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The Absurdity of Atheism, Part 1
The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God!"
In this and the next two papers, I hope to show in that atheists don't become atheists because of premises, but because of conclusions. I contend—and I'm quite comfortable being brazen about it—that no one has ever become an atheist because reason or evidence (deduction or induction) drove them to the conclusion that there is no God.
Atheists want us to think that their unbelief is logical and reasonable and that anyone who disagrees with them is a complete idiot, but nothing about atheism is logical or reasonable.
The momentum of rational thought leads only to God.
When David wrote, "the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God," the Hebrew word he used for fool is nabal (David's wife, Abigal, had a husband named Nabal, 1 Sam. 25).
Although nabal can mean foolish or stupid, it comes from a root that means to wither.
It is translated this way in Psalm 1.3 where it is said of the godly man that "his leaf also shall not wither [nabal]." Because the righteous have constant access to life-giving water (God's word, v 2), they are resistant to the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional drought of unbelief.
"Not so the ungodly!" (Psalm 1.4, MOF). They who say there is no God are as dry as dust when it comes to presenting a cogent argument that shows their unbelief to be reasonable.
But no matter how celebrated a Carl Sagan, or how clever a Richard Dawkins, or how courageous a Stephen Hawking, their atheism is nothing but the emperor's new clothes, warring against rational thought, moral behavior, and their own humanity.
If there is no God, atheists are obligated to demonstrate such by considerations that are either self-evident and/or empirical, for the only way we know anything is through self-evident or empirical means (I'm talking here about matters of the head, not the heart).
Self-evident knowledge includes things we just know, in and of ourselves, to be true. In classical logic, such knowledge is expressed as: a is not non-a—if this is true, its opposite isn't true; if it is noon, it is not midnight. Empirical knowledge, however, comes not from within us but from outside us, from the world around us that we perceive through our five senses and learn about through experimentation and observation (e.g., water freezes at 32°F). Somewhere along the line I just knew that I can't walk in opposite directions at the same time, but I didn't just know that the sun comes up in the east; it was my sense of sight that taught me about the dawn.
If atheists expect to be taken seriously, they must show how innate reason or empirical investigation leads to the conclusion that there is no God.
But this they cannot do, for whether we're talking about our reason within us or the world around us, God has not left Himself without witness.
If the Lord wills, in the next paper I'll try to show that the only viable conclusion from self-evident knowledge (reason) is that God is; in the paper after that, I'll try to show that the only viable conclusion from empirical evidence is that Jesus is God.
I hope you will find it all to be helpful.
