In the next 11 weeks, I hope to show the principal reason why I think there is a crisis within atheistic thinking, and provide a summary of what I think are the main flaws in the arguments of the best-selling authors mentioned below.

 

After covering a long series of objections to Christianity, I thought it might be good to have a look at the modern day Western world, much of which has become very resistant to religion. There has been a steady rise in the number of anti-religious books by atheist polemicists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennet, Sam Harris and a few more. Sometimes it seems to me that many Christians do not always produce very good responses to criticisms of their faith. 

 

I think that non-religious men and women in this contemporary age face many social and ideological conditions which subliminally render religion futile or dissatisfying in their own minds. I have not the time here to go into all the things that I think are causing this (I will cover these states of mind in a future series), but we can certainly have a look at one or two modern misconceptions about science and religion, as well as look at the modern day attitudes to religion, particularly in the West. 

 

I think the piece I once wrote called The Drama Of Evolution covers largely what I believe to be the main cause of atheism’s exponential growth; I do not, of course mean Darwin’s theory of evolution (although that has caused objections that need not exist), I am talking about modern day evolutionism which can be found operating in politics, capitalism, secular humanism, and, in fact, just about every part of modern day living. 

 

Even at the most elliptical level - the idea of evolutionary progression certainly goes against the Christian claim that the next stage in the evolutionary process has already happened 2000 years ago with Christ’s resurrection and ascension. 

 

Modern evolutionism has brought about repellent attitudes to the Christian claim that we were created to know God; that innovation and progression will not, by themselves, be enough; and that we rely on Him for true blessedness and earthly satisfaction. All thoughts that we have to rely upon our Creator instead of relying upon ourselves are alien to the contemporary ‘independence’ mandate that has proliferated in the minds of the majority of people in the Western world, many of which see the ‘scientific’ way of thinking as the right way of thinking and the ‘religious’ way of thinking as outdated and superfluous. But as we shall see later in the series - this type of deduction very rarely amounts to any sensible conclusions.  

 

It is a huge mistake to believe that all scientific thought is proportional to evidence and that all Christian thought is not. Most Christians do not believe in spite of evidence but because of evidence. It is also a mistake to think that science and religion operate under different and non-overlapping magisteria. It is true that both are asking similar questions, and both are, in many ways, complimentary. But it should be realised that science is asking questions about things within God’s creation; therefore no analysis of the laws of nature will tell you very much about the existence of the Creator of the laws of nature - and even when it does, sceptics have already usually armed themselves with a refutation based upon their own presuppositions. Although sensible Christians almost always have a high regard for the sciences, they do not usually claim to know about the Creator because of anything scientific, they claim to know Him because He has chosen to reveal Himself to them. 

 

A lot of modern day atheists, whose books I have read, seem to have one big error in their thinking - an error which will cause perennial frustration for them every time they encounter better theories. All good thinkers know that in order to explain away contentions that appear to contradict or falsify your own, you have to be right in the first place; you must not simply create contentions that accord with what you want to believe, or just as bad, observe a particular human action and use it as an expedient method for rejecting something that is only indirectly attached to the thing itself. 

 

A good example of this is found when modern day Darwinists claim that religion is comparable to a disease, passed on like a ‘meme’ from family to family, town to town and city to city. There is no doubt that this can be true; if a child is born into a Muslim family and taught from the cradle upwards to be a Muslim - observing all the tenets of Islam and being taught to embrace them, he or she will, ninety nine times out of a hundred, grow up as a Muslim child. All children are born conditioned to obey and follow advice from their parents (there once would have been a Darwinian survival advantage), and this means, of course, that in the first few years a child has no way of distinguishing between good advice, such as ‘Don’t put your hand in the fire’ and bad advice, such as ‘Do a tribal dance on the soil to make the crops grow’. 

 

It is true that we become what we behold, but many atheists use this fact as a springboard to a rather disingenuous contention; they claim that this is demonstrable evidence that religion is a big myth, passed on by ignorant parents to ignorant children. This is blatantly untrue - this fact simply tells us about the influence parents have on their children, it says nothing about the efficacy of any belief; for in fact, it is not just religion where this occurs, it occurs in every walk of life. A child who is taught from the cradle upwards that all religion is evil, or that all foreigners should be hated, or that their national leader is a demi-god, will invariably grow up believing what he or she has been taught. And equally, a child who has been taught from the cradle upwards about the virtues of love, respect, honesty, forgiveness, kindness and compassion will also usually grow up believing all that he or she has been taught. 

 

Of course, things sometimes happen in a child’s teenage years or in early adulthood which bring about changes in beliefs, but that fact is not central to the point; it is easy to see that good advice and bad advice, and right facts and wrong facts, will inevitably be passed on from generation to generation - but it says nothing at all about whether the facts being passed on are correct or incorrect. The atheists’ argument is self-contradictory, for it appears in non-religious upbringing just as much as it does in religious upbringing. Our job is to distinguish which teaching is right and which teaching is wrong, but we can never do that by simply analysing how this process occurs (as many atheists have done). 

 

The same applies to those who claim that they subscribe to a particular religious belief because they ‘want it to be true’. Thus you hear some people saying, ‘Oh but I couldn’t bear to think of a world with no God’, or ‘I want it to be true, because I don’t know what I would do if I believed that it wasn’t’. Many atheists have also used this as a springboard for presuming religion must be a big lie - in fact, most atheists seem to be predisposed to the idea that there is no God to the extent that they are using every fault in human thinking to add weight to their case. But there is a price to pay for their type of loose analysis, for it soon reveals itself to be flawed logic. The fact that some people subscribe to religious belief because they hope it is true merely tells us something about their psychology, not about whether their beliefs are true or not. 

 

One could logically deduce that humans spend a lot of time wishing things to be true, and all the evidence says that this is true. But in order to find out what is true, we need to look further than what people are hoping is true, for it is obvious that some things we hope for will be true and other things will not be. In order to find out if a belief is true, we must look at the belief itself. Nothing about the psychological condition of the person will tell us one way or the other. If I meet a psychologist and I tell him that I live in Catton, he will not know if I am telling the truth or if I am mistaken unless he sees some documentation or, better still, comes to my house to see for himself. Only if he concludes that I do not in fact live in Catton can he start to examine the reason why I thought that I did; but no analysis of inference can come until the facts are known. And equally, some people will believe in one religion, many will believe in others and some will believe in no God or gods at all - but we do not find out which belief systems are correct by analysing the psychological state of the people, we find out by examining their claims about each particular religion. 

 

The same applies when we answer all those claims made that religion has caused people to do bad things. Totting up all the good deeds and bad deeds done in the history of religion and secularism is, in one sense, a waste of time, for you will never establish facts about the validity about either set of beliefs by examining the moral behaviour of the adherents. That it might prove worthwhile in other areas of analysis, I have little doubt - but the moral rights and wrongs of religious adherents belongs outside of the religious efficacy debate (although many atheist and some Christians fail to realise this fact). As Christians, we do not find out about the virtues of our faith by what other people do, we base our opinions (or should base our opinions) about our faith on how Christ lived His life. 

 

This system of logic should be applied to all types of thinking. It is simply foolish to speculate about the efficacy of belief systems by examining the states of mind or impressionability of the individuals who believe such things. You must go to the source, or examine the source, to find out if the original arguments made are sound ones or not. 

 

I am afraid that much of modern day thinking is founded on examining the people rather than the validity of their set of beliefs. These best-selling atheist authors have failed in every way to show that Christianity is wrong, so they have simply papered over this crack and instead propounded theories as to why they think Christians are wrong. Of course, if a non-believer were to examine closely the claims of Christ, take them seriously and apply them to his own life, he would soon see how real and wonderful Christianity is. But this can only usually be realised when one steps inside to have a proper look. Our perception of something is very different on the outside to what it is on the inside. 

 

You cannot find out for sure if there are fish in a murky and motionless lake by looking at it, you must enquire if fishermen have caught fish in it before, or better still, catch one in the lake yourself. But this type of thinking is only effective if it is realised that you might, in fact, cast your rod in the lake and not catch anything - but that would not prove that there were no fish in the lake. This is different to what Christ is claiming, for He says that those who seek earnestly will find. If your heart truly desires Him, He will reveal Himself to you - but you can only find out such things if you step inside for a better look.