Monday 3 December 2012

Atheism's blindspot

I have just listened to a pretty poor debate between Peter Hitchens and atheist Alex Gabriel (you can find it here if you're interested).

Alex blundered his way through out of context examples of God's supposedly evil behaviour; he spoke about why we shouldn't have a "Christian country" and how we ought to treat each other, and was very condemnatory of bigotry.

Yet he acknowledged that he did not believe in objective morality; that is, he did not believe there were objective laws that were outside of us and obligatory to us.  Yet he seemed to think that people had an obligation to live a certain way.  This is one of the many areas that most atheists just seem to be blind to.  In an atheistic universe we make the rules, and why should anybody do what Alex wants them to do.  It is also a terrifying prospect that those in power can make the rules and enforce them with absolutely no accountability to a higher power, to an ultimate good.  It has been tried in many countries around the world, and men make terrible gods.

We know, Alex knows, that there are objective moral obligations, and to deny the God who grounds and gives them is to deny reality.  That's what atheists do, and that's why the Bible says that it is the fool who says there is no God (Psalm 14 v 1).