Every worldview has a weak point. The weak point of atheism is unusually close to home. It is not out in the cosmos or buried in the fossil record. It is sitting inside the atheist’s own skull.
Survival Is Not Truth
Follow the logic as the atheist himself lays it out. Your brain, he says, is an accident. It was not designed. It is chemistry, assembled over long ages because certain arrangements helped your ancestors survive long enough to reproduce.
Notice the word. Survive. Not discover truth. Evolution, on this account, rewards useful behavior. It has no interest in true beliefs except where truth happens to be useful, and there is no guarantee that it often is. A false belief that keeps you alive is selected just as readily as a true one.
So on atheism, every thought you have is atoms bumping around, tuned for survival. Including your thoughts about physics. Including your thoughts about right and wrong. Including the thought that there is no God.
The Tornado and the Calculator
Why would you trust such a thought? You would not trust a calculator that had been assembled by a tornado, no matter how confidently it displayed an answer. You would not trust ink that had spilled across a page and happened to land in the shape of a sentence. In both cases the output might be correct by luck, but you would have no reason to believe it was, because nothing in the process that produced it was aimed at being right.
The atheist asks you to make an exception for exactly one tornado-built instrument: his own mind, at the moment it concludes that God does not exist.
The Branch and the Saw
This is why I say the worldview eats itself. If atheism is true, you have no good reason to believe anything your brain tells you, and that includes atheism. The man sawing at the branch is sitting on it. The argument against the Designer can only be made by a mind that works, and a mind that works, one that can track truth rather than merely survive, is precisely what a blind process gives you no reason to expect.
It takes a designed mind to even argue against the Designer.
I do not offer this as a trick. I offer it as a question worth sitting with, the way I had to sit with hard questions during the years I spent trying to argue God out of existence. If your reasoning is reliable enough to reach that conclusion, where did reliable reasoning come from? If atheism is true, why trust the brain that says so?
Get new articles by email
Subscribe and I will send you a short note whenever a new article is published on this site. No spam, and you can unsubscribe at any time.