The Price Of Atheism

What is important to you? The odds are if you become a consistent atheist you will have to rethink it. Does knowledge matter to you? Do you like to learn about science or philosophy? Knowledge means nothing if atheism is true. Does love matter? Are the people closest to you the most important consideration at the end of the day? If atheism is true then love is an illusion. What about art or music? Do you see beauty as something worth sacrificing for and pursuing with great intensity? If atheism is true it is just a strange curiosity of evolution.  What about meaning? Do you want to do something some day that really matters? With atheism is impossible even in principle for any human action or inaction to matter. What about goodness? Do you want people to say you always did what was right even when it was hard? That becomes incomprehensible with atheism.

Sure Christianity ask you to surrender everything. Yet Christianity gives you those things back again in a much better way. Knowledge matters because it is ultimately knowledge of God. Everything becomes reoriented towards God and gains meaning and significance. With atheism everything becomes reoriented toward nothingness. Really it becomes re-oriented towards your own brain but as a defect in your brain. Something that gave humans a survival advantage at some point in history. We got those things the same way we got our appendix or our baldness. It is just the way the genetic ball bounces. 

Satan offers us a deal where he takes our soul and offers us nothing in return. Really when we talk about a person's soul we are always talking about those things that seem to go deeper than physical reality. It is not that there are unrelated to anything physical but there seems to be more there. Atheism has to say sense we have is flat out wrong. They don't have evidence to prove it is wrong. They have to accept it because it comes with the metaphysical assumptions they have made. This is precisely what they ridicule Christians for when they say they believe something on faith. 

So atheism seems like it costs you nothing. When you go deep you find it costs you everything. Christianity is the opposite. It seems to cost you everything but after you embrace it you are much richer than you were before. 

So why can't atheists see this? I mean the vast majority don't want to deny the importance of love and art and human dignity and whatever else. Why don't they see that rooting these things in the random processes of evolution is not going to give them the value they should have. Partly it has to do with a lack of philosophical training. People believe in human rights but they don't understand why they believe in human rights. It just seems clear to them. They don't see the connection to where we have traditionally said the human person comes from. All creatures are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. If there is no creator where do the rights come from? There is very little attempt to wrestle with such questions. There is no real understanding how not having a logic foundation for something will mean it can disappear any time it is challenged. 

The other reason is people just don't see Christianity as a viable option. They see it as anti-science and anti-sex and just not very respectable. They are wrong but it causes many to embrace atheism without any real reflection because they see not alternative.