#Insurmountable problems full

Instead of being enslaved and subdued by sentient machines, the logical conclusion of atheism is that humans are enslaved and subdued by an evolutionary need to survive. Early on in the film, the hero, Neo, meets a character called Morpheus, who offers him a choice between taking a red pill, which will show Neo the harsh truth about reality and a blue pill, which will keep him blissfully ignorant. It’s a bit like how the DVLNI works, only with sunglasses and cool music. One of my favourite films from my yoof is The Matrix, a sci-fi action thriller set in a dystopian future where reality turns out to be a computer simulation run by sentient machines – the Matrix. It is based on naturalist presuppositions that won’t be disturbed by evidence. Therefore, it happened.” But this is circular reasoning, the atheist equivalent to, “The bible is true because the bible says it’s true”. Of course, atheists (at least the ones I’ve engaged with) usually answer this problem with: “Life came from non-life because we’re here. There are competing theories, of course, but they’re merely starting places offered up by materialists, many of which (all?) have been quickly shot down by other materialists.Īnd as time goes on and the more we learn about the complexities of chemistry and biochemistry – and even the complexities of the simplest of living cells – we realise that the problem of getting life from non-life is not going to be solved by any naturalistic explanation.

But how did life come from non-life? As yet, nobody has come up with any answers. If life can’t be shown to come from non-life, then we can’t even get started. You can’t get living stuff from dead stuffįor atheism to be true, it must meet the minimum requirement of life coming from non-life (abiogenesis). But if they assume an objective moral law exists, then they must posit some sort of lawgiver – which is the very thing they say doesn’t exist! 2. When they assume there’s such a thing as good, they assume there’s such a thing as an objective moral law by which to judge between good and evil. When an atheist says ‘evil,’ they assume there is such a thing as ‘good’. The existence of evil, therefore, is actually an argument for God. And they’re not going to get very far with naturalism even making sense of evil, never mind solving it, because, as celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins puts it, “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference”. Getting rid of God does not get rid of evil because now the atheist has to solve the problem using the limited resources of naturalism.

#Insurmountable problems full

The world is demonstrably full of evil and it can be difficult to reconcile this fact of reality with a loving God.įor the atheist who is an atheist because of evil, however, this doesn’t get them off the hook. To a certain degree, I can understand this view. And this, say some atheists, is a good enough reason for rejecting the idea of God (as emoted by Stephen Fry in that interview on RTÉ). Whether that’s terror attacks, the unfair distribution of wealth, cancer or whatever most agree that evil is an objective feature of reality. If there’s one thing that everyone can agree on, it’s that evil happens in the world. In fact, out of all the options out there, atheism is by far the least persuasive explanation of the way things are. These problems, however, are nothing – nothing! – compared to the insurmountable problems with atheism. There are things that are hard to understand, and there are things that are unpalatable. I’m not afraid to admit that there are difficulties with theism.