Here is a sentence that sounds outrageous until you follow the logic: if atheism is true, no criminal has ever been guilty of anything. Not one, in all of history. Stay with me, because the argument is not mine. It belongs to atheism itself.
You are physics
On a consistent atheist account, you are a physical system and nothing more. Your choices are the output of brain chemistry you did not choose. That chemistry was wired by genes you did not pick and shaped by an environment you did not select. There is no “you” standing above the process and steering it. There is only the process.
This is not a caricature invented by believers. Leading atheists say it openly: there is no free will. Many of them regard the admission as a mark of intellectual courage.
No freedom, no responsibility
Now draw the conclusion they are slower to draw. If there is no free will, there is no responsibility. The murderer did what his chemistry dictated. He had no more choice in the matter than a rock has when it falls off a cliff.
And you cannot blame a rock. You cannot praise one either. If human beings are rocks with better publicity, then every courtroom is theater, every hero is an accident, and every act of blame is a mistake about what kind of thing a person is. Goodbye courtrooms. Goodbye heroes. Goodbye blame.
Warming their hands at a fire they deny
Here is where it gets interesting. The same atheists who tell you free will is an illusion will turn around and blame religion for the evils of history, and they expect believers to feel the full weight of the charge.
But blame requires exactly the free will their worldview just erased. If no one is responsible for anything, then no believer in any century was responsible either. You cannot abolish guilt in one breath and hand it out in the next.
They deny the fire and keep warming their hands on it.
What this tells you
A worldview that cannot condemn a single villain has a problem, and the honest atheist knows it. He feels moral outrage like everyone else. He wants the guilty punished and the innocent protected. Those instincts are right. They are simply impossible to justify on his own premises.
The Christian has no such difficulty. We are made by a God who gave us real agency and holds us to real account, which is why guilt is real, why justice matters, and why forgiveness means something. The courtroom makes sense in a world where people can actually choose.
No free will means no guilt. Ever. If that conclusion strikes you as absurd, then the premise that produced it deserves a second look.
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.