Attacking, Atheistically

THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST minister minced no words, and succinctly identified the enemy: atheism. Atheism and its godless brood is on the attack, attacking the Christian faith. Whereas until fairly recently belief in God, presumably the Christian, biblical God, was almost universal throughout western civilization. The community of beleivers has seriously dwindled in recent years, with the advent and coming of age of the millennial generation, half of which has no religious affiliation nor interest. Modern science has further accelerated the decline in traditional religious belief. The alleged assault by the rising atheist hordes is three pronged. The first is the argument that is expressed in the form of a question: if God created the universe, who or what created God? Although this seems like a perfectly reasonable question, (a question, and not an "attack"), the answer, in riposte, is simple: God was never created by anyone or anything, but has existed eternally. Touche, evidently. When something is presented as eternal a prioiri, avoiding the question of origins becomes easy. The second line of attack concerns evolutionary science, or "theory", as Christians would have it. (Christians often remind us, falsely, that not only evolution, but science itself depends of a sort of faith, even though its accepted precepts are never accepted until proven independently and empirically.) Atheists, it seems, consider Darwin's evolutionary biology, evolution by natural selection of mates, to be adequately explanatory for the existence of life, precluding any need for creation by a divine, heavenly, "higher power". The Christian response is that there are loopholes in evolutionary theory through which a church bus could be driven, and anyway, the spark of life which precipitated evolution must surely have been lit by divine inervenetion. For, example, if humans really evolved from monkeys, there would be no monkeys in today's world. What they fail to understand is that evolutionary science does not claim that humans evolved from monkeys, but rather, that humans and monkeys evolved simultaneously from a common ancestor, which is an entirely different matter. It is the common ancestor, another primate, which no longer exists. Thirdly, atheists such as Richard Dawkins, in his book "The God Delusion", and Christopher Hitchens in his book "God Is Not Great" offer the problem of human suffering, and of evil in the world, as proof that God, at least a loving, compassionate God, cannot and does not exist. As poet Archibald MacLeish put it: "If God is God he is not good, if God is good he is not God". Bart Ehrman, Dean of the school of religious studies at North Carolina University at Chapel Hill, once a born again Christian, became an agnostic, troubled over this exact question, of human suffering. Its a question he has never answered, nor has anyone else. The Christian solution is to invent another imaginary being, "the devil", and another dubious concept, that of free will. If free will exists, and most scientists think it does not, then it is an emergent quality, the result of a complex interaction of natural forces, within the laws of nature, laws which in and of themselves give no evidence that living creatures possess free will, but are confined to behave according to natural laws, laws which are absolute, and external to animal behavior. Free will must exist for the Christian God to exist in a world of human suffering, as must the devil itself. To embrace the Christian religion, or any religion, one must embrace arbitrary, dubious concepts.