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.