When an atheist like André Comte-Sponville admits he’d like to be able to believe in a God who loves him and is kind and gives good things to him, he commits two mistakes. Firstly, his definition of God sums up only the positives of the best kind of God he could envisage, voluntarily overlooking God’s more distasteful attributes.  Secondly, he seems to think that people can just imagine God anyhow they like – little realising that God is objectively how he is (existing, really there, with all his divine attributes intact), whatever people may think about him.

More logical atheists have other ways of ousting God, one of which is to deny that he is the Creator of mankind, pretexting that evolution, including macroevolution, suffices to explain our human existence. Erudite philosopher and theologian R.C. Sproul, writing concerning modern secularists who adopt this evolutionary viewpoint, asks: “Why would they be happy to find out that they are a cosmic accident and that their final destiny is annihilation?” This, for many who have no clear Christian faith, is the logical outcome of their atheistic presupposition; they accept unthinkingly that they must have issued forth from a mass of confused and chaotic matter which gives them neither purpose, nor meaning, nor hope. Why do people believe in such a worldview? Dr. Sproul esteems there is “only one answer: evolution offers people an escape from accountability. When we die it is over. We don’t have to worry about facing a holy and righteous Creator.”  

The deep-down human fear of such accountability is an unpleasant apprehension underlying the rejecting of God: the simple way to deal with the dread of an ultimate divine judgment on our lives is to deny that there is a Creator and Judge. “But if macroevolution is in fact true,” the theologian-philosopher continues, “we should be in utter despair: we would have to recognise that we are utterly insignificant and that our lives and labour are meaningless”.

Jordan B. Peterson in his latest book intelligently proposes that the reality of personality is fundamental to existence, and particularly to our human reality: he reminds his readers that this chimes well with the Bible’s basic statement that we were created in the image of God, so ultimate reality (God himself) would be personal. “The idea that we are reflections of the divine nature is valid,” he concludes.  

He strikingly goes on to propose that “perhaps our reductive materialism is a reflection of something worse than mere ignorance: maybe we insist on the deadness and intrinsic meaninglessness of the world to rationalise our unwillingness to accept the immense burden of opportunity and obligation that a true understanding of our place in a truly meaningful world would necessitate”. He dares to conclude: “Perhaps it is not religion that is the opiate of the masses. Perhaps it is instead that a rationalist, materialist atheism is the camouflage of the irresponsible”!!  

As modern intellectual leaders like Peterson discern and expose the atheism that causes our present hopelessness and meaninglessness, some are turning again to the inspired basis of Genesis 1.26-27: “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them”. This foundational fact – and this alone – furnishes the rational basis for our human value and meaning. Our species has the high calling of having been created in God’s likeness at the beginning – though we have fallen away from that likeness by turning from God. Without this key we cannot understand ourselves.

Clive Every-Clayton