Atheists are always trying to be clever but rarely are. Their new advertising campaign carries this line:
“Atheism: A Personal Relationship with Reality.”
What’s real in a materialistic, evolutionary, and amoral worldview? These atheists are begging the question. That is, they are assuming what they first must prove. They are assuming there is no God, that God is not real. Their idea of reality is godless.
They are also assuming that there is an entity called “personal.” The world’s most powerful computer is not a person. An atom is not a person. Two atoms do not make a person. A group of atoms is not a person. So do trillions of atoms make a person? What is it about all these additional atoms that makes matter a person?
Some will say that it’s the human’s ability to reason that makes him or her a person. How do atheists account for reason? All that a scientist can measure is electrical activity and the stimulation of parts of the brain. Where is the mind in all that matter?
How does an atheist account for the personhood of humans in a purely materialistic cosmos?
Debbie Allen, coordinator for the San Diego Coalition of Reason, said the following in a statement.
“We want to express how using intelligence to free oneself of the god idea can open the curtain to an inspiring new outlook. Atheism is positive and offers grounding in the real world.”
How do atheists account for intelligence given materialistic assumptions about the origin of what they call “reality”? Show me intelligence. Show me the mind. Show me the qualifications of intelligence based on a fixed materialistic standard. Remember, atheists are materialists. There is nothing above or beyond matter.
There’s the larger problem of sorting out what’s positive and negative. A thief, a designation that assumes morality, believes that not working for a living and stealing for a living are positives. Adolf Hitler believed he was doing positive things for the German people and the German nation. Where in the material cosmos is there a command that says, “Thou shall not steal”? I’ve never seen one. Is it imprinted on our DNA like the color of our hair and eyes and whether we will be left handed or right handed? And even if they were, who says anybody has to go along with these DNA implanted laws?
If we go back many millennia and followed the claims of evolutionary theorists through the incremental ticks of time, we would see the strong taking advantage of the weak. Was this positive or negative? Right or wrong? Moral or immoral? What we are today, what the atheist calls “reality,” got here by the strong killing then eating the weak. There were no moral judgments then, so why are there moral judgments now?
All atheists can say is “that’s reality” — embrace it with gusto! There are no fixed standards of judgment to say whether any action is good reality or bad reality.
Atheists can’t see in the future. Maybe Hitler was ahead of his time. He could have been what evolutionists call a “hopeful monster,” a surviving radical mutation that moves the evolutionary ladder up several rungs. Who’s to say that what he did was bad? All an atheist can say is the end result is “reality.” It existed. It happened in a certain time and place. It was real. We have pictures and eye-witness accounts of what we call atrocities.
There are Jews who survived the holocaust, the killing fields, and the Gulag. It was very real to them. So let’s take the new atheist campaign and substitute the word reality with a few of our own:
- “Atheism: A Personal Relationship with the Holocaust.”
- “Atheism: A Personal Relationship with the Killing Fields.”
- “Atheism: A Personal Relationship with Slavery.”
- “Atheism: A Personal Relationship with Rape.”
These are all reality to those who experienced them. And at death, what will be the atheist’s relationship with reality? At death, what is the difference between those who designed, built, and oversaw the gulags and gas chambers and a “good atheist” who denounced them? Nothing. What any of these people did in life has no bearing on what happens to them at death. So why not rape, pillage, murder, bully, and steal? They are merely social conventions, most of which are the result of a belief in God and a morality based on His character. With God out of the picture, there is no ultimate judge of what any of us does in this world.
For the atheist, in the end, reality bites back.