Why an atheist decided to believe in God

What causes a man to abandon lifelong atheism and turn to belief in God? The novelist and magazine editor Christopher Beha did just that and wrote a book about that journey simply titled, Why I am not an Atheist. David Brooks reviewed the book and raised points well worth pondering.

Atheism is a religion.

Brooks begins by pointing out something that is obviously true but bitterly denied by atheists: “Atheism likes to describe itself as the absence of belief but that’s false: it is belief in an entire worldview.” In other words, it’s a religion.

I used to ask my students two questions. First, “I believe in God. Is that a religious statement?” The students answered, of course it is. So I said, “Okay. How about this statement, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ Is that a religious statement?” The students would sit in silence. But I asked them, aren’t the two statements, statements of the same kind? If the first one is religious doesn’t the second one have to be? Yes, so atheism is simply another religion.

Brooks defines a worldview as a system of belief that describes the underlying nature of reality, a theory of how we ought to act, and a theory of knowledge, and where we should go for wisdom. A man’s atheism frames his world view. They are two different ways of going about the same thing. Atheism is clearly one more religious choice.

What does the Bible have to say about atheism?

It has no patience with it. It calls the atheist a fool. Psalm 53:1: The fool has said in his heart there is no God. I love Spurgeon’s pithy comment on this verse. “If the Bible calls such a man a fool we dare call him no less.” In Romans 1 the Apostle Paul attacks those who deny God, who do not thank or honor him. Verse 22: “Thinking themselves to be wise they become fools instead.” We dare not say any less. God will come down hard on those who deny His existence.

C.S. Lewis said materialistic atheism was a philosophy for schoolboys. It doesn’t even pretend to answer any important questions.

I have found in my interactions with atheists that they are ridiculous. At a symposium once a philosophy professor said, “When people die there’s no further consciousness. There is no after life.” In the Q and A time I asked him, how do you know that? What proof do you have that there is no life after death? His answer is one of the silliest I have ever heard. “Well when you look at a corpse they’re just dead.” As though that answer should be intellectually satisfying. I asked him, “Wouldn’t the best course of action be to find someone who has been dead and then came back to life? Wouldn’t they be in the best position to argue this question? Is there anyone who has done that? Died and come back to life?”

Why does atheism fail?

Because in the end it does not account for real life experience. I had a student come into my class saying he had just been to a philosophy lecture in which the prof said that no one has free will. We are simply programmed by brain chemistry. I told this student, “When midterm exams roll around you need to walk around during the test copying your answers from other students. You need to turn in Plato’s Republic as your own written work. When the prof rebukes you tell him, ‘Hey, this just the way my brain chemistry works.’” I also told him that Professor Snodgrass wouldn’t respond if his wife had an affair with another prof, “Oh well, that’s just her brain chemistry at work.” He would be rightfully angry and wounded. It wouldn’t be his or her brain chemistry operating. It would be his innate moral sense of right and wrong. So your professor’s arrogant statement that all our actions are mere brain chemistry is nonsense. His real lived experience is not like that and neither is yours.

Atheism fails because it cuts itself off from the blessings of Christian culture.

Eric Metaxas observed that Atheism is like a cut flower. It may retain for a while the beauty it got from its roots but it will soon wither and die. The beautiful virtues of the West that come from Christian culture do not last long under atheism.

Atheism should logically deny the great truths of Western culture—compassion for the poor, human rights, the equality of women.  The famous atheist philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote that the concept of natural inalienable rights was “nonsense on stilts.” This is obviously an attack on the Christian doctrine of man created in the image of God. Nietzsche understood this: ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’

But at this point the atheists are inconsistent. They want to rid themselves of Christianity but retain the beauty of the culture. They have repeatedly told me they are just as moral as I am. And on what basis do they make that judgment? The standards of Christian morality. They claim to be as moral as I am using Christianity as the moral arbiter.

 

Atheists Don’t Answer Hard Questions Very Well.

I had a student at my table at CU who ate lunch with me for three years. One day he said, “Dr. Mitchell, I have questions for you that you can’t answer.” I said, “Ian, I’m sure you do. But remember, I have questions you can’t answer.”

I had a student one time tell me, “I would believe in Christianity if I had more proof.” I asked him, “how much proof do you have for what your currently believe? Or is it only Christians who have to come up with proof for their beliefs?” Are Christians the only ones who have to answer hard questions?

Brooks says:  “I confess, I always found the materialist worldview kind of ludicrous, even during my godless heathen days. Most of the New Atheists were insufferably arrogant. I always wanted to ask them: Are you really so certain of your intellectual superiority to Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, and Dostoevsky that you can dismiss their lifetime commitments to God as mere superstition?” In other words, there are some really, really smart people who believe in God. Are you saying they are stupid? This question should at least make the atheist humble. But if there is anything atheists are not, it is humble. Daniel Dennett said it was hard to be tolerant of Christians because they were people who had been deceived by an illusion. Dennett never once wondered if he, himself, was being deceived by an illusion.

There are lots of questions atheism can’t answer or refuses to answer. David Brooks lists some them: “How does this ineffable thing called consciousness emerge from the material meat of the brain? What happened before the big bang? Where does free will come from? Why is there something rather than nothing?[Which the atheist Jean Paul Sartre said was the preeminent question in philosophy.] Quantum mechanics teaches us that electrons leap from one spot to another without travelling through the space in between. What’s up with that?”

There are others: How am I to live? What do I owe to others? What is the meaning of life?

And one more: On what basis am I forgiven? How are my sins atoned for? How do you deal with guilt?

Of course the Christian faith deals with these questions wonderfully well. Far better than everyone else.

Why don’t atheists ever accomplish anything positive on the basis of atheism?

Atheists do good things but it isn’t because of their atheism. I published a video titled “Why Haven’t Atheists ever built a civilization?” The atheist comments were really angry but they never answered my question. Materialists have never successfully constructed the objective moral system that can guide you through life. Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyev once sarcastically summarized the materialist morality this way: “Man is descended from the apes, therefore we must love one another.”  Yeah, right. Atheists expect moral behavior from people even though atheism provides neither rhyme nor reason for morality. And the in the cultures they have briefly controlled morality has been destroyed.

What is the biggest failure of materialistic atheism?

It’s their failure to account for why a human being knows anything at all. The Materialists argue that they can use their senses to derive objective knowledge of the world, and that is the only source of true knowledge. But one neuroscientist called sense perception a “controlled hallucination.” The brain uses the incomplete data that the senses gather and then it uses imagination to construct a model of the world. The mind tests that model through a process of prediction and correction. There’s no such thing as purely objective perception. It’s subjective experience through and through.

Closely related to this is another big problem: atheists tell you what not to believe but they never gets around to telling you what you should believe. They don’t have any reasonable basis for believing anything.

And back to Lewis’ criticism. Atheists make the ridiculous assertion that all of life’s problems can be solved by the scientific method. Ludwig Wittgenstein was no Christian, but he understood that “if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.” Atheism does not answer any important questions.

What brought Christopher Beha back to God?

So why did Beha—novelist, magazine editor, public intellectual—leave atheism to believe in the God of the Bible?

He began to come back to God when he discovered love. Love takes us toward God. Why? Because God is love. Love counters materialism. It counters atheism. It transcends both.

According to David Brooks one of his friends said, when her first daughter was born she found she “loved her more than evolution required.” Much of human life is more than evolution requires. Love transcends evolution as well as atheism.

The soul also yearns for transcendence. We are not truly happy when we devote our lives to intermediate goods like money and physical beauty; we are only happy when we devote ourselves to the infinite. The Bible rates virtues and in passage after passage it rates love as the greatest. In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul says, “Now abides three things, faith, hope, and love.” But the greatest of these is love. In 1 John the apostle says, “God is love.” He’s right. And when you find love you find God.

God right now is inviting you and others to find Him, to experience His love, to find your joy in Him. It’s time to take that step.

More: Twelve Stories of Atheists Coming to Christ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD51maNncbI

David Brooks: https://comment.org/more-than-evolution-requires/

Michael Guillen: https://www.christianpost.com/news/how-science-led-an-atheist-harvard-physicist-to-christ.html?utm_source=Daily&utm_campaign=Daily&utm_medium=newsletter