The Inconsistent Atheist

Well, it’s Wednesday today on Things Unseen, and I want to welcome you if this is your first visit to our weekday podcast.

This week we’ve been thinking about the question, What is man? Who are we really? And yesterday, we were reflecting a little on the sheer wonder of being created as male and female, men and women, two kinds of the same being made to belong together, to glorify God together and to enjoy Him together.

That last bit, I think, is what non-believers can never get. When we come to know God, we enjoy Him. And no wonder, because we come to realize how loving and kind and generous He has been to us.

I’ve often thought that agnostics and atheists can’t really live consistently on the basis of their own agnostic or atheistic presuppositions. They’ve got to beg, borrow, or steal from a biblical world and life view—of course, without admitting it and often without realizing it. Their presupposition is that we are just a mass of stuff, and all we are and do is determined by the stuff that’s built into us from our conception. But you can’t really live consistently with that world and life view, certainly with that view of yourself.

I’m reminded of a lecture given by one of my professors of psychology at university. She was a well-known British humanist, and she had written on the subject of humanism and its virtues. On one particular day, she gave a lecture on biological determinism, arguing basically that everything we think, feel, and do is essentially biologically determined. The idea, therefore, that we have free will, she said, is a figment of our biologically determined imagination.

The effect on my class was electrifying. There was uproar afterwards. No free will? It was as though someone had given a lecture in an Arminian college on predestination and election. I’ve never forgotten the outrage. Actually, it was all very unacademic. But the interesting thing was that all this had been very calmly argued in a class of students, most of whom, I think, prided themselves in adopting a secular, atheistic, scientific view of the universe, but they couldn’t stand the implications of their own presuppositions.

Now, I recognize that as you get older, too many sentences begin with the fatal words, “I remember.” But there’s a reason I’m dragging up this memory from the past. Some weeks after the lecture, I was in the university bookshop, and over the other side of a bookcase, I heard an immediately recognizable voice. It was my biologically determined humanist psychology professor. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her say very distinctly to one of the staff, “Do you sell Christmas cards here?” Inwardly, I wanted to jump over the bookcase with an angelic leap and say: “Caught you. Why are you stealing Christmas joy from the worldview you’ve rejected?” Well, I’m not an angel, and I suppose it wouldn’t have done my grades any good if I’d leapt over the bookcase, but you see the point.

Now that’s only an illustration of inconsistency, but think of this more broadly. We’re created as God’s image and likeness. We can’t escape the fact that life was created to have meaning, no matter how much we try to deny it. Try to think consistently from a presupposition of atheism and its partner, biological determinism, and the result will be an intolerable darkness and despair. I do not recommend the thought experiment of consistently working out what it means that you’re simply an accident.

As Paul says in Romans 1:18 and following, the only way to sustain atheism is if you hold back, and hold down, and suppress, and try to repress the truth in unrighteousness. And if you’ve professed yourself to be that kind of unbeliever, you need to remember that you are actually a kind of believer—this is what you profess to believe. But you can’t really live that way consistently, can you? You’re always going to need to borrow from a Christian world and life view, the Christian view of man, male and female.

So, if that’s who you are, I hope you’ll be willing to be honest enough with yourself to rethink things. And I hope you’ll come to see how wonderful it is to discover the biblical answer to this ancient question: What is man?