The Irrational Hubris of Atheism

Last week I was reading statements made on a site for secular humanists.  One particular author made the statement I had heard many times before, that he became and atheist when he decided that God was not necessary.

This reminded me of the time when I was four years old and decided to run away from home. I suppose that I was angry at my mother because of some limit she had placed on my freedom. I packed my tiny red and white suitcase and, in full view of my mother's watchful eye, traveled to the end of the driveway. There I sat on my suitcase and petted my cat, Lovey, while I considered the unlimited options for my future.

I had obviously decided that my mother and father were no longer necessary. Staying with them just cramped my style. Without them I would have unlimited freedom.

Of course, as a four year old I had no idea why parents were necessary. I didn't understand human reproduction and genetics so as far as I was concerned I didn't owe my existence to them. The story of the stork or babies in a cabbage patch would have been a fine story of origins for me.

I did not understand economics and how it happened that we had a house to live in, clothes to wear and food to eat. How hard could it be for me to live on my own? I had my suitcase packed with what I supposed would sustain me. (Of course my mother never took her eyes off of me and would have intervened immediately if I had offered to go into the road. Poor Lovey unfortunately did not have the same level of supervision and eventually met her end in that very street.)

So God is not necessary, you say?  Well what do you know about it, really?

The modern theories of the origin of the universe and the origin of life and of evolution are simply "just so stories" to placate people who want to run away from God. They may satisfy someone who is determined to disbelieve in personal God and allow him to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist" but what does it have to do with the truth?

What do we know, apart from divine revelation, about our personal existence or the nature of life or the matter of morality and human conscience? The modern atheist is confident that he knows enough, when in fact he knows nothing at all except that he exists and does not like the constraints placed on him by the idea that there could be a God to Whom he might need to give an account. There is nothing new about this.

(Romans 1:28) And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting;