Confronting Atheism in a World That is Not How It's Supposed to Be

Every time I receive a notification on my phone saying, "Breaking News," my first inclination is to cringe. Lately, breaking news has been nothing less than tragic news - horrifying news about how one person has murderously taken the life of (at least) one other person. It's "breaking news" because it has a tendency to get the attention of the masses. Most people will follow the link out of a deeply strange curiosity - out of a desire to understand why things like this happen.

The Christian faith provides a moral framework by which one can look upon such actions as wrong and inherently evil. Christians can rightly and, without arbitrariness, say, "This is not the way things are supposed to be."

There is another worldview, however, at work in our day. It is the atheistic evolutionary worldview whereby its proponents seek to answer the questions of human existence and experience. Science alone is sufficient to provide us with these answers (given we simply observe the evidence through a naturalistic lens).

To the naturalist, our universe is nothing more than the product one "thing" bumping into another "thing" a long time ago, and producing another "thing" which produced another "thing" when it bumped into some"thing" else (whew!). After billions of years, these chain reactions produced the organism we call human.

For the naturalistic atheist, people are nothing more than the product of genes trying to survive. Staying alive and reproducing other bodies that are good at staying alive is the only purposeful mechanism of cellular life in the world. This is the process of nature to winnow out less-than-efficient molecular organisms. The strong survive. The weak die off. This is just the way things are.

I wonder, however, what the naturalist thinks when he receives the type of "breaking news" I spoke of before. What goes on in his mind when he hears the news of a six year old little girl who was video taped by her father as she was forced to perform oral sex on him (this happened, by the way, a few years back - the man is now, thankfully, in prison).

Do they see it "scientifically" as the cause and effect process of molecular survival? Will they go to straight to the scientific method in an effort to figure out what is going on in this poor girl's sphere of the universe? I wonder if they will begin with a hypothesis before they jump to a judgment. I wonder if their initial deepest problem lies in the question "What is this?" rather than the judgment, "This should not be!"

I doubt it.

The naturalistic, evolutionary world view has no category at all for the repulsive feelings every image bearer feels when they hear such a story. A person like Richard Dawkins can only make observations about "what is". He has, however, absolutely no basis for making assertions as to "what ought to be." He can only state that the father did this to his little girl; not that the father should not have done it.

And this is the danger of atheistic naturalism. It reduces humanity to the product of mindless molecular reactions. It handcuffs these "products" from making moral judgments about what "ought" and what "ought not" be. In a society in which this worldview pervades, and where objective morality is reasoned away, only the strong survive. The weak are left to die off.

This world, for the evolutionist, is nothing more than natural selection taking its course - the genetic quest for survival. Some genes are not so efficient (like the father mentioned above), and consequently die off.

Am I saying all atheists condone what this father did? No. I'm not. I know atheists who would deeply desire the man's judicial punishment. All I am saying is, given their worldview, they have no basis for those judicial desires. The fact that they jump to judgments faster than hypotheses, is evidence that people are more than the product of mindless molecular reactions. The deep conviction they have, that "this is not how things are supposed to be," is evidence of the very God they seek to deny.