Atheism is No Answer
- Scriptures: Acts 17:24-28; Romans 1:18-20; Psalm 14:1; Psalm 19:1-3
- Pillars of the Faith
Transcript
Kerry Duke: Hi, I am Kerry Duke, host of My God and My Neighbor podcast from Tennessee Bible College, where we see the Bible as not just another book, but the Book. Join us in a study of the inspired Word to strengthen your faith and to share what you’ve learned with others.
A lot of people use the internet these days to learn about God and religion, and out of all the searches for answers about God, what question would you say that people are asking the most?
Recent reports indicate that it’s the very question we’ve been talking about. The age old problem of evil. The top three questions in Google searches according to the numbers are these. Number one, why does God allow suffering and evil? Number two, does life have a purpose? And number three, does God exist?
It’s interesting that after thousands of years, with all of our advances in medicine and technology and other areas, mankind is still asking the same things. Some questions just won’t go away. That’s because some things don’t change. Ecclesiastes chapter one, verse nine is where Solomon said 3000 years ago, “The thing that has been it is that which shall be. And that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.” So it’s encouraging that God anticipated these concerns and He addressed them in the Bible long ago.
These three questions are also connected. I’m talking about the question, why does God allow suffering the question, does life have a purpose, and the question, does God exist? These are all interconnected. The answer to one affects how you answer the others. And today in this lesson, we will see that one popular approach to the problem of evil will not work. That approach is atheism, and we are about to see why in this lesson that we’ll call “Atheism is no answer.”
You can say the same thing about agnosticism and skepticism. Agnosticism is different from atheism. It’s the view that no one can be sure whether God exists. Atheism, on the other hand, tries to prove God does not exist. It claims to know that God is not real. Agnostics, on the other hand, believe we just can’t be sure.
They are skeptical about everything. They question what Christians say and even what atheists say, and then they tell us that no one can be certain either way. They question everything, that is, except their contention that no one can know for sure. But that’s the very thing they claim to be sure about—that no one can be sure. So when these people—and I’m talking about agnostics—when they say they don’t believe in God because of all the evil in the world, they reason like a dog chasing its tail.
But an atheist looks at these three questions and gives a definite answer to each one. Why does God allow evil and suffering an atheist? God is supposed to be all-powerful and all-loving. A God like that, an atheist says, could not and would not allow all the suffering and evil in the world a. But since there is so much evil in the world, the conclusion for the atheist is God does not exist. But if there is no God in atheistic thinking, then the atheist has to answer the question: Then why are we here? What’s the purpose of all this? What’s the meaning of life?
Now atheists answer that there is no purpose to live or reason for us being here. There is no meaning to life. Where does that kind of thinking leave them? Well, if there’s no purpose for all this, especially all of what they call pointless suffering in the world, then how are we to feel about life?
So in the atheistic camp, there are two ways of thinking. There are two different kinds of atheists. Now there are more, but there are two basic kinds of atheists when it comes to this problem of evil. In regard to the question, What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of all this?—some atheists dwell on how empty and hopeless life is. They live in a world of pain and sorrow and violence, and to them there is no answer. There is no reason for us being here and no hope of where we’re going (to them). There is no God to help us much less to comfort us. There is no heaven to go to when we die. We live in a dark world and there is nothing that we can do about that.
The name for an atheist who thinks like this is the word existentialist. Now that word has a variety of meanings in religious circles, but in the philosophical world where atheism and skepticism reign supreme, an existentialist is one who says, “We exist, we are here. Don’t look for a reason why or a purpose, just live with it, because there is no God to explain it.”
Now, obviously, this is a very gloomy, pessimistic, depressing outlook on life. How could anyone think like this without becoming suicidal? And sad to say that’s what it sometimes leads to. On the other hand, there are other atheists who say, “You’ve got it all wrong.” Getting rid of the thought of God makes them feel good without God in the picture.
There are no rules. There’s no guilt. There’s no fear of hell. Now, this camp of atheists don’t think a world without purpose is depressing. They see it as a reason to celebrate. It reminds me of what the Bible says in First Corinthians 15, verse 32 about people who do not believe in life after death. Paul is basically saying there, as he quotes the Old Testament in Isaiah chapter 22, 13 and 14, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow, we die.”
So these atheists, in contrast to the existentialist, try to be positive. They try to be optimistic. They see a bright future ahead where mankind can explore and discover and create. And if you ask them about all the suffering and evil in the world, if you ask them, “What about all of that? What are you going to do? How do you deal with it?”—they will tell you that they’re working on that. And in time they will tell you that human beings can eradicate things like disease and crime and maybe even death. Now this type of atheist is often called a humanist, and they are very, very naive. In fact, they’re very dishonest about the world and the facts about it.
They’re also very arrogant. In 1973, a group of renowned scientists and educators wrote a manifesto called the Humanist Manifesto Two. In it, they stated their goals for a world without religion. They say, “No deity will save us. We must save ourselves.” It’s interesting that this booklet talks about how atheism plans to deal with the problem of evil and suffering in regard to morals.
This manifesto says that nothing is absolute in ethics. Nothing is right or wrong for everybody. Every person decides what is good or bad for him. In regard to human suffering, it says that people should work together to have peace on earth and to put an end to things like poverty. And one thing these atheists agree on is that they don’t need God to accomplish any of this.
Now that’s the humanist agenda. But regardless of which view of atheism a person holds, an atheist will point to evil and suffering as a reason why he does not believe in God. Here are a couple of examples of men that were well-known atheists who were very bold in denying God on that very basis. So consider these men.
Robert Ingersoll was a famous orator in America. He lived from 1833 to 1899. He was so gifted and accomplished at public speaking that people would pay money and fill places to hear him speak for three to four hours on politics, religion, and history, and other topics. He was a notorious skeptic. He ridiculed the Bible, he blasphemed God.
He loved to point to stories in the Bible like the Israelites’ war against the Canaanites, and then he would ask, “If the devil had been in command of the Israelite army instead of God, how could he have done any worse than what God commanded the Israelites to do when he told them to kill every man, woman, and child?”
So Ingersoll not only said he couldn’t believe in the God of the Bible because of all the evil in the world, but he also said he didn’t believe in God because of all the evil in the Bible. Now, there’s much more that we could say about that in response, but right now I’m simply pointing out some examples of how people use this problem of evil to reach the level of atheism.
Number two, we find a man by the name of Anthony Flew. He lived from 1923 to 2010. He was a brilliant, highly educated man by worldly standards. He was a world-renowned atheist who wrote, lectured, and debated to destroy belief in God. He said believing in God was like believing in the tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.
But then after decades of fighting against God, he shocked the world when he was in his early eighties by announcing that he had changed his mind. He decided that he could no longer be an atheist. He released his autobiography in 2007. The title is, There is a God with the subtitle How The World’s Most Notorious Atheist changed his Mind.
I was like a lot of people when I heard about this, so I bought the book and read it. I wanted to know, first of all, what made him decide to be an atheist to begin with, and second, I was interested in what led him to change his mind. And I found both answers in the book. Flew starts by telling us that he was not an atheist always.
As a matter of fact, his father was a Methodist minister, but he said although it was hard for him to put his finger on any one thing that marked his transition to atheism, he said there is one thing that affected him early on. He admitted it. It was the problem of evil. Now, the Flew family lived in England, and Anthony Flew said that as a young man, his father would take him on trips to France and Germany in the 1930s before World War II.
There he saw how the Germans were mistreating Jews. There he saw thousands of Nazi soldiers marching in support of Hitler. He said in his autobiography that he could not express in words how deeply these experiences influenced his very young mind, and as a result, he became an atheist. He could not see how an all-powerful, all-loving God could allow such evil to exist.
Then after decades of being an atheist, after all those years of writing and debating against God, he changed his mind. Why? It’s simple. It was, he says in his own words, nature itself. It was God’s creation. It had been right in front of him all that time, all his life, but he was too proud to see it. He finally came out and said, “I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite intelligence.”
Now those words “infinite intelligence” are interesting. That’s the sad part about his so-called conversion. He never said he believed in the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is not only infinite in knowledge, but He’s also infinite in love and power and justice and all his attributes. So when Flew said that he changed his mind and became a believer in God, he was talking about the God of deism. Now, that’s a God who made the world, but has not intervened with it since he made the world. Now, that was a popular view when the United States began. Thomas Jefferson held to that kind of view. Thomas Paine was a deist as well.
And at the same time, Flew was like a lot of people today. A lot of people today want to believe in God and say they believe in God, but it’s not the God of the Bible. They say they believe in God, but they don’t want to answer to God. They don’t want to have rules from God. So Flew died without believing in the true God, without believing in Jesus, and without believing in the Bible as the inspired word of God.
He had turned to atheism because he thought it was the answer to the problem of evil. But in the end, he admitted it was no answer at all. Now, one thing we do see in his story is that there is no excuse for anyone being an atheist because nature itself shows the existence of God to everyone everywhere on the face of the earth.
In Psalm 19 verse one, the Bible says, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto today utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.” That passage says that the heavens above the sky up above us—all these things show the power and the glory of God anywhere at any time on the face of the earth.
In Acts chapter 14, verse 17, Paul and Barnabas are in the city of Lira. These are superstitious people, and the Bible shows that Paul pointed them to nature because God is the one and the only one who could make this creation. In Acts chapter 14, verse 17, here’s what they said. “Nevertheless, He did not leave himself without witness.” Now they’re talking about God. God did not leave himself without testimony. God didn’t hide Himself in the heavens and not reveal His power to man. And how did He reveal Himself to these superstitious people who didn’t even have a Bible?
Well, the Bible shows us in Acts 14, verse 17. He did not leave Himself without witness “in that he did good and gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” Where do these things come from? How do we arrive at getting these things that we need in life? It’s because of the goodness of God.
It’s because of the design of God. It’s because we have, and the world has, a Creator. In Acts chapter 17, Paul is in the city of Athens. This is a city that is full of idolatry and also a city that is renowned for the intellectuals. Imagine that you have all of these supposedly worldly wise people, and yet you have a city that is full of foolish idols.
So how does Paul address these people? What does he say to them? How is he going to talk to people that don’t even believe in the true God? Yet? The Bible shows us in Acts 17, verse 24, that he took them straight to nature, to creation, because creation points you to the Creator. In Acts 17:24, Paul said, “God, who made the world”—there’s the key—“and everything in it, since he is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands.” Going down to verse 26, he said that God “has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth. And has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings so that they should seek the Lord in the hope that they might grope for him and find him. Though he is not far from each one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.”
And then you have that powerful passage in Romans chapter one. Here. Paul teaches us that nature points us to God himself. He shows us and teaches us that the creation logically leads to the creator.
In Romans one, verse 18, Paul said, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has showed it to them; for since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen , being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead: so that they are without excuse.”
Even though we cannot fully understand why God made the world knowing that the world would be filled with evil and suffering, what we do know and what we must not ignore is that the creation reveals the Creator. We don’t know the answer to why all this happens, but one thing we do know for sure is that God made this world.
Whatever we do, we must never let our ignorance of the one lead us to deny the other. That can be hard to do when you’re hurting so bad and feel so helpless that you feel like your faith is at the edge of a cliff. Below you are the sharp, jagged rocks of unbelief. You’re standing on solid ground, but you feel like it’s shaking and about to give way.
It’s at that moment that each person makes a choice. You can consider the alternative to faith in God, which is unbelief or atheism, or you can back away from the edge of the cliff and think it through. More than that, you can get down on your knees and humble yourself before God. Now, if you take a leap of hate, what I would call a leap of hate, hatred of God, hatred of life, hatred of yourself, then you will end up bitter, miserable and estranged from God on the jagged rocks of unbelief below. I call that a leap of hate. It’s a hatred of God. You know, the Bible does talk about some who hate God in Romans one, verse 30. They didn’t set out intending to hate God, but they end up at that point and it’s usually because of a lot of pain and a lot of suffering in their life, and they get angry with God, then bitter at God and then finally hate God.
Now Christianity does not teach a leap of faith. Many people talk about a leap of faith, but the Bible nowhere tells us to take a leap of faith. Our faith is not a leap. It is not a leap of faith. It is not a leap in the dark. It is not a leap without facts and evidence and proof. If in a time of crisis you keep your feet on the solid ground of facts and faith, you will recover from this dark and trying time. God will give you strength and rest.
Most people go through a crisis in life that is so severe that they eventually get to the point to where they question God’s justice. Job did. Others did in the Bible. But that doesn’t mean that we should allow that kind of anger to drive us away from God. This is why we need to spend more time contemplating God’s creation.
Now, that’s more than just spending time with nature as people say. A lot of people love the outdoors. They enjoy the tall mountains, the beautiful seas, the majestic stars, and the breathtaking array of animals and birds and fish and flowers, and trees that cover the landscape of our home on earth. They love to go on vacations and be close to nature. But the sad part is they don’t give a second thought about the God who made all this, and they rarely feel that they owe God anything in return, even a prayer of thanksgiving. They feel exhilarated in nature, but not humble enough to obey God.
But as Christians, we see and feel much more when we look into nature. We see the power of God in nature. We see the love of God in His creation. We see the wisdom of God. We recognize who we are and how little and dependent we are on God.
David often marveled about this in the Book of Psalms. In Psalm eight, verse three, he said, “When I consider your heavens”—and let me just stop there. How many times do we even do that today? He said I am considering your heavens. I’m looking at the heavens. I don’t just glance at them and then hurry back to whatever I was doing.
He said I really think about it. I ponder, I meditate on this vast creation. Do you do that in your life? Do we take the time even to look up just for a few seconds or a few minutes and think about how great our God is? That’s one of the things that is a shortcoming in the lives of many Christians today that don’t spend enough time contemplating nature.
And what I’m saying to you in this lesson is that if you’re going to deal with the problem of suffering and evil in this world, and if you’re going to live with all of the trials in your life, you’re going to have to not only study your Bible and pray to God, but you’re going to have to look into creation.
You’re going to have to spend more time contemplating creation because the God that can create and maintain and sustain all of this is the God that we depend on to get us through those trials. If we believe that God created all this by his mighty power, then there is no reason we should doubt the fact that he will see us through the hardships of life.
It’s just as simple as that. But if you and I are so busy that we cannot even take the time to look up, then our faith is going to be weak. Now look again at what David said in Psalm eight, verse three. “When I consider your heavens the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have ordained, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you visit him for? You have made him a little lower than the angels. And you have crowned him with glory and honor.”
Now, you will see this same kind of thinking brought up in the Book of Job. We will look at that later. We are going to discuss, we’re going to talk about, the Book of Job, but I just want to make a reference right now to one thing in the Book of Job, and that is that when you look at all the speakers in that book, you have Job, you have his three friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, and then the young man named Elihu, and then you have God Himself.
So each one of these six talked about Job’s suffering from the standpoint of the creation, even though Job and his three friends disagreed as to why he was suffering. Every one of them at some point talked about and appealed to nature itself.
They all talked about the fact that nature or the creation backed up what they were saying in some way or another about the problem of evil. When you look at the book of Job, you find that God, who is the last one to talk, appeals to His creation. He talks about nature itself. He talks about what He has made and He tells Job to consider this because He asked Job a lot of questions about his creation that Job cannot answer. Now, the point is simply this: Job thought that he had a case against God. He looked at the evil, the suffering in his life, and he thought he had a case against God. He thought that God was being cruel to him. He says that in Job chapter 30, and so what God does, instead of arguing with him and proving him wrong on the level that Job wanted to argue about, God simply takes him back to the creation.
And He says, Job, if you don’t even understand how and why I made, and how I manage, and why I do the things with the physical world that I do—the sun, the moon, the stars, the animals, the seas, the frost, the hail, the lightnings, the clouds, all this—if you don’t understand how I manage all this and why I put all these things into place, then how on earth do you think that you know enough to criticize me because of what I allow or what I do or how I manage the moral part of this life—the part of human beings and their actions and their morals and their choices? You don’t know enough about that Job, and so if we look into the creation, we are not going to get answers that will satisfy us as to “Why, Lord?” but it will help us to put that question into perspective, and that really is what the focus of this study is really all about.
Now, here’s something else to always remember about the problem of evil and atheism. Atheism is no answer because it always contradicts itself. Here’s what I mean by that. Atheists say that they cannot believe in God because of all the evil that is in the world. That is a contradiction. Why? Because if atheists are true, then God does not exist.
If there is no God, then there is no real right or wrong. That’s the point. There is no evil in the world if God does not exist. Atheists don’t have anything to point to, In the minds of atheists, there is no God. That means that there is no ultimate standard to say what is right and what is wrong. Now you have human beings obviously, you have people that say, “Well, I think this is right, or I think that this is wrong.” You have people who say, “Eell, the majority of people seem to say this about right and wrong,” and then others say, “Well, I disagree with that.” As long as you keep morals or ethics on a human level, there’s nothing objective. There’s nothing that really is absolute.
But if morals are absolute, if there is anything that is objectively right or wrong in this world, then that means that there must be an ultimate standard. There must be an objective source of right and wrong, and that source can only be God. It can’t be man, because people differ in their ideas of right and wrong.
You have to have some kind of law that rises above human law. I mentioned Anthony Flew just a few minutes ago. I want you to think about a debate that he had with a gospel preacher named Thomas Warren in 1976 in Denton, Texas. This was at a time when Anthony Flu was in his prime as an atheistic debater.
So brother Warren asked him the question: Did the Nazis commit real moral evil when they murdered 6 million Jews? And Mr. Flew said well obviously they did. Then Brother Warren asked him the question: what law did they violate? He said the Nazis didn’t violate German law because German laws said that they should do it. They didn’t violate the law of Great Britain because they were not under the law of Great Britain. They didn’t violate the law of the United States because they were not subject to the law of the United States. So what law did they violate? And Flew in that debate never could get out of that trap. He never could dig himself out of that hole because if there is no God, there is nothing that those Nazis did that was wrong. You can’t say that they were guilty of sin. You can say that they maybe broke some kind of law that you invent in your mind or that you appeal to on a human level, but you can’t really say that they did anything that was really morally, objectively evil. And that’s what I’m talking about.
So it’s an incredible thing that you have all these very educated men, supposedly, and women who point to the evil that is in the world, the suffering that takes place on earth, and say this is wrong. This is evil, and the God that you Christians say you believe in cannot exist. Because if He was really all powerful, He would stop this. If He was really all loving, He would want to stop this.
We ask them: stop what? And they of course will answer: stop all the evil that is in the world. But yet they’ve contradicted themselves the very moment they say that, because if there is no God, there is no evil. We’re just dirt and rocks and dust. We’re just animals just like any other animal. And animals don’t live on the basis of this is right and this is wrong.
When a tiger attacks or when a spider bites, we don’t talk about that being sinful or evil or wrong. They just do what they do. And so people killing you, each other, people murdering each other, people starving each other to death—whatever the atrocity is that you point to in life, none of that is evil if there is no God.
So it is just absolutely incredible that atheists are so stubborn and so prideful and so blind that they don’t see that they’re contradicting themselves at every turn because every time they bring up the problem of evil as their reason for not believing in God, they are not only logically but also inevitably contradicting themselves.
We need to teach our young people especially to remember this when they’re confronted with the problem of evil as a reason for not believing in God because it is not. It is actually a reason for believing in God, and that’s why we say atheism is no answer to the problem of evil.
Thank you for listening to My God and My Neighbor. Stay connected with our podcast on our website, and on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Tennessee Bible College, providing Christian education since 1975 in Cookeville, Tennessee, offers undergraduate and graduate programs. Study at your level. Aim higher and get in touch with us today.