What is atheism? Well, it comes in many forms, but we'll concentrate on Naturalistic Atheism, which is basically the idea that nothing exists aside from Space, Time and Matter (the sum of Space, Time and Matter is generally referred to as the Universe, and the Universe is often used interchangeably with the word "Nature," which explains the name). The rest is just either convenient or inconvenient illusion created by human consciousness. If that is true, then nothing supernatural can exist.
There are several reasons naturalistic atheists give to prove their case. The most common are:
1: The universe can create itself, so God isn't a necessary reality. The laws of nature would be enough to create the universe.
2: There's no evidence that God created the universe anyway.
3: Natural Selection is a suitable explanation for the origin of life.
4: Evil wouldn't exist if God was good, so if God is good and evil exists, then God cannot exist.
5: God is a more difficult thing to explain than the universe, so he is an impossible explanation of the origin of the universe.
Let's get started.
Nothing can create itself. I'll borrow from John Lennox here: (X + [create] = Y; X + [create] = X) If X creates Y, then I can explain the existence of Y by the existence and agency of its predecessor and creator, X. However, if X creates X, one can't explain X's existence by the existence or agency of a predecessor or creator, since it had none. In order to say that X created itself, it would have to be its own predecessor, making it eternal and created at the same time. So, saying that the universe created itself is rather like saying that someone could be her own mother.
Another problem with this argument is that the Laws of Nature can't create anything. In point of fact, the laws of nature don't in themselves exist at all. Hear me out: We have a law of gravity because the law of gravity is a succinct acknowledgement and description of the gravitic behaviors of the universe. Similarly, the color yellow doesn't exist either. Yellow light exists, but only because our eyes interpret and describe the particular behavior of light particles, using the perception of color as the description. But while the particles and their behaviors exist, the color yellow is merely a description of those behaviors. Similarly, the laws of nature are descriptions of the universe's behaviors, and so can't be the predecessor or creator of the universe, since the thing being described has to first exist (at least conceptually) in order to be described.
As we have seen above, in order for the universe to have begun to exist (as the global scientific community agrees that it did), it must have had a predecessor. Some have argued that this predecessor was merely another version of this same universe. Others say that there is a universe generator, creating a slough of universes, and ours just happened to be one of the ones that came from that. My argument is that it wasn't just any predecessor - it was a super-powerful, intelligent, benevolent, personal creative force that most would refer to simply as "God."
There are several reasons why the creative force of the universe was probably intelligent. For one thing, while life may have evolved, the universe certainly didn't. It was just as ordered at 14.5 Billion BCE as it is now (in its nature and processes, not in its overall organization - a denial of that would be a contradiction of the second law of thermodynamics), so the universe was done right, the very first time around. Secondly, anything containing data is the product of an intelligent mind. For example, the words you're reading on this screen right now contain data that is designed to be recorded by my keyboard, encoded in the letters on the screen, visualized by your eyes and brain, and finally decoded by your brain in order to bring about a desired result. DNA contains data. It's its own written language with words, letters and phrases, and it contains information designed to be recorded in protein strands, encoded in specific groupings of molecules, and finally decoded by the cell's genetic decoding mechanisms in order to put the instructions in the data into effect. DNA is rather like an instruction manual for single cell organisms to live by. It is recorded, it can be decoded and understood, and it contains data. Therefore, it stands to reason that it is likely the product of an intelligent mind. We would never conclude that the word antidisestablishmentarianism, or the word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis were randomly organized, or even this blog post, or even the computer on which it was typed (the computer did evolve, but by a very guided, intelligent process), and yet people all over the world claim that DNA, a long, complex written code for the formation, construction and function of organisms randomly accumulated over billions of years as part of a completely random, mindless, unguided process. My incredulity does not constitute a valid argument, but I remain incredulous.
There are several reasons why the creative force of the universe was probably intelligent. For one thing, while life may have evolved, the universe certainly didn't. It was just as ordered at 14.5 Billion BCE as it is now (in its nature and processes, not in its overall organization - a denial of that would be a contradiction of the second law of thermodynamics), so the universe was done right, the very first time around. Secondly, anything containing data is the product of an intelligent mind. For example, the words you're reading on this screen right now contain data that is designed to be recorded by my keyboard, encoded in the letters on the screen, visualized by your eyes and brain, and finally decoded by your brain in order to bring about a desired result. DNA contains data. It's its own written language with words, letters and phrases, and it contains information designed to be recorded in protein strands, encoded in specific groupings of molecules, and finally decoded by the cell's genetic decoding mechanisms in order to put the instructions in the data into effect. DNA is rather like an instruction manual for single cell organisms to live by. It is recorded, it can be decoded and understood, and it contains data. Therefore, it stands to reason that it is likely the product of an intelligent mind. We would never conclude that the word antidisestablishmentarianism, or the word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis were randomly organized, or even this blog post, or even the computer on which it was typed (the computer did evolve, but by a very guided, intelligent process), and yet people all over the world claim that DNA, a long, complex written code for the formation, construction and function of organisms randomly accumulated over billions of years as part of a completely random, mindless, unguided process. My incredulity does not constitute a valid argument, but I remain incredulous.
The second argument, that there is no evidence that God was involved, is partly explained by the above paragraph on DNA. A second point is the understanding that the universe did not create itself, did not exist before it existed, and so requires something outside the universe, or outside of nature in other words - and at that point, you may as well say super-natural - in order to come into being. The word supernatural just tells us that what we're referring to didn't originate in the known universe. So anything, even if it's real, that isn't the universe and wasn't born in this universe is by definition supernatural. The universe began to exist and can't have created itself. The universe was created - therefore, the supernatural must exist. Er go, there is, or was, something beyond the known universe. Because of this discovery by science, it is my conviction that we are about to witness the demise of Naturalistic Atheism in the coming decades. So in answering this second argument, we have the evidence that whatever made the universe has to have been supernatural in order to preexist the universe, highly powerful in order to produce the incredible amounts of matter and energy extant in the universe, and highly intelligent in order to arrange the universe in an ordered fashion and to encode instructions in the form of DNA in even the very earliest and crudest of organisms.
The third argument refers to Natural Selection. The problem with Natural Selection being used as an explanation for the origin of life is that Darwin himself used it as an explanation for the origin of species, out of common ancestral bloodlines. Another problem is that evolution cannot bridge the gap between lifeless goo and living tissue by an unintelligent, unguided process - let alone a random one.
The very simplest organisms known to Man (single cell organisms) are comprised of a great many moving parts. Evolution cannot account for the sudden formation of all of these parts. In a cell, there are a great number of tiny parts and molecules that are entirely necessary in order for the cell to survive. Evolutionists make the argument that there may be simpler systems that we as yet cannot imagine. And that's a valid argument, except that we don't have evidence for it, so we have to accept the best option based on the extant evidence.
Evolutionists often explain the origin of life as involving a primordial soup, containing all of the vital components for constructing a living cell, from which living cells spontaneously sprouted, and evolution continues to this day (or so the claim goes). The problem with this is that this is an even more complicated and impossible situation than what I call the Cadillac Problem. Let's say that you have all of the necessary parts to build a 1969 Cadillac DeVille, and you stir them all together in a giant vat. The odds of the automobile being perfectly and tightly constructed in such a way that facilitates perfect and continuing function are just about impossible. And even if the car is constructed perfectly, which is almost impossible, it still won't start on its own. Similarly, not only is the cell's formation dubious, but once the cell has been constructed, there's no guarantee that it will jump-start itself. After all, a physically complete cell doesn't necessarily function in the modern day. A dead cell deteriorates, even if it's physically perfect. Once function has ceased (or in this case, wasn't begun), the cell will immediately begin to break down.
Bottom line: These complex mechanisms within living cells can't have evolved instantaneously in the very first generation. Just the formation of DNA in the first cell ought to tell us that cells probably didn't evolve on their own.
Another argument is that if God is good, then evil wouldn't exist, so if evil does exist (and it does), then God can't exist. This argument is problematic for its own reasons. The most interesting problem is that the absence of God leaves us with no absolute definitions for good or evil - something that naturalists gladly embrace in the name of relative morality, but unfortunately, this concept also defeats the idea that evil is an objective reality that disproves God's existence.
God can indeed be more difficult to explain than the universe itself, but that certainly doesn't mean that God can't be the creator of the universe. For example, if I were to point out this paragraph on a sheet of paper and tell you that I was the one who wrote it, then by the same concept, it could be argued that I can't be the creator of this paragraph because a human being is a much more difficult thing to explain than a paragraph on a sheet of paper. So in reality, we see that the process more often works in the reverse. Simple things are caused by complex things. Dogs cause barks, kids make sand castles, people write words, stars form planets, complex volcanic forces create tiny pebbles - and the list goes on.
I hope this brief list of answers to popular atheist objections to the existence of God has been helpful. If you are a Christian, please feel free to share these in conversation with your friends when the subject comes up - just don't be in-your-face about it. And remember the purpose of apologetics: To deconstruct intellectual objections to Christianity in order to demonstrate that the objector's problem was never really intellectual in the first place, but emotional. Sharing intellectual arguments won't save most people. They have to come to an emotional place of trust in God, after the intellectual objections have been successfully deconstructed.
If you are an atheist, I appreciate that you're reading the last paragraph. Not everyone would read the whole article, so it's encouraging that you have an open enough mind to do so. I hope you won't take my word for any of this, but keep searching. Go looking for these arguments and their more lengthy explanations. More importantly, look up the atheist objections that I have listed - and the rest - and compare them to Christian answers. My experience is that the right Christian answers stand head and shoulders over atheist theory. I especially recommend William Lane Craig, Frank Turek and JP Moreland.
Thanks for reading!
The very simplest organisms known to Man (single cell organisms) are comprised of a great many moving parts. Evolution cannot account for the sudden formation of all of these parts. In a cell, there are a great number of tiny parts and molecules that are entirely necessary in order for the cell to survive. Evolutionists make the argument that there may be simpler systems that we as yet cannot imagine. And that's a valid argument, except that we don't have evidence for it, so we have to accept the best option based on the extant evidence.
Evolutionists often explain the origin of life as involving a primordial soup, containing all of the vital components for constructing a living cell, from which living cells spontaneously sprouted, and evolution continues to this day (or so the claim goes). The problem with this is that this is an even more complicated and impossible situation than what I call the Cadillac Problem. Let's say that you have all of the necessary parts to build a 1969 Cadillac DeVille, and you stir them all together in a giant vat. The odds of the automobile being perfectly and tightly constructed in such a way that facilitates perfect and continuing function are just about impossible. And even if the car is constructed perfectly, which is almost impossible, it still won't start on its own. Similarly, not only is the cell's formation dubious, but once the cell has been constructed, there's no guarantee that it will jump-start itself. After all, a physically complete cell doesn't necessarily function in the modern day. A dead cell deteriorates, even if it's physically perfect. Once function has ceased (or in this case, wasn't begun), the cell will immediately begin to break down.
Bottom line: These complex mechanisms within living cells can't have evolved instantaneously in the very first generation. Just the formation of DNA in the first cell ought to tell us that cells probably didn't evolve on their own.
Another argument is that if God is good, then evil wouldn't exist, so if evil does exist (and it does), then God can't exist. This argument is problematic for its own reasons. The most interesting problem is that the absence of God leaves us with no absolute definitions for good or evil - something that naturalists gladly embrace in the name of relative morality, but unfortunately, this concept also defeats the idea that evil is an objective reality that disproves God's existence.
God can indeed be more difficult to explain than the universe itself, but that certainly doesn't mean that God can't be the creator of the universe. For example, if I were to point out this paragraph on a sheet of paper and tell you that I was the one who wrote it, then by the same concept, it could be argued that I can't be the creator of this paragraph because a human being is a much more difficult thing to explain than a paragraph on a sheet of paper. So in reality, we see that the process more often works in the reverse. Simple things are caused by complex things. Dogs cause barks, kids make sand castles, people write words, stars form planets, complex volcanic forces create tiny pebbles - and the list goes on.
I hope this brief list of answers to popular atheist objections to the existence of God has been helpful. If you are a Christian, please feel free to share these in conversation with your friends when the subject comes up - just don't be in-your-face about it. And remember the purpose of apologetics: To deconstruct intellectual objections to Christianity in order to demonstrate that the objector's problem was never really intellectual in the first place, but emotional. Sharing intellectual arguments won't save most people. They have to come to an emotional place of trust in God, after the intellectual objections have been successfully deconstructed.
If you are an atheist, I appreciate that you're reading the last paragraph. Not everyone would read the whole article, so it's encouraging that you have an open enough mind to do so. I hope you won't take my word for any of this, but keep searching. Go looking for these arguments and their more lengthy explanations. More importantly, look up the atheist objections that I have listed - and the rest - and compare them to Christian answers. My experience is that the right Christian answers stand head and shoulders over atheist theory. I especially recommend William Lane Craig, Frank Turek and JP Moreland.
Thanks for reading!
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