CHAPTER

ATHEISM

“There is no God.”

Ravi Zacharias

Since Dawkins is the new guru of atheism, I will take his major criticism against
belief in God—God, the moral monster—and consider his assertions and
conclusions. Others have dealt with the supposed use of science to defend his
case, and Vince will address this in his chapter on scientism. My intention is to
respond to the philosophical implications and ramifications of Dawkins’ belief in
contrast to the real message of Jesus Christ. Indeed, Dawkins reserves his
strongest attacks for the Bible and the “unfathomable atrocities” that God
commanded. He lists them ad nauseam to make his point. To give him the full
benefit of the doubt, I will let you read his words for yourself as he writes in his
book The God Delusion:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant

character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust,
unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser;
a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal,
pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously
malevolent bully.1

A few years ago, some of these words weren’t even in the dictionary. One is
tempted to ask, “How do you really feel, Richard?” Dawkins himself is not
known for being a particularly humble, irenic, and gracious person. But that is
not the issue here. I grant that at first blush this is very powerful, and it is
troubling that God should be open to this kind of characterization. I would like
to add that anyone who believes that a thinking Christian is not troubled by it
hasn’t talked to the serious-minded thinker. Of course it is troubling, deeply
troubling!
Whether we like it or not, we are all to a certain degree a product of our own
experiences. I could hazard a guess that there is some such deep antipathy
toward God in many atheists though it may never surface, even in their vitriolic
outbursts. But it is not hard to see. I look back over the years and see how I was
shaped through the lens of what I witnessed and heard. All one has to do is be
present in a real war zone, where devastation and death are all around, to move
from questions about individual suffering to those over mass suffering. Hate,
anger, and cruelty are seen up close and questions crowd the emotions.
In my twenties, I covered the length of Vietnam during the height of that war.
Late one evening I sat on the front porch of a missionary’s home about twenty
miles from the demilitarized zone and listened to the firepower being unleashed
just a few miles away, reflected in the amber-colored sky. I was a safe distance
away from where it was really happening, but I was close enough, and the sound
of incoming and outgoing artillery was constant. I asked myself to what end was
all this? How can such realities be part of an eternal plan?
Just a few feet in front of where I sat was the mass grave of six missionaries
who had been murdered in cold blood three years earlier, just because they were
there. They were noncombatants, there to touch the souls of the people, whether
friend or foe. They were there to help others, and they paid with their lives, their
children left orphaned. Late into the night my hosts and I talked of the horrors of
war. I attended church services where airmen in uniform prayed and were prayed
for immediately before being deployed on a mission, uncertain of their return.
On another occasion I was driving in a car with some missionaries from
Dalat to Saigon when our car broke down on a rather desolate part of the road.
After several minutes and some uneducated tinkering, the car started and we
continued on our way, only to come upon a terrifying scene a few miles up the
road. A car that had overtaken us while our car was disabled had been ambushed
and all the occupants lay mangled and bleeding to death on the side of the road.
In the distance, we could see the attackers melting away into the jungle.
At twenty-five, I had seen enough of warfare and bloodshed. I had heard
enough political speeches. I had read enough of the journalists and their
pontifications from a distance. I had heard all the dissent I needed to hear from
professorial lecterns; communism versus capitalism, freedom versus
demagoguery. Walking away from the body of a loved one being lowered into
the ground is a heart-wrenching experience. Seeing it multiplied in the deaths,
deformities, and destruction around me, I found myself crying out to God, “Why
all this in the name of humanity and survival?”
I was doing my thinking as a young man. Years went by, and I read the
philosophers and philosophies of war and the attending theories. I questioned, I
struggled. It would have been enough to question the entire theistic framework.
It didn’t take an atheist to raise the question of violence, injustice, and evil.
Many of the prophets in the Bible raised this issue directly to God and sought
answers from Him. “How long, LORD, must I call for help, but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not save?” is the question Habakkuk
raised (Habakkuk 1:2). Jeremiah did the same and asked God to stand in the
witness box. In Jeremiah 12:1, he says: “You are always righteous, LORD, when I
bring a case before you. Yet I would speak with you about your justice: Why
does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?” Later
in the book he even accuses God of deceiving him and in frustration he says,
“Cursed be the day I was born!” (20:14). And in Psalm 10:1, David asks God,
“Why, LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of
trouble?”
No one questioned the Almighty more about the pain and shame of human
evil and personal loss than the biblical writers. But here’s the rub. They always
raised it while still recognizing the nature of good and evil, victim and
victimizer, human limitation and divine power. They not only understood the
categories, they questioned where a sovereign God was in the midst of all this.
And they found answers. Habakkuk particularly found his way to some solid
footing. We will get to that. What is dramatically real is that they do not raise it
to question God’s existence, nor do they raise it to prove that good and evil are
not real. They raise it to find the answers to God’s existence within the
framework of the good and evil they undeniably see around them.
In contrast, looking at the same evidence as the biblical writers, the
conclusion Dawkins draws is to deny the existence of God, and he is forced,
therefore, to dismiss evil and good as absolute categories. And therein lies the
deep-seated difference. What do I mean?
Where Do You Get Off?

These terrible descriptive words for God that Dawkins uses put him in a real
philosophical and existential quandary. He begins by saying that the God to
whom these actions are attributed is really a “creature of fiction.” If God is
indeed a creature of fiction, he is in effect mounting this great effort against a
nonexistent entity to whom such actions are attributed by some very gullible
people. So wherein lies the evil? If God doesn’t exist, the evil that Dawkins is
railing against is really coming from human beings playing God, isn’t it?
This is key to underscore. If atheism is correct, his nauseating list from
genocide to infanticide does not describe God’s character but the people who
claim to believe in God. Ironically, this comes from an intellectual who writes at
a time when the killing of babies by abortion is at an all-time high, legitimized
by intellectuals as one’s moral right. Thus, the killing of millions in the name of
individual rights is okay, so long as humanity declares it is so. So the source of
both scenarios is human, not divine by his paradigm. If God is dead, then in the
words of Malcolm Muggeridge, we are left with “the pursuit of power versus the
pursuit of happiness, black-and-white television versus color, the clenched fist
versus the raised phallus.”2 In other words, it is either megalomania or
erotomania, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.
If God does not exist except in the minds and writings of His followers, who
are human beings (of whom Dawkins is one), it is they who are genocidal,
misogynistic, infanticidal, homophobic, etc. How in the name of reason does
Dawkins think that his own judgment, as a human being, is a fair and correct
assessment of other people? If evil does not exist, his is merely a “preferred
flavor”… as is theirs.
Intuitively, people react against the behaviors Dawkins is warring against.
But in order to vilify them, or the people he blames for them, he has to agree that
these things are evil, a category he struggles to locate. By saying that there is no
God but that these attributes of God are evil, he has put himself in a bind and is
playing God himself. He may as well put a picture of himself in his living room
and bow down to it every morning.
Elsewhere, this same Dawkins goes on to say that at the base of it all there is
no good and evil; we are all dancing to our DNA.3 What on earth has he created?
He vilifies a monstrous God and throws Him away but presents a monstrous
philosophy of life as the most reasonable. At best, his reasoning is either circular
or self-defeating. Philosophically, his thinking really assumes and deduces the
following:

Assumption 1: If an all-powerful and all-loving God exists, He would

not do such evil things as we see happening. Therefore, the God
described by the religions of the world is fictitious and cannot
possibly exist.
Conclusion: There is no God.

Assumption 2: Since there is no God, these terrible things are really

thoughts and actions of the human heart.
Conclusion: Because there is no God to declare good from evil, these
things are really not evil per se. They are just the means of survival
and expressive categories of human beings.

Assumption 3: Since there is no God and therefore no evil, everyone

is merely dancing to his or her DNA. We each do what we do
because we are soft wired and hardwired to do what we do. It is not
our choice, and we bear no responsibility for it. This is a nicer way of
saying, “nature red in tooth and claw,” now scientifically postulated.
Conclusion: Since there is no such thing as good and evil, the
accusation that God is evil becomes invalid since the very challenge
is merely a DNA dance. Even so, the religious dance is more evil
than the nonreligious one.

Assumption 4: Since religion is therefore a phenomenological matter

rather than a matter of verifiable truth, all religion should be treated
as fictitious.
Conclusion: Mock and ridicule people who still believe in God
because it is nonsense. God’s anger is perverse, but man’s anger
against God is the zenith of knowledge. That religious people may be
deeply hurt from such verbal bullying and ridicule ought not to be a
concern for the one who lives by the reality of a world without God,
because God is the ultimate bully.

There you have it in a nutshell.

 Now, contrast the Christian worldview. Strangely, this slippery slope in
thinking and the degeneracy that follows when humanity turns its back upon
God is addressed in the Bible. In Romans 1:18–25, the Apostle Paul says,

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the
godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by
their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to
them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation
of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine
nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has
been made, so that people are without excuse.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God
nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their
foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they
became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for
images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and
animals and reptiles.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts
to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.
They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and
served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever
praised…

What we have here is the exact opposite of the atheistic worldview. Atheism
declares that belief in God is “foolishness.” And in that denial there follows an
ultimate denial of the essential definitions of good and evil. Everything becomes
desacralized. In the Christian framework, the denial of God is itself foolishness
and leads to a degeneration that is perverse and celebratory of things commonly
considered perverse. The judgment that falls upon willful evil is ever greater
evil.
In short, by denying God’s existence, the atheist doesn’t solve the problem of
evil, he just uses the horrors of evil to deny its moral context, and if hate follows,
so be it. In Christian terms, that very denial of evil has everything to do with
evil. And that is just for starters. There is more. The human scene is even more
fundamentally flawed. You see, for moral reasoning to exist, one must at all
times assume the freedom to choose.
Within a nontheistic, mechanistic, accidental cause for the universe where
“blind and pitiless chance” molds and shapes our choices, determinism is the
inescapable conclusion. With the absence of God, true freedom goes as well;
thus, as Dawkins says, we dance to our DNA. Even Stephen Hawking
grudgingly granted this conclusion, quantum theory notwithstanding, in a lecture
at Lady Mitchell Hall, Cambridge, in 1990, a lecture at which I was present.
Determinism is the logic of our chance existence. And the journey into
contradiction begins. Psychologists such as B. F. Skinner latched on to this
inevitable reality and have been writing on this subject for years.
Determinism and Destination

Determinism dictates that we are hardwired to think in the terms that we do.
That makes truth claims invalid since we are really not free to think in any other
way… out of flux, nothing but flux. Determinism removes the possibility of free
options and can only result in preset conclusions. We are actually computers
with prescriptive feelings for specific realities.
With that hardwiring, even love becomes illusory and merely a mechanistic
preference that is no choice at all, just an action.
You see the result: The foolishness of denying God as the first cause also, in
the end, puts both truth and love in jeopardy. Truth and love as ultimate realities
are lost in the quicksand of a deterministic foundation.
This is reversed in Romans 1. It is very important to understand that belief in
God means that we start off free and volitionally choose that which is corrupt
and corrupting. That corrupted mind/heart slides further into darker choices till
we are conditioned to think in opposite categories to those with which we
started. Good becomes evil and evil becomes good. Those choices we made
three sentences back determine and reconfigure our mind-set and destination.
Determinism is, in fact, the end state, not the beginning.
That is why evil is the final choice and now, with a thoroughly impaired
judgment, we have made God also to be evil and ourselves to be wise. Those
who have freely chosen to reject God end up in the very place they started in
their own thinking; thinking themselves to be determined, though they were free,
they end up determined and shackled. The lie they believed to start with
becomes the entrenched truth that started as a wish to become like God,
determining good and evil, and becomes a death wish. That, after all, was the
same warning given in Genesis 3.
This is the path to an incredible destination of deception and degradation that
seems noble. The gods of this world have deified themselves unto death. Genesis
1 begins with “In the beginning God,” and Genesis 50 ends with Joseph in a
coffin. The God of creation warns us of the folly of rejecting God. Secularism is
by definition “this worldly,” concerned with the things of this world. The life
and death of human reasoning takes place in time and space. As one writer puts
it, “The worst effect of sin is within, and is manifest not in poverty, and pain,
and bodily defacement, but in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy love, the
low ideal, the brutalized and enslaved spirit.”4
 I can hear it already. There’s the word that is so despised: SIN. We hate the
word because it brings with it all the collective prejudice of an anti-God state of
mind to shout back, “It is the same old thing.” C. S. Lewis reminds us that the
fear of the same old thing is the strongest passion the Evil One has put into our
hearts to resist any sense of self-indictment. So let me give sin its softest
definition: A violation of purpose; an addiction to the profane.
The Prison of Darkness

Some time ago, I was visiting death row in one of the largest maximum
security prisons in America. When I came to a particular cell, the young lawyer
who had arranged for us to be there immediately turned away and left the group.
She said that the man I was about to talk to was a serial killer and in her days at
university, she recalled him spreading fear throughout her campus as he had
brutally tortured and killed his victims, all young women. She did not want to
make eye contact with this man who had committed such monstrosities.
One of my colleagues and I stopped by his cell to talk to him. The
conversation, had we not been separated by bars, would have been terrifying. He
repeatedly and belligerently demanded us to tell him whether we were for or
against the death penalty. I told him that I would answer his question if he would
answer one of mine. I asked, “What do you miss the most?”
He paused and said, “My wife and children.”
So here he was, convicted of killing numerous women who were somebody
else’s children, irate at the fact that a system would choose to separate him from
his wife and children and outraged that someone would sentence him to death
for what he had done. The very thing he had done to others he despised when
applied to himself. Young, intelligent, strong, yet condemned by his own
choices, he couldn’t even make sense any more. He had chosen his own path of
darkness and now reviled those who would protect others from his dark and
eerie world. He made a hell around him but wished a heaven for his destiny.
Which of the two worlds was proven by his life, the world of self-deification that
presented itself in grandiose terms as promoted by Dawkins or the world of
Romans 1 and the unleashing of evil it describes?
I recall a conversation with a man who told me of the time Billy Graham was
visiting Disney World. As he left, Mr. Graham said to Mr. Disney, “This is quite
a world of fantasy you have created here.” Mr. Disney is said to have replied,
“Actually, you have that reversed. This is the real world. As you leave this place,
you enter the world of fantasy.”
That is an incredibly powerful analogy. Walk through Disney World and
experience the contagious laughter of children! Look into their eyes and see how
they shine with excitement and wonder! My little grandson insisted on riding the
same ride seven times till we had to plead with him to give it a break.
Contrast this with another illustration. I know a family totally distraught over
their teenage daughter’s addiction to cutting. She would take shards of glass and
cut herself till she would bleed, which only created in her a strange desire for
more self-destruction, destruction predetermined by a destructive choice.
The paradigm of the world and the paradigm of God are opposites with
strange points of terminological convergence. In the first, assuming we are
determined, we freely choose to believe a lie, further eroding our conscience till
we mock the truth and lose our capacity to love. We determine our own destiny
of determinism.
In the Christian way of thinking, we disavow determinism and freely choose
the truth to inform our conscience toward a destiny of a confirmed freedom to
love. Freely, we choose the true joys of freedoms that are based on God’s truth.
The child in laughter symbolizes true freedom. The young teen with a broken
piece of glass represents true determinism. The serial killer, the ultimate
corruption of judgment.
The atheist, of course, does not like to present it in such fashion. The most
sophisticated pronouncement of what he or she believes is that there is no way
an all-powerful and all-loving God of the universe can justify such a creation as
He has made. Since this unjustifiable order exists, it has to be that there can be
no all-powerful, all-loving first cause.
The resulting philosophy is that time becomes eternity; the body becomes the
soul; man becomes God; the sacred becomes profane. This moral quicksand is
what we now live with in the West. I would like to unpack these four struggles
in what follows.
The Difference in Jesus

In contrast, when one looks at the teaching of Jesus, one sees a new paradigm
of life and destiny: Eternity; morality; accountability; charity. These four
parameters define life in completely different ways than atheism. Let me take
them one at a time.
Eternity

I have always maintained that time is the canvas on which we portray our
individual lives. Eternity is the keyhole through which we see the whole gallery.
Philosophical descriptions of time can get sophisticated and almost
incomprehensible. The renowned philosopher Charles Hartshorne, when
celebrating his one-hundredth birthday, remarked that time was the most
mysterious thing about life. But in day-to-day parlance, we see time as a
calibration of change. If the now is all we have, and there is no ultimate reason
for our being except what we determine for and from our own reasoning, we
have a vacuum for a starting point and a pollution of ideas from which to
emerge. Time moves in a linear fashion as a calibration of change. We talk of
the present, the past, and the future.
The Scriptures remind us that time is a creation of God’s and that He dwells
in the eternal realm, above and beyond time, because He is unchanging. As
Vince will expound in detail in the next chapter, God is self-existent and
uncaused. Only that which comes into existence from nonexistence needs a
cause. I know all the arguments naturalists try to present against this. But they
only do so to mount a case against theism. They never follow that same logic in
every other reasoned position of an existent reality. To deny an ultimate efficient
cause is to walk into a logical arena of anarchy and unreason.
God did not come into being. He is uncaused, because God is not material.
He transcends materiality. Solomon reminds us of this when he says that God
has put eternity into the hearts of men, yet we do not know the beginning from
the end. As much as we do know, there are two moments in life over which we
have no control, birth and death.
One might argue that we can control our death to a degree, but to do so we
have to make two assumptions: that the time of one’s death is unknown to a
sovereign God and that we are absolutely certain that when the body dies, that is
the end. Neither of those two realities are part of the biblical worldview. We are
told that every day that is given to us was written in a book long before it came
to be. It doesn’t mean that it was preordained; it at least means it was pre-known.
Everything majestic and stupendous reminds us of the unfathomable vastness
of the universe and the eternal. I remember being paid a visit by two astronauts
who had travelled in space. One of them was the pilot of the module returning
home. Among some of my CDs he had taken on his space mission was one
titled, “Who Are You, God?” They paid me one of the highest honors in visiting
me and presenting me a beautifully framed collage of the entire space team, the
US flag, the Indian flag in my honor, and a copy of the CD. It hangs on one of
our walls and I treasure it. The nation of my birth and the land in which I now
live, together. They are but two specks when viewed from space but a part of
this grand universe.
The pilot spoke of looking out of his spacecraft and thinking of the verse,
“What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit
him?” (Psalm 8:4 NKJV). Think of it: The vast stretch of unfathomable space,
thousands of miles from earth; a small, blue speck in the distance that we call
home; yet, the greatest is this little creature we call man. How does such a being
as the designer and the creator of the spacecraft with all its intricacies arrive on
the scene by accident? He didn’t. He is the creation of an Eternal Being and
designed to live in eternity. That is why the psalmist says, “You have set your
glory in the heavens. Through the praise of children and infants you have
established a stronghold” (Psalm 8:2).
The heavens may speak of the glory of God, but only the lips of a child or a
man or woman can speak His praise. When that praise is not coming, the
destructive capacity is enormous, because the mind steals that which belongs to
God and the sacred becomes profane. Eternity defines the sacred; time can make
things profane. If I only live for the moment, I do not count the cost. If I live for
what is eternal, no temporary sacrifice is too great for the eternal joy of being in
the presence of the One who shaped me.
The scientist Arthur Peacocke describes the journey of the first astronauts to
reach the moon and remarks that it was not at all surprising that when they saw
Earth rise over the horizon of the moon for the first time the words irrepressibly
came from their hearts, “In the beginning, God.” It would be a travesty if they
had said, “In the beginning, nothing.” How ludicrous to think that a handful of
people who have read a handful of books and been given a handful of degrees by
other finite beings actually have the cerebral capacity to kill God and take His
place! It would be like a child jabbing at Joe Louis and thinking he was stronger
because Louis didn’t hit back.
Eternity is an indispensable reality if two of the most painful struggles of life
are to be adequately addressed. After the sudden and tragic loss of his son, Yale
philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff said, “When we have overcome absence with
phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer heat with air-conditioning—
when we have overcome all these and much more besides, then there will abide
two things with which we must cope: the evil in our hearts and death.”5
Evil in our hearts and death: the quest for justice in a world of evil and the
harsh end of life in death. I see a world of terrible injustice where the weak have
no voice, the poor have no hope, the broken know no healing. How do we walk
by? Jesus talked about such things, and the Bible tells us that those who heard
Him marveled at His answers.
The Dawkinses of this world are manglers of truth. They take the finger of a
story and conveniently ignore the fist of the entire narrative. Imagine if you
walked into the play The Phantom of the Opera and all you heard was the
phantom screaming, “Go!” “Go!” “Go!” You might think it a dreadful piece of
music. You would miss the splendor of how even the ugly was given hope and
how even the wounded could not stand in the way of a love pursued and desired
against all odds.
The Eternal Quest for Justice

For the Greeks, virtue was indispensable to democracy and governance. But
we might well ask, whose virtue and why justice? These are not self-defining
terms. Content is poured into them. And whatever happened to justice? What is
the difference between the teaching of Jesus and the naturalist’s framework on
these issues?
Let’s take them in turn and examine the assumptions and challenges of
atheism in this context. The first of these assumptions is that nature is all that
there is, that nature and what is natural explain everything. For the biologist this
means natural selection, for the scientist it means gravity, for the empiricist it is
scientific methodology, and for the metaphysician, the supremacy of reason over
faith. All of them have the same starting point and the same destination; that
there is no evidence for God and that the handmaiden of the autonomy of the
will and the supremacy of law naturally follow. Political correctness is the
escape clause for the inescapability of values, and so they find a home for
morality in politics.
Fascinating, isn’t it? The institution least trusted by most people and most
proven false is the storing house for values. What does that say? Corrupted
values find a corruptible system in which to store and define corruption. Rights
replace right, power replaces freedom, laws become morals, and what is legal
becomes what is just. We talk about human rights, seldom about the right to be
human. Yet the quest for justice continues.
In 1994, former National Football League star O. J. Simpson was accused of
brutally murdering his thirty-five-year-old estranged wife, Nicole Brown
Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman, a restaurant waiter. The nation was held
captive by this trial. Even a barking dog knew a crime had been committed, but
O. J. was acquitted. Recently a television interviewer, herself a successful
lawyer, asked the lead lawyer on the case whether justice had been served by
Simpson’s acquittal. His answer was, “There is legal justice, and there’s moral
justice, and, in this case, legal justice was served.”6
That is the seduction of reasoning without morality. That is the lie of
perverted justice. I would have liked to hear his answer if it had been his
daughter who had been so savagely murdered. I cannot but wonder, would it be
the same? We have become professionals without morals and judges apart from
being lawful. Our courtrooms have become theatrical performances where
arguments risk the lives of people and countries, and reasoning has become
rationalization for the most debased acts.
With God denied and evil necessarily gone, justice will soon be a thing of the
past, as the very generation that cries out for justice has empowered legions of
thugs to behave unjustly when their own desires are jeopardized. This is a
society without moral moorings. Such are the shenanigans we play in the name
of reason.
But where else can this thinking lead? The governing boundary is that the
sciences deal only with phenomena. They deal in the real world of matter and
with the laws of nature. Nothing supernatural, please. So even justice, the
foundation of all civilized societies, is sacrificed at the altar of self-worship.
“Legal justice was done.” The danger of that kind of thinking is that it risks
destroying reason and justifying killing the innocent. Nazi Germany is an
example of what can happen to a culture when a legal system perverts justice.
Here is the irony. Those who declare themselves atheists lay claim to nature
and deny that the miracle can ever take place because nature’s laws are
inviolable. But when they consider the laws of a land, they find every
conceivable way in which to justify its violation. So while arguing for science,
they deny the exception. When arguing for ethics, they invoke the exception.
Reason? They wish to play God, and once the destination is determined, the path
of least resistance is chosen.
So with constant manipulation, the guiding principle and the constrictions of
the material world are supposedly determined by empirically verifiable laws as
the basis. These are not proofs for God’s nonexistence. These are the
assumptions of a worldview that is built only on physical law and then toys with
moral law. This is the cry of a society where people are behind bars who cannot
understand the justice of bringing them to a place of accountability. But even
one of these claimed to love his own wife and children. The O. J. Simpson
defense trial lawyers evict the claims of moral law to keep people free, and put
their own families at risk. Genesis tells us how such killing within the family
began. It all began with the conflict within a man over what belongs to God and
what belongs to his own whim. Cain ran the rest of his life.
How do these two beliefs, that nature is all that there is and that the empirical
sciences are the final authority, even if only argued from silence, disprove God?
Where does that lead in the quest for justice?
Time, which became the friend of naturalists in explaining origin, has
become their enemy as they look for justice. Eternity is swallowed up in an
unanswerable tension between our intuition and our reasoning. The difference is
even greater in what follows.
Morality

Whatever happened to good? In trying to explain away God and evil, the
critic actually misses the larger point. The Christian worldview is much wider in
its scope and more penetrating in its claims than just a definition of evil and an
explanation of its origin. The removal of God may bring some temporary
satisfaction to an argument that seems unbeatable as presented. There remains,
however, a counter side that is totally ignored. If evil makes belief in God
indefensible, where does one find a definition for good? Is good also
indefensible? This is key and critical.
Some years ago we had a beautiful dog, a Border Collie that we had brought
from England. We named him G.K. after G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton would
have been honored, because Border Collies are considered one of the brightest
and most teachable of the canine species. He was really my wife’s dog. She took
care of him and his entire upkeep. During his last two or three years, he suffered
quite a bit with various ailments. Margie was always there for him. Although he
didn’t quite like his visits to the vet, when Margie took him, he never fought her
on it. Gradually, his ill health got the better of him and we knew his days were
numbered.
One afternoon, when I returned home I found that he could not even stand on
all fours. One look at him and I could see the life slipping out of him. I called
Margie and told her G.K. was at his worst and she had better come home if she
was to see him before he was gone. She got into her car and headed home.
Several minutes later, G.K. heard the car pulling into the driveway and the sound
of that engine that was all too familiar to him. Then he heard the garage door
open. He raised his head while lying down to see if she would come into the
house. As soon as the knob turned, I watched as he struggled to rise on all four
feet, slipping and staggering, and literally stumbling over to her as she entered
and collapsing at her feet. He could stand no more.
The Scriptures tell us that even the ox knows its owner and the donkey its
master’s stall. May I ask, from whence comes this affection on the part of an
owner to its animal and the reciprocal understanding of the household pet? In
fact, of all species the dog is one of the most fascinating. From the animal world,
it actually grows to be more attached to its human owner than to the world with
which it shares its DNA. In the same strange way, the human being of flesh and
bone leans so much more to the things of the spirit and naturally expresses both
love and gratitude to God. These extraordinary reminders speak of an inherent
goodness that we celebrate and embrace. We are moved by such expressions of
love and kindness.
Love is real and needed.
This perspective is very unique to the Christian faith. Let me take an
illustration of greater depth, given to me by a Palestinian young man. We were
sitting in a coffee shop in Jerusalem and he spoke in soft tones. He mentioned to
me that he had observed a conversation between a leading Muslim sheikh and
the Christian worker Brother Andrew. The sheikh had recently ordered the
killing of eight Israelis because the Israelis had killed four Palestinians whom
they had accused of crimes against the Jewish people. Brother Andrew asked the
sheikh, “Who appointed you judge and jury and gave you the authority to order
such killings?”
The sheikh replied, “I am not the judge and jury. I am merely an instrument
of God’s justice.”
There was a moment of silence and then Brother Andrew asked, “What place
is there, then, for forgiveness?”
The sheikh replied, “Forgiveness is only for those who deserve it.”
Now there was a real protracted silence. The young Palestinian said to me, “I
thought at once, this explains everything and nothing. If forgiveness is merited,
then it’s not really forgiveness, is it? But I remained silent,” he said, “because I
saw two completely different worldviews at work, both with a common starting
point about God, but with radically different views of God.”
Grace is real and needed.
There it is, the heart of the matter. Our starting points are key, but even they
need to be defended. The teaching of Jesus goes beyond mere morality. It goes
to what even morality cannot do. We are creatures who are flawed from within.
We lust, we are greedy, we are proud, we are selfish. We need these countered
not merely to be good but for the sake of what is at the essence of true value. We
have to value one another not just ourselves. At the core of the gospel message is
“God so loved the world that He gave…”
To subsume all religions as one and, further, wrench texts out of context and
make a caricature of God that is repugnant is to play to deceit and to evoke
emotions that are conditioned by error. If there is anything that stands out in the
teachings and the person of Jesus Christ, it is the notions of love and grace, not
hate and killing. Is there not a nobility to grace and admiration for courage that
stops the domino effect of evil?
 It is not enough to define evil and be repelled by it. We must make a case for
the good. The starting points of religious worldviews may bear surface
resemblance to one another, but the character within the theistic framework has a
direct bearing upon the justifiability of good or otherwise. Goodness and love
are equally lost as categories when a naturalist such as Dawkins cavalierly
dismisses such expressions as good and evil, grace and love as dancing to our
DNA.
Just hours ago, I was talking to a man from a Muslim country. He was asked
the difference between the Muslim God and the Christian God. He said he
reflected for a moment and replied, “If you want to know what the Muslim God
is like, read and observe the life of Muhammad. If you want to know what the
Christian God is like, read and observe the life of Jesus. Between the two lives
you will see the character of God displayed.” He said that settled it for the
person who had asked the question.
Our academics once again are so clever and intoxicated with their credentials
that they often manipulate ideas to reach a preplanned conclusion. The God of
Christianity and the God of Islam are simply not the same. The Muslim knows
that, and the truly committed Christian knows that. If they were not different,
why is there any need for a second religion, as Islam began after Christianity?
And why was there a movement within Islam to ban Christians from using the
generic word Allah for God in the Bible? Not all religious beliefs are the same.
There is a difference, and that difference is justifiable based on a moral
difference.
But the same is true of versions of atheism with a dramatic difference. The
Marxist-Leninist doctrine of government and the Maoist communist government
were both atheistic with different political theories emerging. Both had the same
starting point: atheism. Their political theory and their slaughter of millions in
the formation and sustaining of government made for a different final destination
with similar means—killing, fear, the silencing of dissent, the slaughter of
millions. They have a common starting point, different to theism.
Though theists all believe in God or gods as their starting point, their
different notions of God lead to different political theories. Atheists share the
identical notion of no God and material man, and that has led to the ultimate
demise of any absolutes and to the place that any political theory can be
justified. Man is nothing more than dust in the path of ideological idealism. So
the similarity in essence for atheism is the reason for the atrocities against
humanity. The dissimilarity in theistic frameworks makes the difference in what
it means to be human. But here the most critical question emerges. Is the atheist
right in making man the measure of all things and reducing the opposing person
to his own measure? The powerful obliterate the weak because an idea becomes
more important than a person. This is when atheism gets hoisted on its own
petard.
God’s character matters and is needed.
Amorality and the Cost of Truth

An atheist such as Dawkins needs to consider two tensions he must face. The
first is a descent into the erosion of the categories of good and evil that may
result in others who take what he says to heart. Dawkins may make the case that
neither Maoist nor Leninist political theory are his. Fair enough. So let’s
consider his view of scientific materialism. I begin by asking a simple question.
Suppose a case can be made that upon reading Dawkins’ books, several people
have taken their own lives because what they read shattered their lifelong beliefs
about the nature of reality. Would that stop Dawkins from writing these books?
This is not merely a hypothetical question. I know people whose parents have
been on the verge of suicide because their children have departed from the
family’s faith. I have met mothers with broken hearts who said some professor
somewhere knocked all belief in God out of their son or daughter. That loss of
faith set in sequence a belief system that minimized the value of relationships,
plundered marital commitments, engendered an antiestablishment state of mind,
and split up families. I have heard these stories. Will seeing the negative impact
of his books on others, albeit unintended, be convincing enough for Dawkins or
any atheist to stop writing their books? Will he see himself as the author of
destruction? I doubt it.
And strangely, maybe rightly so, he might well say, “I am not to blame. I
should be free to express what I believe is true.” But then I plead and create a
scenario to argue that some of those who have committed suicide have left their
families destitute; in fact, one of them was doing cancer research that could have
greatly rescued humanity from that dreadful disease. In other words, people
involved in noble causes have cut their lives short because of the philosophy of
atheism that sent them into a nihilistic frame of mind. Should the purveyors of
such thinking be held accountable for such deaths? Such writings as Dawkins’
need to stop.
Picture another illustration. After reading a convincing argument for atheism,
a pilot goes into depression and crashes a plane with men, women, and children
on board. I could go on and demonstrate a domino effect from the negative
fallout of the book, but would that be enough to convince the atheist not to write
those kinds of books anymore?
No! They would insist that their books speak the truth and that those who had
believed a lie paid the price. Isn’t that what they would argue? Friedrich
Nietzsche’s books had an impact on Hitler. Copies were presented by Hitler to
both Stalin and Mussolini. Atheistic writers make an impact and can shape
terrible realities. But should that stop them from their honest expression that we
are without a personal moral first cause?
Here then is the second tension for the atheist. If, indeed, the value of the
truth as he sees it is worth the numerous tragedies that can ensue by virtue of
those who have believed his idea of truth, why is it that he denies the Creator of
the universe the same commitment to truth? The simple reality, albeit painful, is
that when truth is resisted, tragedies and atrocities come to be. At least in
defense of God, the Creator of life can also restore that life into even more
pristine circumstances, something atheists simply cannot do.
It is key to know the truth and its implications for life. The repugnance for
evil may create questions about how God can exist. The freedom to propagate
truth eclipses the wrong-headed decisions made by those who choose to believe
a lie. The inexorable tug of goodness and its attractiveness still has an intuitive
power over the human heart. This makes atheism not only uneasy on the
conscience but untenable in reality.
I knew a prominent businessman in the city where I live. He was immensely
successful and had a big heart for charitable causes. His wife was a lovely
woman, wishing to protect the neediest in society. He invested mistakenly in one
huge venture. He put all his money in a scheme that he thought would make his
material success even greater. And he lost everything. Everything. On a given
night, while his wife was asleep, he made several notes and pinned each to a
different piece of furniture or jewelry, bequeathing each of their possessions to
different members of his family. Finally, he wrote a note of regret, took his gun,
killed his wife who was still asleep, and then shot himself.
Having lost his entire wealth, he ended the life of his wife and himself. Did
he not know the grief and pain he was inflicting? He genuinely thought he was
making a decision for the better. This is the reality, isn’t it? We can take the risk
of destroying lives, thinking we are doing it for the better and that a greater
cause is being served. Be it in the name of academic truth or existential pain, we
simply cannot point the finger at God and say He ought not to be allowed to
permit all this pain when, given the choices, we do the same thing for our own
supposed noble reasons. Causing pain doesn’t stop us from doing what we feel is
right. In Dawkins’ case, he exonerates himself for the pain and disillusionment
he causes, saying it is in the interest of truth. This other gentleman justified the
pain he inflicted because of a looming catastrophe.
 People such as Dawkins make these accusations against God because they
assume that what is true is valuable and that, when violated, it breeds death; that
freedom is a gift to be treasured and not abused; that we have no right to take
another’s life and, more to the point, to take our own life because we victimize
others in the process; that we are interconnected with our fellow human beings,
and oftentimes those who had nothing to do with someone else’s decision pay as
much, if not more, of a price for the actions of another.
But are these not the assertions of a theistic worldview? How does one
explain such realities emerging from a nontheistic, accidental collocation of
atoms? These very ideas and values are actually borrowed from a theistic
framework. They are illegitimate deductions within naturalism. Determinism
cannot give us true freedom and true moral categories.
Let’s go further. However we try to mitigate the reality, there is a difference
between a tragedy and an atrocity. We like to blame God for the atrocity, but we
exonerate ourselves for the atrocities we cause. So we then point to tragedy
because it is easier to absolve ourselves from a causal role. In the grand scheme
of things, God is sovereign over tragedies and we simply cannot explain His role
away without invoking the very categories we disavow of good and evil. So
beneath the weight of all this struggle lie these twin realities. Some things are
good in themselves and some things are evil in themselves. Atheism cannot
sustain the definitions.
Truth matters and is needed.
Morality and Beauty

I am sitting in a plane, writing this on a flight between Seoul and Atlanta. I

have entered the skies of the United States. It is about six a.m., and as I look out
the window I see a spectacular sunrise. The clouds below are soft and almost
appear like marshmallows. I marvel at the beauty. Oscar Wilde remarked that
while I may be in awe at its splendor, the sunrise cannot return the compliment
to the viewer. It is the person who frames such realities of beauty. Beauty as an
abstraction does not revel in itself. But I move to a higher plane and think of
how a poet would respond to such splendor. And then I ask myself, have I ever
read poetry that no poet had written? Have I ever heard a song that no singer had
sung or instrument played? Had I ever read a book that no author had ever
written? Have I ever been loved when there was no one behind that love?
To be sure, the atheist can also enjoy the sunrise. But the atheist stops at the
door of beauty or goodness with no one behind that beauty and goodness. It is
the ultimate dead end of an idea and decapitates the cause behind the creation
and the one who is in awe. Personhood and genius are destroyed at the doorstep
of ideas. It is natural to see a painting and look for the signature, to read a book
and look for the author, to see a war and ask who started it, to see a grave and
ask who is buried, to see a baby and ask who are the parents. The intrinsic and
creative or destructive worth of a person.
The atheist in fact talks of the true, the good, and the beautiful, but never asks
why we admire or pursue such categories. These are ideas by which we judge
everything, as Mortimer Adler points out. The same applies for liberty, equality,
and justice. These are ideas by which we seek to live. Wars are fought over
them. Books are written because of them. If such categories exist, which of the
worldviews is able to explain them or justify them or sustain them? Atheism
simply cannot do it. To be sure, it has been tried. Sam Harris writes on it in The
Moral Landscape, as does Stephen Hawking in The Grand Design. But, alas,
there is no designer and there is no objective moral lawgiver. We make laws and
claim credit. We design beauty and claim the credit. But is the backdrop of these
categories free from such necessary connections? The counterintuitive
conclusions are indefensible. We will write books that can break up lives and
defend freedom, but we deny God the same prerogative. We cannot restore life.
He can. We do not have infinite knowledge. He does.
Ideals matter. They all matter because of eternity and because of the character
of God. Eternity, morality, and, next, accountability.
Accountability

With the jettisoning of eternity and morality, we return to the inevitable: Are
we as human beings accountable to anyone or to anything? Or is it just that we
need to avoid being caught? So I go back to my first challenge: When Dawkins
brands God with all these nasty descriptions, what is he saying? Is he saying that
such a God exists and is not worthy of our worship? Or is he saying that no such
God exists and is the creation of people?
Aha! That’s it, isn’t it? It is the people who believe in God that he is
lampooning, not God. He doesn’t believe God exists; he is slandering the
thinking and beliefs of people. So when people such as Dawkins mock God, they
are really mocking people who believe in God. It is the wretchedness of
humanity that he is talking about, not God. It is precisely what happens when
man plays God.
For the Christian, then, the question still remains: How can “God command
these” things if we claim that this is God’s word? These atrocities listed by
Dawkins, at times so ridiculously and tendentiously stated, still need some
contextual explanation. Were they really ordered by Him? Was God used as a
foil to do one’s own bidding? Was there a reason for some of the hard to
understand judgments? Are there contextual explanations? Is there a difference
between some of the real consequences of turning one’s back upon God and so-
called arbitrary interventions by God? Were there built-in covenantal
entailments for a covenant agreed upon for a nation’s good? Are there
differences between ceremonial profanities and moral resistance?
All these and numerous other contextual matters have to be carefully
considered, in contrast to the brash and angry responses of Dawkins. He clearly
desires an end position and manipulates texts to get to that emotional outburst. A
Bible scholar, he is not. God becomes a very easy target when we wish to create
a caricature of Him. The angry outbursts tell us more about the resistance within
the heart of man than it does on the reach of God for our hearts. We must get to
these issues in response, and we hope to get to these as the material unfolds and
present some greater context in my final chapter.
Charity

Some time ago, I was at a university open forum and a student asked me for
my view on gay marriage. I knew right off the bat that it was a question designed
to put me, as a Christian, with my back to the wall. So I responded with a
question of my own: “What kind of culture are we living in? Theonomous,
heteronomous, or autonomous?”
A theonomous culture believes that God’s law is so engraved into the human
conscience that by design we think His thoughts and are naturally driven toward
His higher calling. Though this perhaps used to be the dominant thinking of
Western culture, it no longer is.
The second kind of culture is heteronomous. Heteros means another, and a
heteronomous culture is one in which the thinking of the masses is dictated by a
demagogue or a power base that forces its own morality upon them. In religious
terms, Islam is a heteronomous culture. In secular terms, Marxism is a
heteronomous culture. In the West, we repudiate that kind of dictation of
morality.
This means we are neither theonomous nor heteronomous. We are, strictly
speaking, an autonomous culture. We are self-governing in our moral choices.
The questioner granted that conclusion.
At that point I said, “Now let me ask you this. If we are an autonomous
culture, will you give me the privilege of making my own moral choices, or the
moment I do so, will you switch to a heteronomous mode and dictate my
choice?” He remained silent. Charity is not an easy deduction in an anti-God
state of mind. But it is the logical outworking of a Christian worldview.
This is the Christian ethic at work. I am given the freedom to choose, and I
am loved even when I make the wrong choices. But I am graphically reminded
in the mission and work of Jesus Christ that, though I can choose my behavior, I
cannot transpose the consequences that are inextricably bound to a particular
choice. The greatest reality is that even in my wrong choice, I am still loved by
God who woos me back to Himself by making the most sacrificial gift of all—a
Savior for my rebellious heart.
Charity is a soft word. A sacrificial love is the substance of that expression, a
love that reveals the pain of wrong choices by paying the price in One who did
not make that choice. That is why the supreme expression of the gospel is the
word grace. Some languages have a hard time even translating it. It is the richest
word for the most impoverished heart, and it is the inheritance of one who
merely asks of the Judge of all the earth to extend that to the one who has
wronged Him.
Remember the conversation with the sheikh who said that forgiveness is only
for those who deserve it? Or the mocking of Dawkins, for whom grace is
probably a foreign concept? Grace and forgiveness are at the core of the message
of Jesus Christ. That truth stands tall in the light of secular gods, or for that
matter other religions of the world.
For the atheist, man becomes god; the body becomes the soul; time becomes
eternity; the profane becomes sacred.
In the teaching of Jesus, eternity, morality, accountability, and charity define
the nature of our existence and the pattern of our behavior. Is it any wonder that
the Christian faith is the richest faith in music and worship? It is based on a
relationship, expressed in worship, demonstrated in charity, a great leveler of
humanity, and it reaches into eternity. It can take captive the mind of a child and
set free the greatest philosopher—both can express wonder in the most simple
yet sublime terms.
The best known verse in the Bible is John 3:16. In fewer than thirty words we
have everything stated: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and
only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Unpack this profound verse with me:

The starting point is filial;

The giving is unconditional;
The gift is relational;
The range is eternal;
At the core it is judicial.

Contrary to the criticism of a naturalist such as Dawkins, there is a law by

which this world operates. The law of God is existentially necessary and was
empirically verifiable in the life, message, death, and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. That is why in countries that were once totally atheistic, the masses still
clamor for His message and, even at the risk of death, will cling to that belief
and hope. Jesus has been repeatedly crucified and buried, but He rises up to
outlive His pallbearers in history and in the hearts of billions of His followers.
Next, we turn to one of the most influential rumors of God’s death: Science
has buried God. The scientism that posits the all-sufficiency of science is
perhaps the most widespread form of and supposed justification for atheism. But
can it be sustained?