BiblicalInsights.net

     In the last few years, numerous books by atheists have appeared on the market.  Richard Dawkins wrote The God Delusion (2006) openly attacking belief in God.  Dawkins occupies the Charles Simony professorship for public understanding of science at Oxford University.  In November, 2005, Dawkins was voted one of the world’s three leading intellectuals–a survey that took place in Prospect magazine.  What does this leading intellectual say about belief in God?  He refers to those who believe in God as “dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads” and contends that they are immune to argument.  He defines God as “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomanical, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 31).  Come to think of it, I don’t believe in a God defined like that either.  Dawkins defines God by attributing to God the sins of mankind.  This is radically false. 
     Other atheistic books recently published are:  Sam Harris’ work, The End of Faith (2004, over 400,000 copies in print) and  his follow-up work, Letter to a Christian Nation.  Daniel Dennett’s book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.  Marc Hauser’s, Moral Minds, explores the non-divine origins of right and wrong.  Lewis Wolpert’s Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast affirms religion as one of those impossible things.  Victor Stenger produced God: The Failed Hypothesis.  Finally, Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s widow, wrote, The Varieties of Scientific Experience.
     This surge in atheistic writings seems to be a reaction to the success and progress of the Intelligent Design movement in America.  Atheists have been and will continue to be met with sound arguments for God’s existence.  The battle is not just for a correct understanding of God, but it is also for an accurate understanding of ourselves.  Victor Frankl wrote, “If we present man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him.  When we present him as an automation of reflexes, as a mind machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drive and reactions, as a mere product of heredity and enviornment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.  I became acquainted with the last stage of corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz.  The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment–or, as the Nazis like to say, “of blood and soil.”  I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other of Berlin, but rather at the desks and in lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers” (quoted in Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God, 25).
     The best atheists have to offer is meaninglessness, lawlessness and hopelessness.  After considering this alternative, I think I will pass.  “The fool has said in his heart, There is no God” (Psa. 14:1).