Why I Am Not An Atheist - Part One

“The greatest question of our time is not communism versus capitalism, it is not east versus west, but it is the existence of God or the absence of his existence.”
- Will Durant


I will readily admit that the title is not my idea, but every other possible idea I had for this next line of posts seemed either inflammatory or just silly. Before I get underway with this line of posts, I want to make it absolutely clear that I’m still not looking for an argument, despite what the title may see seem to provoke one. I am not here to rub anyone’s face into the philosophical mud, as it were, until they scream “uncle.” What I intend to accomplish with this line of posts is twofold. Firstly, to put some foundation to comments I have made in passing about there being no meaning or morality apart from God. I do not want to just throw such statements around as self-evident truths without taking the time to discuss why. Secondly, to point out the problems I have found to make the atheistic worldview one on which it is not sound to base one’s life.

I also want to say that anyone who says that they have avowed or disavowed the existence of God based purely upon their intellectual capacities reveals a prejudice and misunderstanding of the concepts at hand. There are many good minds that have been atheists, but there have also been many good minds that have been believers.

Furthermore, my main thrusts are going to be existential rather than abstract because it is very easy when discussing such material to climb higher upon the ladder of abstraction and lose all connection to the real world. The existence of God, or his nonexistence, will have a great impact on your life, and to not deal with the outworking at that level is to do ourselves a disservice.

The word atheism comes from the Greek. The alpha, a, is the negative and the word theos means god. Thus, we have a word that says negative god, or there is no god. This is an affirmation in the negative sense and is self-contradictory. The contradiction goes something like this: There is no being with infinite knowledge, and I know this to be infinitely so because on the basis of my own infinite knowledge, I affirm that God does not exist. The very properties of the being we are trying to deny the existence of are required in order to have the knowledge necessary to deny his existence! Now, let me also point out that by an atheist I also mean someone who may not have claimed that God does not exist, but whose life is lived in such a way as if God did not exist.

Ravi Zacharias has claimed that the man who has had the greatest impact on the twentieth century was Frederick Nietzsche and I am tempted to agree. He dealt a lot with the idea of the death of god as a philosophical entity and wrote, in his work The Madman, what the outworking would be if god were no longer an influence on our lives.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"
Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887)

As we will see, the consequence of god’s nonexistence is an utter lack of morality, hope, and meaning.