1. Christians Rely on Faith without Reason. Statistics prove that atheists require far more faith to believe in a random, purposeless universe than do believers in a universe designed. The best proof is called the Anthropic Principle. The odds that various properties in our universe (such as the gravitational constant) would be exactly what they need to be to support life are one in 10229 (that’s a lot of zeros!). But atheists argue that life is a random accident. Either they’re bad at math, or their faith stands against reason.

2. Materialistic Evolution Can Explain Everything. It cannot explain the origin of life, the complexity of DNA as a code of information more detailed and specific than a hundred sets of encyclopedias, nor the existence of human rationality.

3. Science is Purely Rational and Perfectly Objective. Science cannot be perfectly objective because people are not perfectly objective. The recent scandal involving scientists associated with the U.N. who falsified their conclusions about global warming shows clearly that science is only as good as the prejudices of scientists.

4. Science Deals Only in Facts. Then why do the facts constantly change? Today’s cutting edge science is tomorrow’s fiction. If science only dealt in unchanging facts, scientific truths would never go out of date. Consider how many times what we’ve been told about nutrition and dieting has changed in the last thirties years and you’ll see my point.

5. Variety in Cultural Beliefs and Morals Proves There is No One God or Universal Morality. Anthropological studies in the past few decades have shown the opposite to be true. Morality itself is a universal quality of human cultures, and, though there is diversity in moral practice in the world, there is a much greater unity of agreement regarding moral standards.

6. Heaven is Merely the Product of Psychological Wish Fulfillment. Atheists argue that, since people have a strong survival instinct, the desire to live gets inflated into a belief in eternal life. If that were true, there would be nowhere near as strong a belief in hell (or something like it) as there is in the religions of the world. Atheists might answer, “Hell is the place religious people invented for their enemies.” But any close reading of religious texts, whether from other cultures or the Bible, proves that religious doctrine is much more concerned about the believer’s avoiding hell than his wanting to send his enemies to it. If we merely invented heaven out of wish fulfillment, we would not have invented a hell to accompany it.

7. Religion Cannot Explain the Problem of Pain and Suffering in the World. Actually atheism can’t. While the answers to pain in the world are difficult, they exist in Christianity. But the atheist has no recourse in explaining evil. If there is no God and we are merely products of evolution, then the only thing that matters is survival of the fittest, and the pain and suffering that “the fittest” inflict on the rest of the world isn’t evil at all—it’s simply evolution. It’s nature. We do not blame lions for eating antelope. There’s nothing moral about their behavior. But for some reason we do sense something wrong when a lion mauls a person, and we draw the line completely when people abuse or kill other people. We feel a sense of moral outrage at such behavior. And atheists feel it too. Because of that moral outrage, they argue that there cannot be a loving God. But in making this argument they fail to ask where their moral outrage comes from in the first place! They have no reason to be outraged if there is no God, but their outrage is the reason for claiming there is no God. Without God, the problem doesn’t exist; that is, in an evolutionary universe, pain is natural—there is nothing abnormal about it—and our aversion to it on moral grounds is merely the product of a strong survival instinct and a nervous system wired for pain. In other words, if the atheists are right about God, then our outrage toward pain is mere wish fulfillment, like our desire for heaven. If it is wish fulfillment, then the atheists are hypocrites because, in regard to pain, they’ve been wishing the same thing as the rest of us.

At the end of a decade of atheistic attacks, the response by Christian thinkers can be summed up in a single statement: every argument atheists have made against the existence of God has been proven wrong. I’m sure that’s no surprise to God.

¹ A reminder: Much of the material I cover here has been collected together by Dinesh D’Souza in his book, What’s So Great About Christianity.Return to Text
² D'souza, Chapter Twelve. Return to Text
³ D’Souza, Chapter Thirteen. Return to Text
⁴ The classic book which proves the biases of scientists and the humanly subjective leaps to which they have gone for the advancement of science is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Return to Text
⁵ D’Souza, Chapter Twenty. Return to Text
⁶ D’Souza, Chapter Twenty-three.Return to Text
⁷ D’Souza, Chapter Twenty-four. Return to Text