, though some Western countries such as Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium also have high percentages of the irreligious.
What Does Atheism Say?
Atheism is commonly understood to be the belief that there is no God. Most atheists, however, reject this definition. They argue that the term atheism derives from the Greek a (not, without) and theos (God, god), and conclude that atheism is simply the lack of belief in a God or gods.
That is, an atheist does not necessarily deny the existence of a god but simply has no belief about the existence of a god.
This allows them to dismiss out of hand all claims that atheism is a dangerous or corrupt philosophy since it is not a philosophy at all but merely a lack of belief in a particular philosophical concept.
Further, atheists commonly argue that since they lack a belief while theists hold to a belief, the burden of proof rests fully on the theist to make a case for belief in God.
The claim that atheism is not a position that needs to be defended is contradicted by atheists themselves.
For example, B. C. Johnson repeats the standard claim that because atheists merely have a “lack of belief in God,” they are not affirming anything and so do not need to justify their views.
Yet, just before this claim, he explains the purpose of his book: “For some time now, atheists have been in need of firm grounds upon which to base their position.”
The attempt to defend their definition of atheism by etymology misunderstands the origin of the word. “Atheism” comes from athe-ism, that is, the “belief” (-ism) that there is “no God” (athe-), rather than as a-theism, the lack of belief in God.
It is silly to define atheism in such a way that babies, animals, and even inanimate objects would qualify as atheists — since all of these lack belief in God! When atheists are not worrying about the definition, they commonly use the term to refer to people who have rejected the concept of God.
Although atheists often deny espousing such a dogmatic atheism, they frequently are quite insistent that God does not and cannot exist.
Atheism, then, tries to have it both ways. Atheists claim not to have any belief about God but then vigorously deny that God could exist. Atheists deny that atheism needs to be defended but then offer arguments in defense of atheism.
The behavior and arguments of atheists show that atheism is a worldview that sees the world as self-existent and humans as alone in the cosmos, with no transcendent Creator or other supernatural beings to help them or to hold them accountable for how they live.
Atheism, therefore, entails naturalism, the belief that matter and energy are all that exist. For most atheists, atheism also paradoxically entails secular humanism, the belief that life is meaningful and that human beings must determine their own purpose for life and solve their own problems.
Given these claims, atheists cannot legitimately place the burden of proof exclusively on the theist. The only alternative to some such humanism is nihilism, the belief that life has no purpose or meaning.
Atheists are naturally offended by the Bible’s declaration that “the fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1a; 53:1a).
The foolishness of atheism is an expression of the universal impulse in human beings to turn away from God and to follow a path of their own choosing, as the very next lines affirm (Psalm 14:1b-3; 53:1b-3; Romans 3:9-12).
Atheism falls into foolishness not because atheists are unintelligent but because they reject God. We see in this the foolishness to which we are all prey apart from God’s revelation to us.
Is God a Meaningless Word?
Atheists routinely claim that the concept of God is meaningless or nonsensical, so they don’t even know what theists are talking about when they use the word “God.”
Although atheist philosophers have expended great effort to show this, it is clear from their own writings that they understand what theists mean by the term “God.”
That is why atheists must work so hard to show that the concept of God is meaningless! They claim to have found certain logical problems that show that the concept of God is incoherent, but these almost always depend on definitions of God or of divine attributes that are not part of historic theism and thus do not refute God’s existence.
How Do Atheists Answer Arguments for God?
Atheists claim that the traditional arguments for the existence of God are illogical and, therefore, do not justify belief in God. Very often, they state the theistic arguments in a completely erroneous form and then triumphantly point out the logical holes in the arguments.
Gordon Stein, for example, states the cosmological argument as follows: “Everything must have a cause. Therefore, the universe had a cause, and that cause was God.” He then points out the obvious problem: “If everything must have a cause, then God must have had a cause.”
Although some versions of the argument are based on causation, in these versions, the premise is not that “everything” must have a cause but that all finite, temporal, contingent, or mutable things must have a cause.
God does not need a cause since he is infinite, eternal, necessary, and immutable. Atheists know this, yet they constantly misrepresent the cosmological argument to score a cheap point against theism.
Perhaps the most outrageous misrepresentation of the theistic arguments offered by Stein is his handling of the argument from God’s self-revelation in Scripture.
He summarizes the argument as follows: “The Bible says that God exists, and the Bible is the inspired word of God. Therefore, what it says must be true, and [therefore] God does exist.”
But the fallacy is obvious: “This is a circular argument and begs the question” because calling the Bible “the Word of God” surreptitiously “assumes the existence of the very thing we are trying to prove (God).”
Yet no Jewish or Christian philosopher or theologian argues that the Bible proves the existence of God merely because it asserts God’s existence. Rather, they argue that the Bible reveals God’s existence and nature to us through the many ways in which it evinces a divine origin.
In other words, we believe in God because in the Bible we find abundant evidence that God is real. There is nothing illogical about this claim, and it is certainly not question-begging.
Stein also argues that the Bible is full of contradictions and factual errors. This objection is more substantive and, if true, would conflict with the claim that the Bible is an error-free revelation from God.
Yet Stein and other atheists ignore the massive Christian literature that offers detailed, rational answers to the difficulties raised. They also ignore the positive arguments for the Bible as a supernatural revelation from God, such as fulfilled prophecy or the life and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The skeptics frequently make glaring factual errors of their own about the Bible. For example, George Smith claims that “most modern theologians would agree” that the gospels, “or at least three of the four,” were “written anywhere from 40 to 150 years after the death of Jesus.”
But his figures are wrong: most biblical scholars agree that the gospels were all completed by AD 95, or no more than about 60 years after Jesus’ death. The absurdity of Smith’s dating is shown by a harmony of the four gospels produced by Tatian around AD 155.
G. A. Wells, another atheist, argues that there is no good evidence that Jesus ever existed and that the gospels are simply mythology. While space does not permit a detailed critique of this theory, a few comments will illustrate its foolishness.
No serious historian and even radical and hostile biblical scholars (of which there are many) believe that Jesus did not exist.
The gospels contain culturally embarrassing details (such as the short time Jesus was on the cross or the first witnesses to the risen Jesus being women), making it very unlikely that they were simply made up.
And the idea of a crucified Messiah, or worse, a crucified God, was grossly offensive in both Jewish and Greco-Roman culture (1 Corinthians 1:23).
The theory that the Christians saddled themselves with a central belief that is absurd, for any reason other than its being a historical fact, is more incredible than the Gospel story itself!
What More Can He Say?
All atheists regard the reality of evil in the world as disproving the existence of an all-powerful and all-good God. This so-called “problem of evil” is by far the most popular and weighty argument for atheism.
The argument assumes a moral standard by which events or situations or persons in this world can be judged “evil.”
But if there is no God and we are merely one of the many species of animals inhabiting this planet, then moral judgments of good and evil are mere human conventions or emotional responses.
Plane crashes due to negligence, mass murderers of innocent women, children dying of starvation — these things may outrage us, but if there is no God, they are just part of the purposeless process of the cosmos. They are not evil.
The anti-theistic argument from evil assumes that for evil to be a part of the world of an omnipotent God, God must himself do evil. But this does not follow.
Creating a world in which evil takes place does not necessarily make God responsible for evil. If the evil is done by his creatures, and if God has a purpose for temporarily allowing that evil, he is not morally culpable for the evil in creation.
To the question of whether God is justified in creating a world in which there seems to be so much senseless evil, Christians may give at least two complementary answers.
First, we cannot know what the balance of good and evil in the world will prove to be in the long run, nor whether what seems senseless to us now will always seem so. There is nothing irrational about admitting that if there is a God, he might know better than we do about what he is doing.
Second, God has embraced this evil in the most intimate way possible through the abusive treatment his Son received when he was tortured and crucified. God ordained that this seemingly senseless evil would happen so that evil could be turned on itself and overcome by mercy.
Thus, the real “problem of evil” — whether anything can be done to overcome it and bring good out of it — has been answered in the affirmative by God himself through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
For further discussion, join Dr. Boa’s weekly live interactive webinar, Think on These Things
For further reading:
Why Are There So Many Questions about ‘In the Beginning’?
Can Christians Know if God Truly Exists?
Photo Credit: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/Bulat Silvia
Kenneth Boa equips people to love well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a writer, teacher, speaker, and mentor and is the President of Reflections Ministries, The Museum of Created Beauty, and Trinity House Publishers.
Publications by Dr. Boa include Conformed to His Image, Handbook to Prayer, Handbook to Leadership, Faith Has Its Reasons, Rewriting Your Broken Story, Life in the Presence of God, Leverage, and Recalibrate Your Life.
Dr. Boa holds a B.S. from Case Institute of Technology, a Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from New York University, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in England.
