The Atheist Faith Under Review

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Article by Craig Ireland – source: https://craigireland.substack.com/p/the-incredulity-of-faith

THE ATHEIST IS NOT A MAN STARVED OF FAITH

He is a man drowning in it.

I follow quite a few atheist apologists online. The popular, the academic, the unmistakably pseudo-scientific. And I am always left marvelling at the sheer measure of faith required to sustain their worldview.

Spurgeon saw this clearly more than a century ago.

“I have noticed that whenever a person gives up his belief in the Word of God because it requires that he should believe a good deal, his unbelief requires him to believe a great deal more. If there be any difficulties in the faith of Christ, they are not one-tenth as great as the absurdities in any system of unbelief which seeks to take its place.”

The man was right. The cost of unbelief is always paid in the currency of greater misplaced belief. Reject the Word, and you must believe a hundred wilder things to fill the silence.

Here’s an abbreviated inventory of the things Atheists “believe” fully expecting you to join them.

1. Something from nothing. The universe popped into existence from literal nothing. Not nothing-as-quantum-vacuum. Not nothing-as-empty-space. Lawrence Krauss titled a book A Universe from Nothing and then spent three hundred pages redefining “nothing” until it meant “something.” When pressed, the atheist will tell you that nothing is unstable, that nothing fluctuates, that nothing has properties. Nothing, it turns out, is doing an enormous amount of work in the atheist universe. It is, in fact, the hardest-working nothing in the history of nothing.

2. Life from non-life by accident. Inert chemistry, given enough time, warmth, and the right puddle, spontaneously assembled itself into a self-replicating, information-encoding, error-correcting molecular machine of staggering complexity. No mind. No intention. No information source. Just rocks and water and luck. The simplest known cell contains more functional information than the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the atheist asks you to believe it wrote itself in a warm, stagnant pond. Then he calls the Christian “gullible.”

3. Consciousness from unconscious matter. Subjective experience, the felt sense of redness, the ache of grief, the awareness that you exist, somehow emerged from mindless particles obeying mindless laws. Atheist philosophers have a name for this. They call it “the hard problem of consciousness” because they cannot account for it, and the leading materialist response is to deny that consciousness exists at all. Daniel Dennett’s career was largely an exercise in convincing conscious beings that they are not, in fact, conscious at all. Yet, you have to be conscious to read his argument. The argument is self-refuting before page one.

4. Reason from non-reason. The atheist trusts his brain. He must. He uses it to argue against God. But on his own account, his brain is the unintended by-product of a blind, non-rational process that was selecting for survival, not for truth. As C.S. Lewis put it, if naturalism is true, then the very thoughts by which we conclude naturalism is true are themselves the output of a process that had no interest in producing true thoughts. The atheist saws off the branch he is sitting on and then asks you to admire his logic.

5. Morality from molecules. Nothing is really right, and nothing is really wrong. Morality is a useful fiction evolved to keep our ancestors from eating each other outright. And yet the same atheist who tells you this will, within the same conversation, denounce the God of the Old Testament as a moral monster, condemn the Crusades, decry slavery, and demand justice for the oppressed. He has no metaphysical ground to stand on, and he stands on it anyway, with both feet, indignantly. He cannot live in the universe his worldview describes.

This is not a faith deficit; it is a faith surplus. The atheist is exercising more credulity over his cornflakes than the average Christian exercises in a lifetime.

So the question is not whether he will believe. He will. He must. He cannot draw breath without believing something.

The question is, who will he believe, and who will he not?

And the One he will not believe is God.

That is the whole problem. Not intellectual. Not evidential. Not scientific. Personal.

He does not believe Him.

And here is where the matter turns serious. Because this unbelief is not your regular run-of-the-mill unbelief.

This unbelief is penal.

That word will offend some readers. Let it offend. The Apostle Paul did not write Romans 1 to soothe anyone. He said the man knew God. He suppressed what he knew. He refused to glorify and to thank. His heart was darkened. Professing wisdom, he became a fool.

Three times in that chapter, Paul tells us what God did about it. God gave them up. God gave them up. God gave them over.

This is not God leaving men to wander. This is God actively handing men over. The unbelief itself is the punishment of the misbelief.

The atheist is not winning the argument. He is fulfilling Romans 1.

The full case, including Spurgeon’s diagnosis, the second judicial passage from 2 Thessalonians, and the pastoral way home, is in the Substack. Link is below.

Faith is the only defence against the utter insanity of the alternative.

Believe Him.

Calvin and Servetus – Cutting through the noise, getting to the facts

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In the 16th century, heresy was treated as a capital offense across Europe because people genuinely believed heaven and hell were real places. Leading someone into false doctrine that could damn their eternal soul was viewed as an extremely serious crime. It is difficult for us today, wearing our 21st-century glasses, to fully step back and understand the world as they saw it then.

In this episode of the Room for Nuance podcast, host Sean interviews Jonathan Morehead, pastor in Geneva and author of The Trial of the 16th Century: Calvin and Servetus. Morehead shares his personal background, growing up in Alabama, coming to faith after a youth pastor challenged his superficial profession of Christianity, studying at Southeastern Bible College and The Master’s Seminary, marrying Sharon, and serving as a missionary in Russia and the Czech Republic before becoming a pastor in Geneva and leading Calvin tours. The conversation then turns to the book, which grew out of repeated questions Morehead encountered while teaching church history: Did John Calvin murder Michael Servetus? Morehead explains that the book was born from pastoral necessity rather than academic curiosity, aiming to provide an accessible, evangelical treatment of the 1553 trial that is more balanced than Roland Bainton’s earlier work.

Morehead carefully walks through the historical context and events. Servetus was a brilliant but obstinate man of many talents, often called a polymath, and a modalist heretic who denied the Trinity and held Anabaptist views, both capital offenses under imperial law. After years of combative correspondence with Calvin and failed attempts to persuade other reformers, Servetus was first arrested and condemned by Roman Catholics in Vienne, France, but escaped and was burned in effigy. He then traveled to Geneva, where he was recognized at a church service, reported by Calvin among others, and arrested. The trial was conducted by Geneva’s magistrates, not Calvin, who was not a citizen and held no civil authority. Calvin provided evidence of Servetus’s heresies, including 38 charges, and pleaded with him privately to recant, even advocating for beheading rather than burning. The obstinate Servetus insulted Calvin and the magistrates repeatedly. Other Reformation cities, especially Bern, urged strict action. Servetus was executed by burning on October 27, 1553.

Morehead emphasizes that Calvin did not unilaterally control or murder Servetus. The decision rested with the magistrates amid intense political and religious pressure from Catholic Europe and internal libertine opposition in Geneva. Virtually all major reformers, including Melanchthon, Bucer, Farel, Knox, and Turretin, approved of the execution of such an obstinate anti-Trinitarian heretic under the era’s laws and theology, which tightly intertwined church and state. The episode concludes by reflecting on the differences between 16th-century covenantal assumptions about church and state versus modern Baptist or separationist views, while stressing that Jesus Christ remains the only perfect hero of church history. Morehead’s book and presentation aim to replace simplistic slogans such as “Calvin was a murderer” with a nuanced understanding rooted in primary sources and historical context.