The Fool Says in His Heart

For Christians who really care about theology and apologetics, one of the biggest issues that regularly comes up in personal conversation or online is atheism. If we want to effectively engage atheists with the sure hope we have in Jesus, we need to understand what atheism is all about and where atheists are coming from. That's a way bigger task than we can accomplish together here. But if we're fooled into believing it's all rational arguments and scientific evidence, we might end up seriously overestimating atheism and underestimating Christianity. So, as a theologian with experience getting this right and getting it wrong, I'm going to share with you just five essential, useful truths to keep in mind when we as Christians today weigh the claims of atheism or engage with atheists in conversation.

1. Atheism is just as much a belief system as anything else.

When I say atheism, I'm guessing if you're reading this you're likely most familiar with the so-called New Atheism, a militant, vocally anti-religious movement usually associated with four prominent authors: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens.

The New Atheism is a post-9/11 movement of outspoken atheism led by figures like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, characterized by its militant critique of religion as irrational, harmful, and incompatible with science and modern reason.

These aggressive atheists, known as the four horsemen of the new atheism, really ramped up their criticism of religion after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC. The four horsemen initially focused their fire mostly on Islam but quickly broadened their public critique of all faith and religion as not just irrational and out of touch but actively dangerous and harmful. These men wrote a number of best-selling books against religion in the mid-2000s and became massively influential through their writing, speaking, and debating.

It was around this time I had my first intense argument with a zealous disciple of these new atheists. This guy, let's call him Max, showed up at a mutual friend's house because he knew I'd be there. He didn't want to get to know me, to understand my point of view—just bang, bang, bang, one atheist talking point after another. Max was just looking to pick a fight with a committed Christian and I was his chosen target.

We can think of a belief system as a big story about the true nature of things, a story that claims to provide us with overall meaning and purpose, and so this system acts as a guide for how those who believe this story should live in such a world. Christianity is definitely more than this, in a way that makes it unique (which we'll talk about later), but we can think of it on one level as a belief system alongside all the other claimants to religious truth and all the other big stories that claim not to be religious.

Like everyone else, atheists embrace big stories that claim to make better sense of the universe than the alternatives. They form communities that share and develop their beliefs. We can even think of the four horsemen as the four evangelists of atheism, self-appointed apostles who encourage their more militant followers to go and make disciples, dispelling the darkness of religion and spreading the truth of atheism far and wide.

And like all other true believers, zealous atheists are prone to privilege what supports their belief system even if those things aren't actually true. Especially when it comes to history. One very careful and thoughtful atheist has even compiled an amazingly well-researched webpage called "The Great Myths," where his goal is to convince fellow atheists to stop retelling a whole laundry list of falsehoods from history just because they're convenient for attacking religion.

Now, not all of us as Christians are called to be experts in history. Most of the people retelling these myths don't know any better. (I have multiple degrees in history and some of the details on that website were news to me.) But when other people share historical accounts in a conversation or debate, most of us would tend to take such accounts at face value. That's not wise. Just as all well-informed Christians should be aware of the many things that believers have done in history that weren't worthy of our Lord, we should also be aware of the tremendous amount of completely bogus anti-religious history going around on the internet. So if an atheist is attacking Christianity as a whole on the basis of historical claims, be very wary of the accuracy of that history.

And even if a particular historical account turns out to be accurate as history, that doesn't mean an atheist interpretation of that history is accurate in its attempts to overturn or undermine or disprove Christianity.

So atheism too is its own sort of belief system. It's just a particularly troubling one.

Christians need to understand this. Whenever someone denying the existence of God uses logic and reason or carefully crafted arguments against their Creator, they're like the prodigal son spending his dad's money to subsidize his self-indulgence.

Max, the guy I met, hounded me with what about thises and what do you say to thats for hours. I finally really needed to leave and went out to my car. Max followed me out, not letting up. I finally got exasperated and said something like, "Max, this is ridiculous! Do you even hear yourself? You've been attacking God and Christianity all afternoon but you have nothing to stand on. What's your alternative? Meaninglessness and blind chance?" It was fully dark by that point and the sky was full of stars. I said, "Look around you, man! On your own terms, you have no reason to expect anything to exist at all, much less to be reliable or to be objectively true. You need Christianity to be true to have any way to fight it."

Atheists are constantly drawing on intellectual and rhetorical resources that they deny the reality of. It's like a story the apologist Cornelius Van Til once shared of being in a train car, seeing a small girl across the aisle sitting on her father's lap, playing. All of the sudden, she reaches up and slaps him in the face. And Van Til thinks to himself, that's what atheists do every time they use reason to try to argue against the God who purposed and upholds all things in a meaning filled and orderly universe.

Cornelius Van Til was a twentieth-century Reformed theologian and apologist best known for presuppositional apologetics, arguing that all reasoning rests on faith commitments and that Christian theism alone provides the necessary foundation for rational thought.

How could reason possibly be reliable in a world formed and guided by nothing for no one? The very existence and reliability of reason and logic proclaim the existence of the all-wise, entirely self-consistent, perfectly sovereign God. The little girl could only reach her father's face because he was holding her in his lap.

3. Atheism isn't primarily a rational problem. It's a heart issue.

So God is the source and ground and condition for all rationality. But our beliefs about God, like our beliefs about ourselves or other people, are always relational. They're always a matter of the whole person, or in biblical terms, atheism is a heart issue.

That doesn't mean atheists don't have reasons. It means the heart will always find reasons. Or as Christian philosopher Blaise Pascale famously said, "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." Pascale was talking about knowing truth through more than just reason, especially the truth of God. But in the case of a passionate atheist, a heart in rebellion against God has gone looking for reasons that justify running away. That's a bad use of reasons.

After my exasperated response to Max out in the dark next to my car, he was completely silent for a while. Then—and I’m not exaggerating—he looked me straight in the eye and said, "You're right. I hate my life. I hate God. And I wish I'd never been born."

Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and philosopher whose reflections on reason, faith, and the human condition bridged the emerging scientific age and classical Christian theology.

You know, it's not just an atheist's relationship with God that's at issue. It's also his or her relationships with others. Some atheists are insufferable; they laugh at religious people for being naive or weak or needy. But lots of people are pulled into atheism through traumatic experiences or deep wounds or a godless upbringing (or worse, the wrong kind of godly upbringing). As Christians, we don't know the personal story of any particular atheist God brings into our life. But we do know that he brought this particular person into our life as someone made in his image, with dignity and value despite rebellion or stubbornness.

Atheism is a heart issue, so we need to address the heart; atheism is a relational issue, so we need to care for people personally. If we want atheists to learn to keep the first great commandment, "You shall love the Lord your God," then we should remember the second: "Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:36–40).

4. Practical atheism is a far bigger problem than theoretical atheism.

A lot of Christians have done a lot of good apologetics work responding to the new atheists with biblical truth, theological care, and pastoral wisdom over the last twenty years. But many of us also have a lingering sense that this tidal wave of militant atheist cultural influence is still cresting.

In reality, what a lot of Christians may not realize is that the outsized influence of committed atheism in the broader culture has really dried up since the mid-2010s. Part of the reason is that the four horsemen broke up or lost credibility. Hitchens died in 2011. Dennett died last year. And Dawkins, the most prominent of the new atheists, for years has publicly called himself a "cultural Christian" who's happy to enjoy the trappings of Christian heritage in his native England (even though he doesn't believe any of it is actually true). Compare these two claims from two interviews:

I think that to ground your morality in, certainly in the Bible, would be an appalling thing to do. If you actually look at the Bible, look at any of the moral—almost any of the moral lessons you can take from it….

You know, I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I, I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. And I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country, though I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith….

Dawkins is like a man who wants to live among the Hobbits in the Shire and enjoy all the blessings that flow from their values, while having no respect for those Hobbit values that made the Shire the kind of place it is. Not much credibility there.

Let me say this another way. In places like the United States, atheism just isn't as big a deal as committed atheists and committed Christians think it is. If people think Christianity has a numbers problem in the modern, secular West, then atheism's problems are far worse. We're dealing with a tiny minority of people who have had an outsized influence in intellectual culture over the past couple decades. Self-identified atheists—not just people who doubt, but have a conviction that no God exists—represent less than 5% of the US population and around 10% of the European population on average. And only a small fraction of that small fraction are loud and proud.

Most avowed atheists live in a few countries under communist regimes that explicitly enforce atheism at the state level, whose authorities either systematically discourage or outright persecute anyone who doesn't toe the party line. Even in those countries, like China, around 40% of people don’t consider themselves atheists. (And the real number of non-atheists is probably a lot higher, because a whole variety of practices like ancestor worship or folk spirituality aren't typically classified as religious.)

And as I mentioned with the waning cultural influence of the new atheists, loud and proud atheists aren't just few and far between. They're not cool anymore. So what has replaced atheism's trendiness? Well, pretty much the same thing that has always been more widespread. Quiet, laid back, practical atheism.

Theoretical atheism is the explicit denial of God’s existence as a matter of conviction or philosophy. Practical atheism is living as though God doesn’t exist, regardless of one’s stated beliefs.

Theologians have two different terms for two very different kinds of atheist. A theoretical atheist is someone who has thought things through and is a convinced believer in atheism as a worldview. He or she is committed to the theory, the intellectual standpoint, that God simply doesn't exist and that no religious commitments are true (besides atheism, which we've already talked about). Theoretical atheists are that tiny minority.

Far more common is the second kind of atheist. Practical atheists are people who think, feel, speak, and act as if God may as well not exist—regardless of what they may say they believe. The surge in popular religious survey categories of "spiritual but not religious" or "the nones" in recent decades largely represents not theoretical but practical atheism. Practical atheists may or may not acknowledge the existence of gods or even the true God of the Bible, but in day to day life they submit their lives to their own understanding or feelings or politics or vibes rather than to God and his revealed word.

So practical atheism is a far bigger problem than theoretical atheism. And not just out there in society. It's a huge problem in the church. And listen: when I say we need to recognize practical atheism as a problem in the church, I don't mean only among insincere and immature Christians. I mean practical atheism is a problem in every heart of every genuine Christian. That's why sometimes Christians are the ones motivating atheists to refuse to believe in God. Because we're supposed to show other people what our Lord is like by reflecting his character. What do we expect to happen when we show unbelievers pride, ignorance, anger, or hypocrisy while preaching a God of grace, wisdom, patience, and faithfulness? I read somewhere once, "There are only two reasons why someone isn't a Christian: either because they haven't met a Christian, or because they have."

I'm not saying atheists or other non-Christians bear no responsibility for their own unbelief. I'm saying we Christians shouldn't be speaking or acting in ways that give others more reasons to justify their unbelief. If we want to provide a clear witness in the face of atheism, we can't act like practical atheists ourselves.

5. The gospel is the answer for all who reject or ignore God's existence.

We've all found ourselves justifying what our hearts want with poor reasons in some way or another. “The fool says in his heart, there is no God” (Psalm 14:1). How many times have I been a fool? So Christians should feel where atheists are coming from. You too were once a prodigal son spending your father's money to justify a life of sin or apathy. I might not have been a vocal atheist, but I’ve spoken many words against God and done many ungodly deeds. Sometimes we've failed to acknowledge God in what we've done, and sometimes, like me with Max, in what we've left undone.

I vividly remember what I said to Max when he followed me outside that night twenty-something years ago, and what he said back about hating God and himself. But I have never been able to recall what I said next. Or if I said anything. What haunts me is that I don't remember doing the most significant thing I could have done that night: I don't remember pointing him to the gospel. And I didn't get another chance. We never talked again. The next time I heard anything about him, he was dead. Max had taken his own life.

I’m not insinuating that all atheists are like Max, or end up like Max. I pray that if I wasn't faithful to testify to Max of God's grace in Jesus, then someone else was prepared to give that defense for the hope that’s in us. No argument, no rhetoric can change a person's heart. But we all desperately need God to change us—to plant in our hearts the kind of hope that satisfies our souls. The hope that only Jesus brings. We need the God who is our biggest problem to be our only solution.

Jesus is the Way, and the Truth, and everlasting Life for all who turn from unbelief to faith (John 14:6). This is the heart of the difference between Christianity and every other belief system. Everyone else tries to make sense of the world by telling a story for which I must be the hero if everything is supposed to make sense and go well. And we always fail. But in Christianity, I'm the one who needs to be rescued because I fail, and Jesus is the real hero who doesn't fail to rescue. This isn't just a story, but a fact proven two thousand years ago through a real cross and a really empty tomb that proclaims a real God. This is the answer for lifelong Christians who struggle with remaining sin and doubt; for former atheists who used to refuse to believe but have repented; even for those current atheists who will turn from their unbelief and trust Jesus for life and hope.

Even for practical atheists who will realize they're spiritually bankrupt apart from living faith in the living God. And even for that little practical atheist living inside each believing heart, "prone to wander . . . prone to leave the God I love."

The only wise God is the only solution for godless fools.