Category Archives: Atheism

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.

If Matter Is All There Is, Where Did Persons Come From?

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In our “Got Questions?” series so far, we have asked whether God exists and whether science makes God unnecessary. But there is another question underneath both of those, one that touches every one of us. That is because we are not merely objects in the universe; we are persons.

Here is the question: How do you get persons from an impersonal universe? How do you get mind, meaning, love, guilt, laughter, reason, and conscience from nothing but matter and motion?

Many people assume the answer is simple: given enough time, matter can eventually become life, and life can eventually become intelligence, and intelligence can eventually become personality. But that assumption needs to be tested, not merely repeated.

Some will say evolution bridges the gap. But even if you grant change over time, the deeper question remains: how do mindless, unguided processes produce minds, and not only minds, but persons? How do you get a real “I,” a self that reasons about truth, loves, chooses, and feels the weight of “I ought” and “I ought not,” out of nothing but matter in motion?

Some will say consciousness gradually evolved from simpler nervous systems, from basic reactions, to feeling sensations, to awareness, to full consciousness. But this still doesn’t solve the real problem. Even if you can trace how brains got more complex over time, you still haven’t explained the most basic mystery: why do we experience anything at all?

Think about it this way: when you bite into a pizza, you don’t just process information about temperature and taste. You experience it. There’s someone on the inside (you) who feels that warmth, tastes that flavor, enjoys that moment. Why? A computer can analyze pizza ingredients perfectly, but it doesn’t experience anything. It’s empty inside. So why aren’t we like that? Why is there a ‘you’ on the inside experiencing your life, instead of just a body going through the motions with nobody home?

Time is not a cause

Time can measure duration, but it cannot explain how meaning arises in the first place. It is a clock, not a creator. If you leave parts alone long enough, you do not get a message, a code, and an interpreter, because interpretation belongs to minds, not molecules.

Think about it in ordinary terms. Take a pile of dirt, or a mound of chemicals, or a mix of raw materials. Leave it alone for ten minutes, you still have a pile. Leave it alone for a year, you still have a pile. Leave it alone for a million years, you still have a pile. Without guidance, without a plan, without an organizing mind, time does not turn “stuff” into “self.”

Even when scientists do remarkable work in the lab, what we see is not accidental life emerging from nothing, but brilliant minds arranging and engineering what they already understand. One famous example is the lab-created ‘minimal cell.’ Scientists stripped away every gene they thought was unnecessary, trying to create the simplest possible living cell. The result? It still requires 473 genes to function. And here’s the striking part: 149 of those genes have functions scientists cannot yet explain. In other words, even the most stripped-down living system we can build is still astonishingly complex, and it does not appear by leaving chemicals alone. It bears all the hallmarks of design. [1]

And this gets to the heart of the challenge for a purely materialistic framework. Life is not merely having the right “parts.” Life requires coordination, instructions, self-copying, and energy, all working together at the same time. Think of it like this: having amino acids is like having an alphabet. Having the right amino acids in sequence is like having words. But life also needs grammar (the genetic code), a translator (ribosomes), an energy source (ATP), error correction (DNA repair), packaging (cell membranes), and reproduction (cell division). All of these systems reference and depend on each other. Remove any one, and the whole thing collapses. This is what makes purely materialistic origin-of-life scenarios so difficult. You need multiple integrated systems working simultaneously. Parts remain parts. Not life.

Chemistry can’t explain consciousness

So the issue is not a small gap that can be casually filled with “more time.” The issue is a category difference. Chemistry can produce reactions. But reactions do not aim at truth. Reactions do not weigh evidence. Reactions do not love their children. Reactions do not feel the moral weight of “I should” or “I should not.” An impersonal cause does not naturally give rise to personal realities.

Some suggest consciousness simply “emerges” from sufficient complexity. But emergence is a description, not an explanation. It names the mystery without solving it. Wetness emerges from water molecules because wetness is just a way of describing how those molecules behave together. But consciousness is not just behavior. It is the inner experience of “I am,” the felt quality of being someone. No amount of describing neurons firing explains why there is someone home to experience it.

Here’s another way to see the difference: you can fully describe wetness by describing how water molecules behave. But you cannot fully describe consciousness by describing how neurons fire. Why? Because consciousness has an inside view. There’s what it feels like from your perspective. Someone can study your brain all day long and see exactly which neurons are firing when you taste chocolate. But they still don’t know what it’s like for you to taste chocolate. That inside experience, that ‘you’ experiencing your life, can’t be captured by studying the outside. The subjective experience isn’t the same as the objective description.

The self-refuting position

That is why this question matters so much: if the universe is ultimately impersonal, then personhood is an accident, and meaning is an illusion, and conscience is a chemical trick. But we do not live that way. We live as though truth matters, as though love matters, as though right and wrong are real, and as though persons have value. The worldview has to account for the world we actually inhabit.

There’s another problem: anyone who says “all meaning is illusion” or “conscience is just chemistry” is making a truth claim. They are asking you to believe them because what they say is true. But if truth itself is an illusion, why believe them? The position refutes itself.

C.S. Lewis pressed this problem even further. He pointed out that if all our thoughts are just the result of brain chemistry and survival instincts, not aimed at truth, then why should we trust them when they reason about anything? If naturalism is true, your brain only cares whether you survive and reproduce, not whether your beliefs are actually true. A useful false belief works just as well as a true one, as long as it keeps you alive. So if your brain is just chemistry shaped by survival pressures, why trust it when it reasons about chemistry, survival, or anything else? The naturalist who argues for naturalism is sawing off the branch he’s sitting on. The very act of reasoning assumes our minds can track truth, not just survival. And that makes sense if we’re made in the image of a rational God. It makes no sense if we’re cosmic accidents.

Christianity’s answer: the personal God

Christianity does. Scripture begins, “In the beginning, God.” Not impersonal forces, not blind matter, not fate. A living, personal God. And the Bible says we are persons because we are made in His image (Genesis 1:26–27). This means your capacity to think, choose, love, and recognize right from wrong isn’t the result of random chance. And here’s something important to understand: chance isn’t actually a thing with power to make anything happen. When you flip a coin, it has a 50% chance of landing heads and a 50% chance of landing tails. But ‘chance’ doesn’t make it land one way or the other. Chance is just a word we use to describe potential outcomes. [2] This is the difference between mathematical description and causal power. Chance has no creative power. It can’t build anything. It can’t design anything. Your personhood, your capacity to think and love and choose, requires an explanation with actual creative power behind it. And Christianity says that power is God. You’re not a mistake. You’re made for relationship with your Creator. That explains why the universe is intelligible, why our minds can grasp it, and why personhood is not an intruder in reality but part of its design.

And it goes further. The Bible says all things were made through the eternal Word, and that in Christ “all things hold together” (John 1:1–3; Colossians 1:16–17). In other words, the foundation of reality is not less than mind. It is more than mind. Not less than personality, but the living God who speaks, commands, loves, and saves.

And here’s the stunning claim of Christianity: this personal God didn’t remain distant. He entered history as a person, Jesus Christ, so we could know Him personally. The question isn’t whether personhood is real. You already know it is. The question is whether you’ll acknowledge the Person who made you a person.

An invitation to follow the evidence

Anthony Flew was one of the 20th century’s most influential atheist philosophers. For decades he argued against God’s existence. But late in life, he abandoned atheism. Why? He said the origin of life, the fine-tuning of the universe, and especially the existence of rationality itself pointed to Mind behind it all. He wrote, “I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence.” By all accounts, Flew didn’t become a Christian, but he recognized what the evidence points to. If you’re an honest thinker, you can’t ignore the evidence forever. The question is whether you’ll follow it all the way to Christ.

If you are wrestling with these questions, start here: read the Gospel of John slowly and honestly, with an open Bible and an open mind. Ask God to show you the truth. Since God is personal, your personhood is not an accident, and your conscience is not an illusion. It is a signpost. Christianity is not offering God as one option among many. It is announcing that God has made Himself known in the Person of Jesus Christ, and that He now calls you to respond to Him. And if you would like to talk it through, come speak with us.

Footnotes

[1] “Design and Synthesis of a Minimal Bacterial Genome,” Clyde A. Hutchison III et al., Science, March 25, 2016, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). (JCVI-syn3.0 reported with 473 genes; includes 149 genes of unknown function.)

[2] This insight comes from R.C. Sproul, who developed this argument extensively in his book Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology (Baker Books, 1994). Sproul demonstrated that “chance” is a mathematical description, not a causal agent.

Does Science Make God Unnecessary, or Does It Actually Point to Him?

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In the first article of our “Got Questions?” series, we asked: How can we know God exists? We considered the Bible’s claim that God has not left Himself without witness: in creation, in conscience, and supremely in Jesus Christ.

A natural follow-up often sounds like this: “I trust science. I trust airplanes. I trust the laws of nature. I do not need to add God.”

Before we go further, let me say this plainly: Christians are not anti-science. We are grateful for careful observation, honest experimentation, and true discoveries. Historically, many of the pioneers who helped build modern science were Christians, convinced that the universe is orderly and intelligible because it was made by a wise Creator. [1] The question is not whether science works. It does. The question is whether science, when you think it through, quietly points beyond itself.

Trusting the airplane assumes more than aerodynamics

When you step onto a plane, you trust that it will fly and reach your intended destination safely. You trust the engineers, the pilot, the maintenance, and yes, the laws of aerodynamics. And you trust them because you have seen patterns. Planes have flown many times before. Experience teaches you to expect they will fly again.

That everyday confidence depends on something most of us rarely stop to examine: the reliability of human rationality. It depends on your mind being able to reason from repeated experience. It depends on the world being stable enough that patterns can be discovered and trusted.

In other words, you are not only trusting a machine. You are trusting that your mind can know real things about the world.

Now, a skeptic may say, “Evolution explains why our brains work well enough to survive.” Perhaps. But that still leaves a serious question: why should we assume our reasoning is aimed at truth, rather than merely at survival? If our brains are merely survival machines shaped by blind evolutionary pressures, why trust them when they make claims about evolution, mathematics, or logic itself? Natural selection cares whether you survive and reproduce, not whether your beliefs are true. A useful false belief works just as well as a true one, as long as it helps you survive. So if naturalism is true, we have undermined our own confidence in the reasoning that led us to naturalism in the first place.

Christianity offers an answer that fits the world we actually inhabit: the universe is intelligible because it is created by a rational God, and our minds can grasp reality because we are made in His image (Genesis 1:26–27). That does not discourage investigation. It explains why investigation works.

Looking for God in the machine is the wrong category

Some people say, “I do not see God in the laws of aerodynamics, so God is unnecessary.”

But of course you do not “see” the maker of something as a component inside the thing. You can investigate a car for a lifetime and never find the inventor sitting under the hood. That does not mean there was no inventor. It means you are asking the wrong kind of question.

God is not a part of the universe, as though He were one more object inside the system. He is the Creator of the system. So the question is not, “Where is God inside the machinery?” The more foundational question is, “Why is there an intelligible, law-governed world at all, and why do we have minds capable of discovering it?”

And this matters: God is not a “gap filler” for what science cannot yet explain. He is the reason there is anything for science to explain at all. Christianity does not set God against aerodynamics, chemistry, or physics. He is not a plug-in explanation for what we cannot yet understand. He is the foundation that makes the entire scientific enterprise possible in the first place.

The design discussion goes deeper than complexity, it goes to meaning

Many debates about God and science orbit around “design.” People discuss whether a biological structure is too complex to arise by evolutionary processes. Those conversations can be detailed and technical.

But there is another layer that often gets overlooked, a layer that is more basic than questions about biological machinery.

It is the layer of information and meaning.

Modern genetics shows that DNA is not merely “stuff.” It is an ordered sequence that carries biological information. DNA uses a four-letter “alphabet”: A, C, G, and T. [2]

One complete set of your DNA instructions contains about 3 billion DNA “letters,” arranged across 23 chromosomes. Most of your cells carry two complete sets, one from your mother and one from your father. [3] If you want the exact reference benchmark scientists use, the Genome Reference Consortium’s GRCh38.p14 assembly lists a total human genome length (all scaffolds) of 3,099,734,149 base pairs. [4] A base pair is simply two matching DNA letters paired together, like one rung on a ladder, so that is about 3.1 billion rungs in one genome copy. [5]

Put simply, we are not talking about a seven-letter word on a sign, but a code in the billions. The question is how meaningful, instruction-carrying order like that arises in the first place.

Let me illustrate this concept in simple terms. If you see the seven letters F-R-E-E-W-A-Y on a sign, you do not treat them as random shapes. They communicate because an agreed-upon language already exists, and because you have a mind that can read and understand. In the cell, something parallel is true: DNA’s “letters” only function as information because there is a code and a translation process that reads and applies them. So the question is not only, “Where did the letters come from?” but also, “Where did the language system come from?”

We are not claiming evolutionary processes cannot produce complexity. But information systems with codes and interpreters consistently point to intelligence. Some will object, “Codes can arise from mindless, unguided processes.” All right. Show me one, not merely a pattern, but a true code, with a key and an interpreting process.

Some will point to computer simulations where code “evolves” solutions, or genetic algorithms that optimize designs. But notice: those programs were written by programmers, run on designed computers, with fitness functions defined by minds. The “evolution” happens within an intelligently designed system targeting specific goals. You haven’t eliminated intelligence; you’ve just moved it back one step to the programmer who set up the entire framework.

And the startling thing is that you do not have to imagine such a system. It is already there in every living cell.

In the cell, that translation system is real and specific. The DNA message is first copied into a working message, and then a tiny molecular machine in the cell reads that message in three-letter “words.” Helper molecules act like carriers, bringing the right building blocks at the right time, so the cell can assemble proteins. [6] In other words, the cell has a built-in reading and translating system that takes the DNA message and turns it into working parts.

This is not a claim that chemistry is irrelevant. Chemistry is obviously involved. The point is that when you encounter coded information and an interpreter system, you are dealing with something that looks very different from mere chemistry. Words and languages are not the same kind of thing as ink and paper.

This is not a quiet whisper. It shouts. A message, a code, and an interpreter are not the kind of thing we ever attribute to mindless, unguided processes.

A brief note for clarity

Some Christians believe God used evolutionary processes as His means of creating life over long ages. That’s a discussion for another time, and faithful believers hold different views. But even if evolutionary processes played a role, they don’t eliminate the need for God. They just relocate Him from direct special creation to sovereign design of the entire process, including the laws that govern it. Either way, intelligence and intentionality are foundational, not accidental. The question isn’t whether God could use gradual processes, but whether mindless, purposeless processes can account for specified information systems like DNA without any intelligent input.

Christianity says the universe is word-shaped because it comes from the Word

Here is where Christianity becomes both bold and beautifully coherent.

The Bible does not say, “In the beginning were the particles, and later, somehow, mind appeared.” It says the opposite:

“In the beginning was the Word … and all things were made through him” (John 1:1–3).

And Scripture adds that this same Christ is not only the origin of all things, but the One who sustains them:

“By him all things were created … and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16–17).

Christians are not surprised to find order, meaning, and intelligibility woven into reality. We expect it, because we believe the universe is created and upheld by the eternal Word.

Now, you might think this is just philosophical speculation, elegant but ultimately unprovable. But Christianity makes a falsifiable historical claim: the Word who made everything actually entered history in a specific time and place, performed public miracles, died, and rose from the dead. This is what makes Christianity unique among worldviews: it stakes everything on a checkable historical claim. If Jesus didn’t rise, Christianity collapses. But if He did, everything changes. That’s not blind faith; that’s an invitation to investigate historical evidence (1 Corinthians 15:14).

And then the Christian claim becomes concrete. The Word entered the universe.

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

So the question is not merely, “Can I win an argument?” The deeper question is, “What will I do with the God who has made Himself known?”

The heart of the matter

The Bible teaches that our problem is not a lack of evidence, but a resistance of heart. We suppress the truth, not because it is absent, but because it is inconvenient (Romans 1:18–20). If you feel that resistance in yourself, you are not alone. That is simply the human condition. And it is exactly why we need not only arguments, but grace.

The good news is that God doesn’t just confront us with evidence and leave us to figure it out alone. He sent His Son to seek and save the lost. Jesus didn’t come primarily to win debates but to reconcile rebels. The same God whose wisdom we see in DNA became flesh to die for our sins and rise for our justification.

An invitation

If you are wrestling with these questions, here is a simple next step: read the Gospel of John slowly and honestly, with an open Bible and an open mind. Ask God to show you the truth. Christianity is not afraid of investigation. It welcomes it. And it ultimately invites you not merely to conclude that God exists, but to come to know Him through Jesus Christ.

Christianity is not offering God as one option among many, or even as the best option out there. It is announcing that God has made Himself known, and that He now calls us to respond to Him.

Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and is one of the world’s leading geneticists, was an atheist when he began reading DNA. The elegance and information he discovered pointed him toward God. He later wrote that the DNA molecule is “our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” That led him not just to theism, but to Christ. If you’re a scientist or love science, don’t think faith means checking your brain at the door. Christianity invites you to bring all your questions and promises you’ll find the One who is Himself the Answer.

If you would like to talk it through, come speak with us.

Footnotes

[1] “Modern Science’s Christian Sources,” James Hannam, First Things, October 1, 2011, First Things.

[2] “ACGT,” National Human Genome Research Institute, Genetics Glossary, date not listed, Genome.gov.

[3] “Human Genomic Variation,” National Human Genome Research Institute, Fact Sheet, February 1, 2023, Genome.gov. In simple terms, DNA is written using four chemical “letters” (A, C, G, and T), often called bases or nucleotides. A chromosome is a long, packaged DNA molecule, humans have 23 chromosomes in one complete set. Most human body cells have two complete sets (often called “two copies” of the genome), one inherited from the mother and one from the father. This two-set arrangement is why we speak of pairs of chromosomes. (A small note for curious readers: some cells are exceptions, for example, mature red blood cells do not have a nucleus, and therefore do not carry nuclear DNA in the usual way.)

[4] “Human Genome Assembly GRCh38.p14,” Genome Reference Consortium, National Center for Biotechnology Information, date not listed, NCBI.

[5] “Base Pair,” National Human Genome Research Institute, Genetics Glossary, date not listed, Genome.gov.

[6] “From RNA to Protein,” Bruce Alberts et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell (4th ed.), Garland Science, 2002, NCBI Bookshelf. In standard biological terms, the DNA sequence is transcribed into messenger RNA (mRNA). A ribosome (a molecular machine) then reads the mRNA in three-letter units called codons. Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) act as adaptors, matching codons to specific amino acids, which the ribosome links together to form a protein.