It's Hard to Really Be an Atheist

J. Wallace Hamilton once told a story about a Russian girl who was brought up as an atheist. She had taken a government examination, and like all students, was worried about some of the answers she had given. One question on the exam that had bothered her was this: "What is the inscription on the Samarian Wall?" She had answered: "Religion is the opiate of the people"—that famous anti-religion declaration of Karl Marx. But the girl wasn't sure of her answer, so she walked seven miles to the Samarian Wall to check it out and sure enough, there it was: "Religion is the opiate of the people." Greatly relieved, she forgot for a moment her upbringing, and said, "Thank God! I had it right."

Friends, when Soviet Communism fell, it was certainly a blow to atheism, but there are still plenty of folks around the world who deny the reality of God. Yet, like that Russian girl they have a very difficult time being consistent in their atheism. A few years ago, I exchanged e-mails with David, an atheist who lives on the west coast. Though he adamantly denied there is any evidence for the existence of God, many of the assumptions David made point to God’s reality. For example, at one point he challenged me with the traditional “problem of evil.” David described a situation where a child died after being beaten by his father for vomiting in the car. He asked, “How can there be a god if things like this happen?” My response was, “David, I will not even attempt to answer that question until you explain why, from an atheistic perspective, what happened to that little boy even matters?”

In previous correspondence, David acknowledged that he does not believe in objective morality, that anything is inherently right or wrong. He claimed that human beings exist on this planet only because of a chance process of evolution. He said he is willing to accept the fact that even people he loves, such as his wife, are really nothing more than a blob of protoplasm that just happened to come together in the right way. And yet, David cares very much what happens to those blobs of protoplasm. Not only does he love his wife, but he grieves over what happened to that little boy who he never met. He cannot, however, explain why he cares. If the atheists are right that there is no God and we are just accidents of nature, then the suffering and death of a human being is really no more tragic than the suffering and death of a mosquito. David can claim he thinks people are nothing more than blobs of protoplasm, but his actions and attitudes reveal that he doesn’t really believe that.

Friends, I told David that I am confident what happened to that little boy is a great tragedy and very evil because I know he was much more than a blob of protoplasm. That boy was a creature made in the image of God, and killing him violated God’s law. I cannot prove empirically that any of us are something other than biological accidents, but intuitively, I am certain we are much more than that. Because I know that meaning, morals, beauty, purpose, good, and evil really do exist, I also know there really is a God. My guess is that deep down inside David, he may suspect the same thing but just does not want to admit it.