Why Are Atheists Fools?
The Fool Has Said In His Heart, “There Is No God….” Psalm 14:1
When we think about atheists, our minds tend to go back into history to the likes of Francois Voltaire, Frederick Nietzsche, Julian Huxley, and more recently Madelyn Murray O’hare and Michael Newdow who is on a crusade to remove every trace of God from American society. There is an aggressive atheism in the world today that is being showcased on television documentaries, for instance on the likes of the Discovery Channel, that are completely atheistic and evolutionary in their philosophy. The Christian Faith is constantly being maligned by comedians such as George Carlin and Bill Maher, just to name a couple of the better known comic atheists.
It wasn’t that long ago that John Lennon of The Beatles flaunted his atheistic songs such as God and Imagine. In them he sings, “I don’t believe in the Bible. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in Jesus. I just believe in me, Yoko and me, that’s reality.” Or again, Lennon sings, “Imagine there’s no heaven…no hell below us, above us only sky…no religion too. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.”
Lennon is just one example of the modern atheist’s call to arms! They not only confess atheism, but now they boldly summon proselytes. They proudly hang up their flags of anti-God defiance which shout that there is no such thing as a Maker and Governor of the universe called God. You see, not only are these modern atheists crusading for their atheistic belief system, but they are touting atheism as the solution to all of the divisions in the world that religion has caused. Get rid of Jesus and God, and then the world will become a much more friendly place in which to live.
In short, the battle of the forces of atheism against theism has been openly declared and is being hotly waged, and it is global in its scope. The atheistic attacks on God have been centralized in the United Supreme Court’s anti-God, anti-Ten Commandments, anti-prayer laws now being implemented in the American public schools. Atheism vs. Theism has truly become “The American Civil War” of modern times.
It has always been my experience in well-meaning church circles, that when people hear about atheists and what they actually believe and say, religious folks, as in my background, tightly scrunch up their faces in holy horror and stunned shock, and say something like, “Unbelievable! How can they believe and say such things? What’s wrong with those people?”
Yes, I know, it is gut-wrenching to hear and smell atheists breathing out their anti-God noxious fumes and that against the very God Who gave them breath to begin with. Christians are aghast when they hear atheist attack dogs like Woody Allen say, “Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on the weekend.” But don’t let him fool you, for when it comes right down to it, the Woody Allens of life are scared to death about death and eternity. That is why he also once said, “I don’t know anybody who can contemplate his own death and hum a tune at the same time.” Not only that, but very few atheists denounce God or make jokes about the Scriptures when they begin to walk through the lengthening shadows of the valley of death.
Yes, there are many people whose numbers have been growing as the world spiritually and morally deteriorates, who actually say that there is no spiritual, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent being that is called God. Rather, they hold to the view that the world is of and from itself, and there is nothing and no one who is above it or distinct from it.
Of course, if we believe the Bible to be God’s Word, as I most certainly do, then we should not be that surprised, for we were already forewarned by God Himself that there are and will continue to be atheists in the world. And He has a very unflattering name for them, as we read in Psalm 14:1,
“The fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God.'”
Today, they not only say it in their hearts, but trumpet it proudly with their mouths. In their pompous anti-Godness, it would be good for them to hear what G. K. Chesterton once said,
“If there was no God, there would be no atheists.”
They don’t know it, but God is the only reason that there can even be atheists. If it wasn’t for Him, there would be no God not to believe in.
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I. The Heart Of Atheism
It is most significant for our understanding of this whole issue that the Lord tells us about those who when they say that He does not exist, they do so in their hearts first of all. We read in Psalm 14:1,
“The fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no God’….”
We must fix this in our thoughts right from the start, namely, that it is in the “Cardio-Council of the Atheist” where his atheism is birthed and formed. Atheism is a passionate choice, just as theism is a passionate choice. Both belief and non-belief are heart choices. It is in his sin-darkened heart that the atheist makes his choice, and not only dethrones God but summarily erases Him from any possible existence. We will find the same thing repeated in Psalm 53:1, just in case we missed it the first time.
But we must quickly be assured of this, that where the heart of man is concerned, it will surely seep into and saturate the head and his entire thought process. That is why we read elsewhere in Psalm 10:4,
“…All his thoughts are, ‘There is no God.’”
Not some of his thoughts, but all of his thoughts are about a non-God world. When the spirit of atheism gets hold of a man, it is pervasive. Just as the Christian embraces the Lord with all of his heart and mind, so the atheist rejects the very thought of God with all of his heart and mind. The atheistic heart quickly puts his mind to work to come up with arguments and reasons to convince and content his atheistic heart that it is completely justified in its anti-God, no-God posture.
But be assured of this, as we read in Proverbs 4:23 about the heart,
“…for from it flow the springs of life.”
The heart of man is control central, and it is there where atheism first springs forth. As the bent of the heart, so the bent of the thoughts! Even as the bent of the tree trunk determines the bent and the angle of the branches. Atheism begins in the man’s inclinations, not his convictions. Man’s heart is naturally inclined away from and against God. (Romans 8:7) His no-God convictions flow from his anti-God inclinations.
I know that what the prophet Jeremiah says about man’s heart is really difficult for man to accept. After all, the heart in man’s estimate throughout the ages is the center of romance, love, and everything good and gooey. The heart is viewed as not only good, but what is best about man. After all, how can that wonderful and warm symbol of Valentine’s Day ever be thought of as vile or vicious? Even Christians get swept away by these sentimental notions. But the prophet Jeremiah says quite the opposite in Jeremiah 17:9,
“The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick….”
And by sick, he does not mean lovesick, but rather, sin-sick. It is sin-sickened and weakened and therefore most defenseless against and vulnerable to Satan’s deceitfulness and atheistic lies. Yes, Satan! John 8:44 tells us about the Devil,
“…for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
Well then, atheism which says there is no God, is an out and out lie which comes from Satan who is the author of all lies. The sin-sick and deceived heart is no match for Satan. The human heart spiritually speaking is not stout-hearted but weak-hearted. If Satan is to get a hold in man, he must enter at the point of greatest weakness, and that point is the human heart. For when one is desperately sick, he is also desperately weak, and cannot resist the devil. And once he has gripped the deceitful heart of a man, Satan can control everything else, including his thoughts!
It is in the human heart that Satan plants the seeds of, “There can’t be a God with all of this misery in the world,” or, “If there is a God, who would want Him anyway after all He has allowed you to go through.” Then finally he drops the big bomb, “Why don’t you just admit the obvious, there is no God. There just can’t be. It doesn’t make any sense.” That is the “Father of Lies” coup d’état in the heart of man, as the Devil then snatches the scepter of rule and nestles himself so comfy and cozy on the throne of the deceived human heart which then becomes Satan’s kingdom of darkness. At which place and point, the atheist is birthed, who but parrots Satan’s words, “There is no God.” Such lying words are music to the Devil’s ears.
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II. The Stages Of Atheism
Let’s look at atheism from another vantage point. We must understand that the human heart, while not at first gripped by full-blown non-God atheism, is by nature potentially inclined to unbelief – unGod. That is to say, I don’t deny God’s existence, I just choose to ignore Him and live my own life as if He isn’t there. Isaiah 53:6 puts it this way,
“All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has
turned to his own way….”
Away from God! We all have this natural inclination to get as far away from God as we can, even though deep down we know that He exists. That is true of every one of us. Man by nature doesn’t necessarily renounce God’s existence, he just avoids Him. Classic unbelief! Classic unGod! Classic us by nature! That is to say, all of us by nature have the inherent potential for unbelief. It is much easier for us to not believe than to believe.
Added to the difficulty of believing is that to believe, we must give up the tastiness and enjoyment of sin for a God that we cannot see, touch, taste etc. Faith must fix itself upon an unseen world, while unbelief fixes itself upon the seen world which is much easier.
Some people move from unGod unbelief into a most likely no-God disbelief. That is to say, there could be a God but they don’t see any real convincing evidence to believe that there is One. So they choose not to believe that any God exists and they live accordingly. God has no relevance to their lives. It is traditionally called agnosticism. Romans 1:28 says,
“And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer….”
They don’t deny 100% His existence, but rather, they choose not to acknowledge it. As one agnostic put it, “I don’t spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don’t consider that a relevant question. It is unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I cannot worry about.” That pretty well says it. We all by nature have the capability to move from UN to AG, from unbelief to agnosticism. The AG seeds are there ready to germinate.
And then of course, there are those who move from UN to AG to NO, that is, there is no God. Atheism! As Clarence Darrow put it, “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.” In other words, this God thing is nothing but a nursery rhyme and a fairy tale. Mother Goose is fictional and so is God. I am presently in dialogue with a prominent American atheist, and he makes it very plain that the God in Whom I believe is nothing more than a figment of my imagination. I respond to him that his non-God is a figment of his imagination. But I always tell him that Jesus loves and died for the sins of all men, which includes the UNS, the AGS, and the NOS.
All of this is why sustained unbelief is so dangerous. Unbelief can move through and into all of the other stages. You see, natural man is dead in sin. (Ephesians 2:1) All spiritual truth must be spiritually discerned, and man by nature is dead spiritually and in big trouble from the start. He is a sitting duck not only for unbelief, but for agnosticism and atheism.
We must face this obvious truth, namely, that spiritual realities can only be discerned spiritually. That is obvious! Run Dick run, go get the ball. Likewise, things that are sensible must be grasped by the senses. If your senses are dulled, and your smeller doesn’t smell, or your hearer doesn’t hear, or your seers don’t see, there will be no apprehending of sense things in your life. My wife’s taste buds are loosing their sensitivity, and it is hard for her to sense at times what is over or under salted. I am her taste sense gauge.
Or again, intelligible things must be grasped by the intelligence, or, intelligibly. I want this teaching to be super-intelligible to you, and part of that process is assuming that you can reasonably and rationally apprehend. So too, spiritual things are spiritually discerned! That makes sense doesn’t it? There must be a likeness and suitableness between the object and the faculty that processes it. Right? Right! However, natural man’s spiritual processor is broken, not working, kaput! So the Apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians 2:14,
“But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God; for they
are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them,
because they are spiritually appraised.”
Man, which includes you and me and everybody, needs a brand new heart that can spiritually discern. That is why we have the glorious promise from God in Ezekiel 36:26,
“Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within in you
(able to spiritually discern); and I will remove the heart of stone
(spiritually dead) from your flesh, and give you a heart
of flesh (spiritually sensitive).”
Wow! That explains why one man listens to a sermon based faithfully and fully on the Word of God, and in that sermon he finds nourishing food by which he spiritually thrives and grows. At the same time, another fellow hears the same sermon and gets nothing out of it because he is without a spiritually perceiving heart.
Or again! Think of it this way! You see, we are told in I John 1:5 that:
“…God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.”
In other words, God is pure spiritual light, undimmed and easily seen (spiritually discerned). Man’s difficulty in believing in God is not because God is a spiritual dim bulb. It rather is the darkness of our sin-blackened hearts that blocks out the brightness of His shining. That is exactly why we read about Jesus in John 1:4-5,
“In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines
in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”
The non-comprehension does not come from a lack of potency in His light, but from the potency of the darkness in man’s heart. Every truth of God’s Word has brightness in it that is so powerful, that it literally can and does become a lamp unto our feet and a light upon our path in this world of darkness. But then can you begin to imagine how darkened man’s spiritual discernment is when it refuses to be penetrated by the light in which there is no darkness at all? In fact atheists believe, mind you, that their belief about there being no God is enlightened wisdom. This brings to mind the words of Christ in Luke 11:35,
“Then watch out that the light in you may not be darkness!”
Horrors, for if the light in man be darkness, how great is the darkness.
ILLUSTRATION
You and I can go from dark to darker to darkest! We too could move from unbelief to agnosticism to atheism. Why? To put it yet in another way, but in principle the same, we all start out in life spiritually blind. During the Christmas season of 1879, a newspaper reporter in Boston saw three little girls standing in front of a store window full of toys. One of them was blind. Coming closer, he heard the other two trying to describe the playthings to their sightless friend. He said he had never thought of how difficult it would be to explain what something looks like to someone who has never been able to see. That incident became the basis for a newspaper story.
Two weeks later this same reporter attended a meeting conducted by Dwight L. Moody. His purpose was to catch the great evangelist in some inconsistency and expose him. He was greatly surprised, therefore, when Moody used the reporter’s own newspaper account of the three children to illustrate a spiritual truth. “Just as the blind girl couldn’t visualize the toys,” said Moody, “so an unsaved person can’t see Christ in all His glory.” Moody then went on to say that God opens the eyes of anyone who acknowledges his sin and accepts the Savior in humble faith. The newsman was touched by Moody’s words and saw that he too was blind and in need of Christ’s healing touch. There is only one who can heal spiritual blindness, and that is Christ.
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III. The Foolishness Of Atheism
It has always struck me that God is so brutally frank about how He sees atheists. In Psalm 14:1, God calls atheists fools. I mean, there are a lot of immoral and rotten people in this world that He doesn’t categorize with nearly as demeaning a descriptive. What is going on here? He really gets all over the God-deniers. Slam bam! They are summarily lumped together by God as all a bunch of fools. Yikes! The Hebrew word for fool used in Psalm 14:1 is nabal which means empty and void. In other words, He is really calling them empty heads. There are thick-headed people in the world, and then there are empty-headed people in the world. Both are a real challenge! But at least the thick-headed person has something in his head to work with. Empty heads do not!
God is saying about these atheist-fools that they are empty of all sound reason and wisdom. In no uncertain terms we know from the Word of God that the atheist is an empty head and his atheism is an empty philosophy. All the more important when I realize that prominent atheists are often viewed as some of the most brilliant people in the world! God says that when it comes right down to it, they are dumber than a rock. Amazing stuff!
It is interesting isn’t it how Christians are portrayed by Hollywood and on television. The percentages are very high that the Christian will be characterized as a retard or a degenerate or both. Basically, that was exactly the case in the film Inherit The Wind, in which the religious townspeople were presented as a bunch of ignorant rednecks, and the prosecuting attorney as a Bible-thumping, emotionally affected dohdoh. On the other hand the attorney for the defense, a Bible-mocking, God-slandering atheist was conveyed as a brilliant logician and orator. Typical!
So it becomes us to confront these pseudo-reasoned and pseudo-superior atheists. We must answer all of their arguments and expose their folly head to head. So we read in Proverbs 26:5,
“Answer a fool as his folly deserves, lest he be wise in
his own eyes.”
This is how it goes. When the devil has planted his no-God lie in man’s deceived heart, the heart puts the head to work to come up with some arguments to validate the heart’s deceived posture so that it can rest easy and content in its atheistic disposition. This is where the atheist begins to expose his foolishness, and where he really begins to sound and appear as the fool that he really is. So Proverbs 12:23 states,
“The heart of the fool proclaims folly.”
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Let us then answer him argument by argument as his folly deserves, and in so doing we can take off his mask of heightened reason.
A. THE SAME-0 SAME-0 THEORY
I am certain that you have heard this one a time or two. Says the atheist’s head to the atheist’s heart, “Be assured of your atheistic convictions, and be passionate about them, for all one has to observe is that the world continues ad nausea as it always has. All of this talk by Christians of a returning Savior and a coming judgment is nothing more than just that – talk! Anyone can see it with half an eyeball. Things just continue in the same vein and proceed day after day on their same course.”
This they say disproves history as some dynamic play or divine drama leading to some great climax. They conclude that there is no director behind the universe who is the overruling, governing potentate and distinct from the visible world as we see it. History is going nowhere and is being orchestrated by no one. The teaching that there is some great cosmic conductor is disproved by the status quo of argument. Another way of saying “Same-O–Same-O.” “Same-O–Same-O” is what Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is all that is or ever will be.”
Of course, most Christians already know that God anticipated this argument long before it was argued. We read in II Peter 3:3-4,
“Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their
mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is
the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell
asleep, all continues just as it was from the
beginning of creation.’”
Mocking mockers! They mock Christians and say that the Bible is false, that there is no God, and that Jesus is not coming back. Their entire argument is based upon the unbroken-time continuum. God knew that the atheist mockers would come, and He quoted them word for word before they spoke. This ought to shake one or two of them up just a little bit. If you will, they are really mocking themselves. Peter’s prophecy about them, which they say is not true, they themselves have fulfilled word for word thousands of years after it was first written. And they would have us to believe that history is just Pete and Repeat in a boat? Are you serious?
And then for the status-time factor, i.e. that time continues just as it was from the beginning!? Nothing is happening!? Day in and day out, that’s about it!? So the atheist says! Of course, this is all sheer foolishness and empty reasoning and rhetoric. The prophetic pieces of the Word of God are snapping into place in God’s prophetic time table quicker than the eye can blink. The dramatic increase in famines and earthquakes and pestilences is overwhelming. (Luke 21:11) If you were to collect recorded accounts of all of these phenomena, you would run out of room on your computer. History is not stagnant, and nothing is staying the same.
Don’t let the passage of time throw you off either. The atheist mocker sees it from the human perspective in terms of unending seconds, minutes, day, weeks, months and years. Rather, the Bible tells us that to the eternal God, one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. (II Peter 3:8) Jesus has only been gone for a couple of days, or for hundreds of thousands of years.
Oh my, the brazen gull of putting the eternal God on man’s time table. That is like trying to put calculus into a baby’s brain. But if history seems to the atheist mocker to have gone on far too long for there to be a history Originator and a history Terminator, he is really trying his own patience. Why? The reason why Christ’s fulfillment of His promised return is still waiting is because of them, as God says in II Peter 3:9,
“The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but
is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but
for all to come to repentance.”
He doesn’t want them to throw their souls away eternally, so He continues to give them more time to change their minds and turn to God. Once again, they are the fulfillment of the very prophecy which they mock and deny. They just continue to run smack dab into themselves. They are the invalidators of their own arguments, and every argument they use to disprove God only proves Him in the end. What folly! What fools!
B. Floating Atoms/Proteins = Fantastic Universe/Man Theory
You know what they want us to believe, don’t you? They tell us that there was something like an innumerable and infinitely disordered number of little bodies called atoms. Atoms are ultra-microscopic units of matter and are the smallest unit of any element. They are so tiny that they can only be discovered by super-powerful atomic microscopes. These electrically charged atomic eternal wanderers were flying and floating around in a void and dumb space. Somehow these little rascals all got together for a big atom reunion and they decided to stay hitched together. From which clandestine union they grew and grew into these magnificent, unfathomable and exact structures called the universe and man. Hello! How, when and where, who knows? No one!
It is a theory more suited to a loony farm than an institution of higher learning. It not only totally violates common sense, but universal experience. It is comparable to positing that anyone can take a bucket full of sand and dirt, shake it until the shaker can shake no more, and then dump it out and the elements and atoms will fall into a fully formed horse, or a bald eagle, or a fish, or even a man. You know, sort of like standing back and literally hurling the contents of a full paint bucket, and there on the canvass is a masterpiece, a Rembrandt. Of course, the hurled splattering paint would be accepted in any configuration as modern art today, much as noise today is considered music.
No, for you see, art requires an artist, even as a structure requires an architect and a builder. Design requires a designer! Of course, none of that even begins to compare with the elaborate intricacies and structures of the universe and man. This not only requires a designer and builder, but one of supernatural intelligence and power. Even an atheist like Julian Huxley admitted that the odds of all of this evolving by chance is 1,000 to the millionth power, which is 1 followed by 3 million zeros.
So much for atoms! What about proteins? Writes David W. Cloud of “Way Of Life Literature” in his article Can Evolution Produce An Eye, “Over a thousand different kinds of proteins have been identified in the human body, and each has a unique chemical composition necessary for its own particular function. Proteins are polymers, whose chemical composition depends on the arrangement of many smaller subunits called amino acids. There are 20 different kinds of amino acids that are used to construct the protein of all living organisms, including man. These amino acids are linked together end-to-end (like a string of beads) to form a single protein macromolecule. The average protein consists of a string of 500 amino acids. The total number of combinations of 20 different amino acids in such a string is, for all practical purposes, unlimited. Each protein in our body, however, must contain a specific sequence of amino acids if it is to function properly. It is the task of the genetic system in our cells to organize the assembly of the amino acids into precisely the right sequence for each protein.”
David Cloud continues, “We can appreciate the improbability of randomly assembling one of the essential proteins of life by considering the probability of randomly assembling the letters of the alphabet to form even a simple phrase. Imagine if we were to try to spell out 23 letters and spaces in the phrase “THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION” by using the evolutionary principle of “chance.” We might proceed by randomly drawing letters from a Scrabble set consisting of 26 letters of the alphabet plus a space (for a total of 27). The probability of getting all 23 letters and spaces in the order required for our phrase can be calculated by multiplying together the probability of getting each letter and space 1/27 x 1/27 x 1/27 – for a total of 23 times. This calculation reveals that we could expect to succeed in correctly spelling our phrase by chance, approximately “once” in eight hundred, million, billion, trillion draws. If we were to hurry the process along and draw our letters at the rate of a billion per second, we could expect to spell our simple little phrase once in 26 thousand, trillion years. BUT EVEN THIS IS A VIRTUAL CERTAINTY COMPARED TO THE PROBABILITY OF CORRECTLY ASSEMBLING ANYONE OF THE KNOWN BIOLOGICAL PROTEINS BY CHANCE.”
That is answering a fool as his folly deserves! I think this answer has been more than adequate, don’t you? Let us restate it in a more simplified way. As Mike Oppenheimer of “Let Us Reason Ministries” writes in his article There Are No Atheist:
“An atheist must assume that personal unique intricate organisms arose
from impersonal disorderly chaos.”
In other words, blind chance and accident cannot be the origin of such sophisticated and minute order. Chance and accident do not produce order, but rather they are always the parents and originators of disorder, confusion and chaos. Strong Point! This is contrary not only to all sound reason, but even to common sense. Says Oppenheimer, “All designs have a designer, and the universe has proven to be incredibly designed. Even the minutest organism is more complex than the space shuttle.” The only reasonable and logical explanation for it all is found in Genesis 1:1-2,
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the
earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the
surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was
moving over the surface of the waters.”
To believe anything else is not only for man to renounce his Creator, but his right reason as well.
Tragic isn’t it? Lucy O’Brien, one of the pioneer newspaper women in Florida, then turned entrepreneur, once wrote, “The most important question a person ever asks is, ‘If I die today, what will my life have stood for?’” The atheist must answer, “I stood for no-God atheistic evolution based upon totally shoddy reasoning.” What a memorial!
3. The Matter X Monkey = Mankind Theory
Or if you will, from the goo to the zoo to you! All of that of course based upon the eternity of inane matter and not upon an eternal, omniscient and omnipotent being named God. From molecule to monkey to mankind! Atheistic evolutionists believe only in eternal material substance, therefore the thought of immaterial substance is out of the realm of possibility. All reality is measured by sense knowledge, and nothing can be admitted into the realm of reality except those things that can be confirmed by the ear, the eye, the touch etc.
Atheists are materialists, not in the values sense, but in the sense of the eternity of matter. My first encounter with a materialist-atheist was when I did an interview with Duncan Littlefair who was the then pastor of Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. When I asked him how he comforted families at the death of a loved one, he forthrightly answered in part that he tells the bereaved that the dead loved one at burial or cremation feeds back into the eternal cycle of matter, as well as fertilizes the earth for succeeding generations. I kid you not! Here lies fertilizer Freddie.
For the materialist atheist, if anything falls outside of the scope of the outward senses, it is a mere foolish figment. This then means that the odorless, unseen, and untouchable air that we breathe doesn’t exist either, although when you ride through Gary, Indiana you can smell it as well as grind it between your teeth. Nonetheless, for the atheistic evolutionist, material substance and reality are synonyms and equivalent terms.
Well then, as the theory goes, this eternal primordial ooze over billions of years produced primitive protozoan. Then the complexity began to increase into worms, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, apes, and apes slowly evolved into man:
“The eternal goo through the developing zoo to the evolving
you! How do you do!”
There is only one big problem, and one gigantic bridge that the atheistic evolutionist cannot cross, and that is what the pure biological science of the Bible describes as “After Its Kind,’ or, “After Their Kind.” We read of it in Genesis 1:21,
“And God created the great sea monsters, and every living creature
that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind,
and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw
that it was good.”
God has fixed something into every species, or what is called by some the fixity of the species. The atheistic scientist runs into this at every turn, namely that organisms only reproduce after their kind. The species are fixed! That truth appears 10 times in the first two chapters of Genesis. On yes, there is mutation, but no transmutation. There are a variety of dogs – mutation within the species of dogness. In fact, one can mate a horse with a mule, but the mule is sterile and cannot reproduce, and the transmutational theory is stopped in its tracks.
If atheistic evolution is factual, then transmutational forms should be in abundance, like picking up clam shells along the gulf coast of Florida. Yet out of all of the millions of fossils, not one transitional form can be found. You can’t fool nature. Not only is the missing link missing, but the entire transmutational chain between fish, birds, apes and man are missing as well. No intermediate fossils have ever been discovered. The discovery of the missing link along with transmutational forms along the evolutionary path, are what atheistic evolutionists are desperately searching for to substantiate their theory which was passed down to them from Erasmus Darwin and his grandson Charles Darwin.
ILLUSTRATION
Someone not too many years ago found a tooth in Nebraska. He sent it to some evolutionary scientist in the northeastern part of the United States. The scientist examined the tooth and shortly thereafter introduced what came to be known as “The Nebraska Man.” Henry Fairfield Osborn, a professor at Columbia University and a most prominent paleontologist, as well as several other distinguished authorities in the field, proclaimed to the public about the tooth, “Here we have proof of what early man was like in North America.” Osborn went on, “The tooth is like a still small voice. Its sound is by no means easy to hear, but this little tooth speaks volumes of truth in that it supports man’s descent from the ape.”
However, someone suggested returning to the site where the tooth had been found and to dig deeper in the area. It was then that an entire jaw bone was unearthed in which the reinserted tooth fit perfectly. The enthusiasm of the scientists suddenly turned to dismay as they realized that they had made a terrible mistake. The jawbone from which the tooth was taken was identified as that of an extinct pig.
What an embarrassment to the entire evolutionary community. Of course, very little publicity was given to the error, for after all no one wants to end up looking like a monkey. Though the evolutionist scientists tried to make a monkey out of pig, the pig ended up making a monkey out of them. It is almost humorous if it were not so pathetic, how the least bit of similarity between man and animal gives the atheist evolutionist the nerve to trumpet to the world that they have found the long sought for ape-man connection. The fact is they never will, because it does not exist.
4. The Suffering World – No God Theory
This is the one that quickly becomes very heated in which atheists not only deny God, but they become angry disputants and attackers at the very thought of a God. You have heard it said over and over again, and perhaps you have even sunk into thinking it yourself on an occasion or two, namely, “How could there be a God of love Who allows so much suffering in the world?” It is a denial of God that is more of an out and out denunciation and a renunciation, not from reasoned arguments, but from hostility toward and even hatred of God for screwing up man’s life.
Man has always in the face of suffering and pain put God on trial, as he then becomes the self-appointed judge and jury and passes his verdict of guilty on the Almighty. He sentences God to a lifetime of banishment from his life not only, but to the death sentence of non-existence forever. But even then he cannot be fully rid of God, as captured by the phrase from Thomas Altizer,
“God is dead, thank God.”
Has it ever struck you how the atheist and the run-of-the-mill unbeliever continue to curse the non-existent God Who will simply not go away? We read of that in Psalm 10:7,
“His mouth is full of curses….”
I mean, when things don’t go right, somebody has to take the blame, and God is always handy. Interesting isn’t it that man never says “IBM damn it” but always “God damn it.” Man continues to call back the non-existent God into existence for the purpose of taking His name in vain and venting his rage at Him when he is ticked off. Why? Because God is the One Who is supposed to make everything nice and comfy, and when He doesn’t, man gets nasty with God. When there is a lot of fluff and stuff in man’s life, then it is OK with him that some people believe that God exists. When there is a lot of agony and pain, then God may not and does not exist. There it is! God cannot have anything to do with suffering of any kind, and if He does He is worthy only of our unbelief and our hostile disbelief.
Man has always been far more concerned about comfort than character, even as today much of the modern church is far more interested in riches than righteousness. As Warren Weirsbe wrote,
“Our values determine our evaluations.”
How true! It is man’s self-centered and soft-advantage philosophy of life that determines his God concept not only, but also his harsh evaluations of God when He proves to be something other than a “Sugar-Daddy Cotton-Candy God.” Which is why Bishop John Spong, who was ordained bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Newark, New Jersey, gutted the very heart of the Christian Gospel when he said, “I would choose to loathe rather than to worship a deity who required the sacrifice of his son.”
Of course, in Christianity true eternal values transcend and supersede our temporal conveniences and physical ease. As Charles Spurgeon once said, “God, if it is the blueness of the wound that will make me a better man, then pinch me.” No pain, no gain. Sometimes we have to blister the child’s bottom in order to mature him. Spare the rod and spoil the kid. And it follows that if the child embraced the atheist’s “Suffering World–No God Theory,” then the child could only conclude during his spanking that there are no such things as parents. At least not any that he would care to have in his life. However, it was Job who said in Job 23:10,
“…When He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”
Trials are meant to help us to be what God requires us to be, and those that hurt us the most help us the most. That is why the Palmist declared in Psalm 119:71,
“It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may
learn Thy statutes.”
But all of this is really nothing new in the life of man. Not only does man do this to God, but he does it to his fellow man as well. If he has been seriously or even mildly inconvenienced, hurt or pained by someone, you may hear him say things like, “I hope that I never see that jerk again. I certainly will never ever speak to him again. As far as I am concerned he doesn’t exist anymore. I wish he was dead. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a dead man.” And if looks could kill, that man would be dead already! Man not only has death wishes for his fellow man, he has them for God as well. Anyone who causes man discomfort and disease is not worthy to exist.
Okay then, the “Suffering World–No God Theory” is foolishness first of all because it is based totally upon carnal self-interest and self-easement, and goes no further than external values. However, it is also foolish and irrational because if we could totally account for and understand God in all of His actions and allowances, then He would not be God, and we would be God. There is not a finite believer or unbeliever in the world who can put God into his human paradigm, and then expect the infinite God to function accordingly. If God could be put into our paradigm, He would again not be God, and we would be God. There is not a believer or unbeliever on the face of the earth who can explain the ways of God on each and every occasion. Why? Because this is the very essence of Godness, even as we read in Romans 11:33,
“…How unsearchable are His judgments, and unfathomable His ways.”
We can only the see the surface and the outside of things when it comes to God in action. As God rules and overrules the affairs of nations and of men throughout history, there are so many windings and turnings that surpass human understanding. Hey brother, I can see the hands of our grandfather clock and the swinging pendulum, but I can’t for the life of me give you an adequate reason for its motion or exact time-keeping mechanism within. Anymore than the silver encasement around my wristwatch can give an exact explanation for the intricate workings inside of the watch! Magnify that a million times with man and God! If we were able to fully interpret the ways of God, we would then have to be the originators of them too. Which of course we are not, and He is!
There is a form of science known as Chaology – the study of chaos. The basic assumption of this discipline is that some things in life are basically unpredictable. For example, the weather! Our ecosystem is so interrelated that I am told how a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing may ultimately affect weather over in New York City. There are simply too many variables to ever give a completely accurate long range weather prediction. And yet according to computer models there are patterns even to these supposedly chaotic events. The patterns are so huge and so complex that they only seem chaotic to us.
The Biblical testimony is that there is a basic pattern to all of life. You and I can’t discern it anymore than a fish can analyze the water in which it swims. If we could step out of space and time with God, we could see the pattern, and we could see that He does work all things together for good to those who love God. (Romans 8:28) But right now we see through a glass darkly. All we know is that God knows and therefore things are all right, even when they seem all wrong.
Let’s put it this way, either God’s ways will be embraced by faith as mysteries, or they will explode our brains as contradictions and destroy our faith, or even the possibility of faith. Yes a mystery! To be blunt about it, who can explain the mystery of the Cross of Christ? Why did God choose the cross? Why did it have to be the cross? How is it that the cross alone can be the perfect way to salvation? Oh yes, we may come with some theological explanations, none of which ultimately answer the questions. God says in Isaiah 55:9,
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways
higher than your ways, and My thoughts
than your thoughts.”
Without trying to explain the cross, the Lord says to us, “In faith, accept the fact that I love you. Jesus is my only begotten Son, and He has endured your hell for your sin, that you, by faith in Him, might be forgiven and rejoice forever in my Heaven.” The cross looked like the greatest tragedy in the history of the world. The disciples viewed it exactly that way, as it seemed to write the very finish to their faith. But never judge suffering or even death by the day or the season in which it occurs. Yes, Jesus was crucified, but He arose, ascended into Heaven, and is coming back to take us unto Himself. God’s ways we cannot fathom at the time, and therefore the suffering we endure seems so cruel and senseless. But that is because we only see the beginning, while God sees the beginning and the end and all of the reasons why in between.
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IV. The Motivation Behind Atheism
What is really behind atheism as its pulsating and motivating drive? Nothing complex really! First of all, man by nature wants to be his own lord and master. That was the driving force of sin from the very beginning. To be free in his choices, to obey nothing but his own appetites and desires. Second, and above all, to be accountable to no one! There you have it in an atheistic nutshell. To be able to eat, drink, be merry and party, without any reckoning to anyone staring them in the face down the line! Bingo!
One thing for sure, God isn’t going to change, nor will His standards of morality. Although the modern Christian church is redesigning God and rewriting His Word to make Him and It more compatible with our morally-decayed contemporary culture! But no matter how hard they try to alter God and His Word, God and His Word remain immoveable and rock solid. So we read in Malachi 3:6,
“For I, the Lord, do not change….”
We also read about God’s Word in Mark 13:31 where God says,
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words
will not pass away.”
Shucks! It is obvious then that you can’t buy God off or make a deal with Him, for He is a no-deal, no-change God. Now what?
So man puts his little wits together with other small-witted fools who are likewise indignant about always having to deal with this God thing. It is that carking and nagging God-talk in our society that makes sinning not as fully and freely enjoyable as they would like it to be. It takes so much of the fun out of sinning. So they muster all of the pseudo-scientific knowledge that they can gather, and invent all kinds of far-out and foolish theories. All of that not first of all to prove where man and the world really came from. No, but chiefly to prove that there is no God!
Atheism is not primarily about science, but about reverse theology – in the beginning no God. To be able to sin like the devil and enjoy it without those perpetual checks of conscience! To not always and forever having to confront the reality that God Who will one day judge the world! So man conjured up the astonishingly stupid theory of atheistic evolution. Now he can have a blast without that Party-Pooper God always hanging around. You know now don’t you what is really going on?
God says it in Romans 1:18,
“…who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”
That’s the whole point! Science is not the issue. Righteousness and unrighteousness are the issue! It doesn’t say that the atheist suppresses the truth in unbelief, or disbelief, or anti-belief. No, the truth about God is pushed away and buried in unrighteousness. The psalmist David says the very same thing in Psalm 14:1,
“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt,
they have committed abominable deeds; there is
no one who does good.”
You’re on to it all by now, aren’t you? All of these Supreme Court Decisions about no prayer, no Ten Commandments, and no Bible in America’s public schools or on state property! It is not what they are making it out to be. They pass it all off as a constitutional struggle, i.e. as a requirement of the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution. First of all, this is not what the U.S Constitution requires at all. Second, that aside, what is really going on is the attempt on the part of the ACLU, along with their atheist judges and legislators, to get rid of God completely from our society, so that they don’t have morally to deal with this Divine killjoy anymore. They want to be able to sexually and sensually express themselves in every sinful and perverted way without moral restriction or accountability.
That is why Justice Roy Moore, Alabama’s Supreme Court chief justice was ordered by a federal judge to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the state’s judicial building. He defied the order. Alabama’s judicial ethics panel then removed Chief Justice Roy Moore from office. Both he and the Monument to the Ten Commandments were hauled away. In America, the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Christians and the Bible are now the least tolerated group and book in this post-Christian nation and era. Who would have thought that would happen? But what we must understand is this, namely, that men are atheists not primarily because of the doctrine of God, but because of the obedience to God that His existence requires. Atheism is not rooted so much in anti-theology as it is in anti-morality. It isn’t Christian doctrine that bugs the atheist. It is Christian living!
To warp this all up, think of it in this way. It will help clear things up. All men who are born into the world by nature are trying to:
“Hide Themselves From God”
That is all the result of sin in their lives. Adam and Eve started the universal custom. In their sinful guilt and shame, they played hide and go seek with the Lord. They were now deathly afraid of Him. We read in Genesis 3:8,
“…and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of
the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”
Everyone tries it in his or her own way. Sin always wears the badge of guilt, privacy and darkness. Man commits most of his sins in the dark forests of nighttime. That way, when the day dawns, all their sins seem to fade away with the vanishing darkness! Of course it doesn’t work, for the light of God’s omnipresence has already shined into even the darkest corners. But it is the constant attempt of natural man to try to hide himself from God. It is the spirit of sin and unbelief in the human race.
However, the evil spirit of atheism carries it all a step further in foolishness. Atheism is men trying not only to hide themselves from God, but trying to:
“Hide God From Themselves.”
That spirit of atheism is now rampant in America. The spirit of unbelief seeks to avoid and hide from God. The spirit of atheism seeks to counter and deny God. I mean to say, all of these futile attempts to try and stay clear of God become so wearying to the sinner! So why not cut the work short? Just get rid of God, for you will no longer have to agonize over trying to hide from God, when you can hide God from yourself! Just reject Divine existence. So as he drinks from the poison cup of atheism, the atheist denies the existence of the ocean.
Does it work? I really don’t think so, not in the deepest places of the atheist’s heart. On what do I base such an opinion? Romans 1:19,
“because that which is known about God is evident within them;
for God made it evident to them.”
In other words, God has created within each man what John Calvin calls the Sensus Divinatus – the deep inner sense of God. It is not something that he is catechized or taught into. Rather, it is something powerful that he is born with. No matter what man does to disconnect the plug from that God-socket inside of himself, yet that God-light never totally burns out. God has not put the capability within man to fully extinguish that inner witness that God has left of Himself. If you will, man cannot ever totally erase what God has written deep in his spirit. The atheist may and does try very hard to shake loose from the gnawing sense of a God, but he never totally succeeds. He arms himself with all of his foolish theories and arguments against that inner voice of Divinity, but none of them can completely silence it.
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CONCLUSION
In the late 1990s Newsweek magazine featured a front cover in gold, no less, with the headlines, “Talking to God: An Intimate Look as the Way We Pray.” The article featured a Gallup poll which attempted to get a pulse on the prayer life of America. The poll revealed some very fascinating results:
A. Seventy-eight per cent of all Americans pray at least once a week.
B. More than half, 57%, pray at least once a day.
C. About 20% of all atheists pray once a day.
This is exactly why throughout human history this sense of the Divine has shown up in every nation, language, tribe and culture. Because of man’s sinfulness, his sense of deity has been warped and distorted, so that the god or gods that he ends up worshiping are the false gods of perverted idolatry. But still the acknowledgment of a deity sticks to the human race throughout time because it is deeply embedded within its essence.
The atheist is in fact the exception to the rule and an irregularity from the universal norm. A man born without the Sensus Divinatus would be the same as a man born without a head or a heart. And one day the atheists will join with all men as they confess their belief in God. We read of the end of all unbelief, atheism, agnosticism and idolatry in Romans 14:11,
“For it is written, ‘As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall
bow to Me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.”
