[I]t would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, … a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. …

~ Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and, to a great extent, modern psychology and psychiatry, came of age in Vienna in the late 19th century. At that time Vienna, despite its overt anti-Semitism, was a cultural and intellectual haven for Jews. Freud’s biographers aren’t exactly certain what series of events led to his virulent hatred and disregard of all religions (especially Judaism and Christianity), but what we do know is that in many of his most important writings – “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905), “Totem and Taboo” (1913), “Civilization and Discontents” (1930) and the book I will critique in this essay, “The Future of an Illusion” (1927) – Freud repeatedly and shamelessly attacks religion as nothing but a grand illusion; psychotic delusions that people who consider themselves to be rational, intelligent and scientific should straightway give up, grow up and admit “man’s insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe.”

Despite his hatred of religion and glorification of sexual perversity, Freud admittedly had many revelatory, thoughtful and profound insights into the deep, dark recesses of the conscious and unconscious mind, which for a century have aided scientists and psychologists to help people understand and resolve real and serious mental and emotional problems. Freud isn’t original in this respect. The Bible, arguably the first psychological treatise (or as Bishop Jakes says, “psychiatry for the poor”), for millennia has already told us about the grotesqueries of human nature, our irrational attraction to evil [sin] in all its innumerable forms and the need for a Redeemer to save humanity from committing suicide against itself.

“The Future of an Illusion” is a naked frontal assault against religion, dismissing it as mere illusion, foolish wish-fulfillment by infantile minds. Freud’s ideas originated in classical philosophy whose intellectual foundation lies squarely in the amoral political atheism of Machiavelli, reaching its philosophical zenith in the writings of Nietzsche. However, Freud provided a novel distinction by presenting atheism as ipso facto true. Rejecting the thought that religion exists because God exists and that human beings therefore have a natural tendency to worship, Freud thought that a more scientific explanation for religion was in order.

Freud first presented his perverse and unscientific theories of the unreality of religion in his 1913 book “Totem and Taboo.” Here Freud’s famous Oedipus Complex theory stated that the source of the religious cult (the origin of culture) was the murder and eating of a father by his sons. The sons killed the father because naturally they desired to have sex with their mother, and their father was a rival. In base primeval fashion, they thought that by eating their father they gained his power and privileges. Over time, this consecrated feast evolved into the institution of religion and its moral prohibition of incest and patricide.

There you have it, in Freud’s Garden of Eden the three branches of humanity’s family tree lay in incest, patricide and cannibalism. Where is Freud’s historical evidence, scientific rigor and substantive psychoanalysis to support these scurrilous charges? There is no evidence. Freud’s immoral anything-goes philosophy was animated by the atheism of Hobbes and Rousseau who glorified Primitive Man, including their entirely phony philosophy of man’s inherently primitive state of nature – particularly Rousseau’s ideas contained in his famous aphorism: “Savages are not evil precisely because they do not know what it is to be good.”

Freud believed that he had demonstrated “the psychical origins of religious ideas” in “the terrifying …helplessness in childhood [that] aroused the need for protection – for protection through love – which was provided by the father,” and that religious ideas are therefore “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind.”

Freud’s solutions are even more ghastly and unconscionable than his subjective rants, which he falsely presents as reasoned, dispassionate psychoanalysis in his books. The rational thing to do, Freud argues, is to renounce this illusion. Grow up, reject religion and embrace science. Become “irreligious in the truest sense of the word” and admit “man’s insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe.”

One cannot help reading Freud’s anti-Judaism and anti-Christian diatribes in his book “The Future of an Illusion” and not think of two things: First, by attacking religion in such a personally virulent way Freud lacks all objective or scientific credibility and makes himself a victim of his own perverse ideas, namely psychological displacement, which is a psychosis and defense mechanism invented by Freud himself whereby one ascribes his own evil intent or psychopathy to one’s enemies.

Secondly, although much of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories have been ruled fraudulent, unsustainable and untrue by modern science and psychiatric literature and scholarship, nevertheless Freud’s maniacal atheism and hatred of religion, history, hierarchy and moral traditions have been wholly adopted by modern-day liberals, progressives and socialists, into whose education atheism has been infused not only in every aspect of public and private education curriculum and the academy, but also Freud’s legacy is found permeated throughout American politics, law, popular culture and society.

For example, progressives, the Democratic Party, President Obama and his administration have been zealous advocates of taking Freud’s perverse legacy to brand new nihilistic ends. How else could one explain contemporary social policies like abortion on demand, same-sex marriage, the homosexual and LGBT revolution, the radical feminist movement, support of Occupy Wall Street protesters and the modern amoral trends to exposing our children to greater and more extreme forms of psychopathy and psychosexual depravity?

Assuming Freud was mentally unimpaired, nevertheless he engaged in many impulsive, perverse behaviors and zealously promoted self-defeating, amoral acts upon society in the name of substantive medical discovery and legitimate scientific inquiry. A hundred years before Freud, French physician Philippe Penel perhaps would have diagnosed Freud as la folie raisonnante (“insane without delirium”), meaning one fully understood the irrationality of his behavior but continued with it anyway.

Thanks, Sigmund Freud!

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington is a former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He is an instructor at Spring Arbor University, the American College of Education, and the National Paralegal College. Washington is a co-host on “Joshua’s Trial, a radio show of Christian conservative thought. He is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and has written extensively on constitutional law, history, politics, philosophy, critical race theory and other subjects. His latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust” (2008) and law review article, “Natural Law Considerations of Juvenile Law” (2010). Visit his website, Ellis Washington Report.

 

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Liberals defend the guilty and impugn the innocent not only because they side with barbarians, but because a fair and just system of law challenges their hegemony as judges of the universe.

~ Ann Coulter, “Demonic”

If evolution is so scientific, factual and beyond all rational argument, then why do the proponents of Darwinian evolutionary theory systematically lie about their findings, block and defame other scientists with contrarian ideas like Intelligent Design, creationism and natural law, and in the name of “academic freedom” dominate the majority of the academic journals and university professorships with a Stalinist grip? What of derivative theories of evolution like the Big Bang theory – that all matter and living things in the universe, including mankind, came about 13.7 billion years ago from an explosion? I’m not a scientist, but I was taught in elementary school that explosions destroy things, not create them.

These are exceedingly important questions not only because for over 150 years evolution has indoctrinated and perverted science virtually beyond redemption, but because Darwinian philosophy and its speculative suppositions have totally dominated the entire academy including: law, religion, philosophy, politics, economics, education, culture and society under the ancillary philosophy of Social Darwinism created by Herbert Spencer who also coined the phrase, “Survival of the fittest” – the totalitarian motto 20th-century dictators, including Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and many other tyrants, used as a pretext for control, domination, suppression of liberty and the genocide of hundreds of millions of people.

If you doubt the Gestapo tactics of the Darwin lobby, consider that just last week another case was uncovered about how they routinely block academic papers that criticize Darwin’s evolution theory from being published. Writer Casey Luskin recalled a meeting with Wesley Elsberry, a long-time activist for the Darwin lobby and former staff member at the National Center for Science Education, who literally rejoiced whenever Intelligent Design scientists had their papers rejected from journals. Furthermore, Elsberry had the gall to criticize Intelligent Design proponents for not publishing in the mainstream scientific literature (an untrue charge).

Ray Comfort poses 101 questions to shake up the followers of Darwin. Don’t miss “Evolution: A Fairy Tale for Grownups”

Luskin wrote a 2-part article on the case of Dr. Granville Sewell and how the Darwin Gestapo unfairly had one of his papers unjustly rejected from a prestigious scientific journal:

As John West has reported, the journal Applied Mathematics Letters has agreed to apologize after pulling a paper by University of Texas, El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell which was critical of Darwinian evolution. Sewell is author of “In the Beginning: And Other Essays on Intelligent Design” as well as three books on numerical analysis and dozens of articles in respected journals. As West reports, Applied Mathematics Letters withdrew his paper not because it found any errors in the paper, or because the paper was not peer-reviewed, but because it had received a protest from the Darwin lobby. Because of the journal’s inappropriate treatment of Dr. Sewell, it has now issued an apology to Dr. Sewell and paid his attorney’s fees in the matter to the tune of $10,000.

The second law of thermodynamics actually holds that entropy/disorder will increase in a closed system. Yet using this law as a predicate to refute evolution is a tempting but fallacious argument because the earth isn’t a closed system since it gets energy, heat and light from the sun thus giving Darwinists the allusion that evolution generates new functional biological information.

Sewell did not present Intelligent Design arguments, but postulated that there are certain forms of complexity most people agree will not happen under a natural, unguided environment. Therefore, the fact that a system is “open” does not generally follow that the odds of all events happening is sufficient to make such events possible. Sewell further argues:

But after we define a sufficiently low threshold, everyone seems to agree that “natural forces will rearrange atoms into digital computers” is a macroscopically describable event that is still extremely improbable from the microscopic point of view, and thus forbidden by the second law – at least if this happens in a closed system. But it is not true that the laws of probability only apply to closed systems: if a system is open, you just have to take into account what is crossing the boundary when deciding what is extremely improbable and what is not.

Luskin’s articles on Sewell are ipso facto proof that those who dispute Darwinian evolution are not being permitted the academic freedom to publish their arguments to the scientific community as well as to the general public.

I can personally testify to this widespread intellectual discrimination against conservative thought in academic journals. As a conservative academic, I’ve written over a dozen law review articles; half of those papers were rejected at the 11th hour after having been accepted for publication, cite-checked, edited and peer-reviewed. In some cases I was forced to have my work published with another law journal. For example, in a 2010 law review article, “The Delinquencies of Juvenile Law: A Natural Law Analysis,” after being accepted then rejected by an American law journal for no rational reason, I was forced to publish this work in a Romanian journal – the former communist country of the murderous dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. How’s that for irony?

Remember that the primary purpose of Darwinian evolution (and later in economics, philosophy and politics under Marxism, Nietzsche and progressivism) was not understood solely as a scientific discovery, but to infuse education atheism throughout every conceivable aspect of culture and society. Influential thinkers like Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Thomas and Aldous Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Max Weber, O.W. Holmes, George Bernard Shaw, C.S. Pierce, John Dewey, Carl Becker, Charles Beard, Richard Hofstadter and many other progressive intellectuals were all atheists and fanatical devotees of evolutionary theory – and they demanded society follow suit.

Tragically, for over 150 years since the publication of Darwin’s diabolical, anti-scientific book, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,” nonpartisan science, truth, logic and deductive reasoning have been ruthlessly suppressed and replaced with state-funded Darwinist propaganda, groupthink, education atheism, liberal fascism and Machiavellian tactics as demonstrated in the Sewell case representing the ongoing battles between the Darwin Gestapo and Intelligent Design scientists.

This existential war on ideas reminds me of a passage from Dan Brown’s novel “Angels and Demons” – If science is allowed to claim the moment of creation, (or in Coulter’s words, “judge the universe”) what is left for God?

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington is a former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He is an instructor at Spring Arbor University, the American College of Education, and the National Paralegal College. Washington is a co-host on “Joshua’s Trial, a radio show of Christian conservative thought. He is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and has written extensively on constitutional law, history, politics, philosophy, critical race theory and other subjects. His latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust” (2008) and law review article, “Natural Law Considerations of Juvenile Law” (2010). Visit his website, Ellis Washington Report.

 

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Socrates (470-399 B.C.) – a renowned Greek philosopher from Athens who taught Plato, and Plato taught Aristotle and Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. Socrates used a method of teaching by asking questions. The Greeks called this form “dialectic” – starting from a thesis or question, then discussing ideas and moving back and forth between points of view to determine how well ideas stand up to critical review with the ultimate principle of the dialogue is Veritas – Truth.

Characters

• Socrates
• Aristotle
• Ayn Rand, 20th century Objectivism philosopher

The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle. ~ Ayn Rand

{Setting: The Academy of Socrates}

Socrates: We are gathered here today at my Academy to discuss a very important question – Is Ayn Rand’s radical atheism a terminal defect of Objectivism philosophy? Rather than conducting this symposium myself I will call upon my student, Aristotle, the father of political conservatism, to make diligent inquiry into Rand’s ideas.

Aristotle: Ayn, what significant entry did you write in your journal at age 13?

Ayn Rand: I have made this declaration about my life which I shall never change – “Today I decided to be an atheist.”

Aristotle: But how can a mere child make such an irrevocable declaration about one’s life?

Ayn Rand: “The concept of God is degrading to men” because the affirmation that “God is perfect” meant that “man can never be perfect.” The thought that “man is low,” and imperfect and that there is something above him was simply “wrong.” Therefore, since there is “no proof of the existence of God exists, belief is rationally indefensible.”

Aristotle: Ayn, you discovered my writings on philosophy in 1918 after graduating from high school and your admittance to the University of Petrograd where you later made this sweeping declaration: “The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle. In your magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged” (1957) you detailed the parameters of the philosophy you later created – Objectivism – that the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness or rational self-interest.

Ayn Rand: I tried to make radical individualism the foundation for capitalism.

Aristotle: Indeed, this brings us to the central premise of this dialogue: The four major problems of an Objectivism worldview which may lead one to form sophistic conclusions:

1. Where rationality leads

In Atlas Shrugged, Galt Gulch’s Dagny Taggart [a.k.a. Ayn Rand] extols the wondrous machine motor designed by Galt: “She thought of this structure … replacing the power plants of the country” of which Dr. Wicker commented:

These beautiful passages lead to one, very profound insight: the well-designed technological object is a demonstration of the existence of the spiritual power of the human mind over matter against those who like Marx would argue that our thoughts are entirely caused by material conditions.

Aristotle: Ayn, you zealously propagandized the cause of rational objectivity, yet your atheism ignores God. Without God our technological progress would not be possible if our minds were incapable of penetrating nature, if there were no order to nature, if there were not definable objective truth. “If you allow human technological wonders to be tangible proofs of the human mind as cause, then the things of nature should likewise demonstrate the existence of a mind that made them.”

2. Selfishness is not the cure for collectivism or moral relativism.

Aristotle: Ayn, throughout your work you “present false dichotomies, either-or choices between two extremes: collectivism or individualism, either living entirely for the state or entirely for oneself, either complete self sacrifice to the point of annihilation or complete selfishness to the point of narcissism.” You avoid Marx by accepting the radical individualism sown by Thomas Hobbes that comes to fulfillment in Nietzsche. What about the importance of family in society? Ayn, doesn’t family mean anything to your philosophy?

Ayn Rand: Aristotle, the family isn’t a relevant part of Objectivism. I proved that by the abortion I got in the early 1930s, joining the abortion movement and refusing to have children with my husband. To me family restricts me from enjoying my life, my way!

Aristotle: But your Objectivism philosophy ignores my extensive writings about the family which establishes “the conservative affirmation of the primacy of local economic life against the interference of the state is rooted in the moral duty of families to provide for themselves, not in individual selfishness (which is a vice, not a virtue).” Throughout my writings, including “Politics,” I avowed that the family is the fundamental economic entity as well as the disseminator of morality. Ironically, Ayn your obsession with narcissism and radical selfishness lived vicariously through your books perverted your reason, the very power that defined you and your Objectivism philosophy.

3. Objectivism becomes subjectivism; reason becomes Rand

Aristotle: Ayn, is it Reason that you celebrate or is it your reason that you have championed in the philosophy of Objectivism? …I have here a signed copy of “Atlas Shrugged” to your friend and leading woman disciple, Barbara Branden, the wife of your lover Nathaniel Branden, whom you named your institute of Objectivism after. May I read the inscription? I believe your words reveal the essence of your soul.

Ayn Rand: {nervously} Yes.

Aristotle: To Barbara – For the sense of life which is mine and yours – for starting with the same values and accepting nothing less – to carry on my battle, my universe and all my values. ~ Ayn

Ayn, you claim Objectivism is a philosophy dedicated to Reason, if so then why did you steal another woman’s husband, justify it with your reason and humiliate her further in the book’s dedication? … Are these not the acts of an irrational mind?

Ayn Rand: Perhaps my Objectivism philosophy devolved into a cult-like movement as my star ascended. I become increasingly intolerant of any contrary views or intellectual challenges to Objectivism philosophy and excommunicated all heretics.

Aristotle: Indeed, let us move to the fourth and final critique of the Objectivism philosophy.

4. Philosophy of selfishness or personality disorder?

Aristotle: Ayn, when I analyze Objectivism and observe your life which merely mirrors your writings, I have come to this evident conclusion: You are a narcissist. From your earliest work, “The Little Street” (1928) you extol as virtuous the main character’s vice: “He doesn’t understand, because thankfully he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning or importance of other people.”

This radical selfishness is a leitmotiv throughout your entire body of work including your late writings like, “The Virtue of Selfishness” (1964) – a paean to selfishness and narcissism.

{Turning to the Academy students}

Narcissists like Ayn Rand have no respect for the pain and problems she caused others. Narcissists like Ayn Rand are motivated by delusions of grandiose self-importance and demand to be deified above all others. Narcissists like Ayn Rand live in a dream world of exceptional success, power, beauty, genius, or perfect love (“romantic realism”) which confuse and conflate fantasy and reality.

Ayn Rand: Aristotle, I must protest now that you are being too hard on me.

Socrates: And now we end where each of us must begin – with God. Ayn, is your summary rejection of God merely a projection of yourself as a narcissist? If so, what do we do with your “bible,” Atlas Shrugged? If your rejection of God was merely narcissistic rejection of a power greater than your limited intellectual capacity could understand or value, then, absent God, is it the conservatism of Aristotle, Adam Smith, or Ronald Reagan that you truly celebrate, or is it self-deification and crass narcissism disguised in Objectivism rhetoric?

Ayn Rand: {profound silence}

Aristotle: As a conservative I accept the world as it is and distrust the politics of abstract reason, unlike the sophists, humanists and liberals whose empiricism views reason separate from experience.

Despite her exceeding love of my ideas, I answer “yes” to the question – Is Ayn Rand’s radical atheism a terminal defect of Objectivism philosophy? Conservatism and capitalism aside, the major tenants of Objectivism philosophy effectively is the worship of selfishness and narcissism which is antithetical to real conservatism and capitalism which are rooted in the Republic, the free market, morality, assiduousness, veritas, virtue, and God.

* See Dr. Benjamin Wicker, “10 Books Every Conservative Must Read” (Regnery, 2010), pp. 299, 318-28.

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington is former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He hosts a radio program Thursdays at 11 a.m. Eastern on 1620 AM in Atlanta. It can be heard online at the Radio Sandy Springs website. His weekly podcasts are available Mondays at The Conservative Beacon. Washington is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

 

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Try as the atheist might to manipulate objective data to fit their hypothesis with some evolutionists going so far as to invoke the law in order to suppress perspectives conflicting with their origins account, the assumptions of atheism fail to square with the facts of nature and with the revelation of nature’s God. At one time earlier in the modern era, it was quite common for the atheist to portray himself as the true friend and ally of science. However, as impartial observational science has probed deeper onto the macroscopic realm of cosmic space as well as the microscopic world of the subatomic particle, this relationship once prided by the atheist turned out not to be as solid as originally thought.

The scientific establishment and the philosophical elites once derided the so-called “theistic proofs” for the existence of God as the outdated wisdom of a less-enlightened era. It turns out, however, that these time-honored arguments may be as relevant as the latest academic journals.

The cosmological argument, perhaps the best known, states that all finite realities and structures have a cause. Therefore, ultimately there must be an uncaused cause complete in itself in order to get the proverbial billiard ball rolling; this the theist declared to be God.

Naturalistic cosmologists steeped in atheism such as Carl Sagan once tried to dance around the issue by saying that the cosmos is all there was, is, or ever will be. But it seems that the laws of physics don’t exactly have a record of contributing to their local PBS station.

The Laws of Thermodynamics declare that, left to themselves, systems degrade to the maximum level of entropy; or in laymen’s terms, things wear out. Employing this principle, one is forced to conclude that, if the universe is an infinitely-old closed system those like Sagan claim it to be, then the universe would have already wound down in eons past. Therefore, the universe must have had a beginning. And since something finite cannot come from nothing, the hypothesis of a divine creator provides the most plausible alternative.

It has been noted that the theistic proofs do not necessarily reveal the God of Judeo-Christian adoration but at best point the seeker in His direction. Likewise, the findings of science point the individual in the direction of a yet more definitive source of knowledge standing in opposition to the claims of atheism.

Scripture strikes the decisive blow against those daring to spit cognitively in the face of God. Psalms 19:1 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.”

Until the scientist can replicate life on his own from nothing whatsoever, that verse settles the issue of whether the universe sings the praises of an omnipotent Creator or testifies to the cruel fact of an arbitrary universe devoid of plan or purpose. Some will no doubt continue to insist upon their own path of stubbornness despite what the very molecules they are breathing might be telling them.

Of those failing to be persuaded by the evidence, Psalms 14:1 says, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” Webster’s defines fool as “a person devoid of reason or intelligence.” Either the educated person assents to the reality of God or his so-called “education” is not worth the value of the parchment the big-shot degree is printed upon.

If the skeptic still refuses to abandon atheism in light of the objective evidence, one is left with no alternative but to drag out the rotten fruits produced by this faulty system in terms of ruined lived and fallen nations. For instead of establishing a set of moral values resting upon a foundation apart from divine revelation as originally postulated by the adherents of early atheistic modernism, one ends up with an ethical system based upon the absolutist relativism of postmodernism where almost anything goes except daring to set forth some kind of behavioral standard binding upon all.

According to Chuck Colson in Against The Night: Living In The New Dark Ages, in the arena where relativism reigns supreme in opposition to the law of God, there is no legitimate ground in which one can exclude the arguments and proposals of Nazis, serial killers, and pedophiles (47). From today’s headlines, the nation is coming to realize in the most brutal of ways that these ideas do not confine themselves to academic journals or newspaper opinion pages. And in the case of school shootings such as Columbine High, this radical antipathy towards God can in fact turn deadly.

If the lawlessness of atheism can wreak havoc upon individual lives, just imagine its affects magnified across entire societies. The major dictatorships of the twentieth century testify to this blood-soaked historical truth. Founded upon assorted atheistic ideologies, these totalitarian regimes promised secular heavens on earth but instead dragged their nations down to the very borders of hell.

Unfettered by eternal external standards, those holding the reins of power in such societies had nothing to hamper the implementation of their most extreme policy whims, not even the value of innocent human lives. For example, Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China slaughtered five million of his own countrymen in pursuit of his Cultural Revolution and related kinds of Communist nonsense.

While the United States has not yet eliminated that many (at least among those fortunate enough to escape the womb alive), the Orwellian day is here when good will be called evil and evil called good. Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett aptly noted on an appearance on “Meet The Press” that, had the Columbine killers greeted one another with “Hail the King of Kings” rather than their trademark “Heil Hitler”, school officials would have intervened since an affirmation of theism — especially of a Christian variety — is the one thing an atheistic educational system cannot tolerate. School officials did not intervene and the rest is history, with organized unbelief claiming yet a few more in its unrelenting war upon God and humanity.

As public rhetoricians are fond of pointing out, mankind stands at a crossroads. The choice, however, goes to a level deeper than the choice between Democrats and Republicans that Americans must make on election day.

The decision to be made transcends the limited purposes of institutionalized politics to embrace fundamental issues of worldview and belief. The nature of this conflict can be discovered in a comparison and contrast between atheism and Christianity.

From the fundamental postulate regarding the nonexistence of God, atheism attempts to formulate a comprehensive framework upon which to hang its understanding of mankind and the universe. Without God to account for the cosmos in which they find themselves, atheists argue that the complexity of nature arose through a process of gradual evolution governed by the rules of chance.

This process of evolution, to the atheist, serves as the dynamic against which man strives to find and determine his role upon the earth. As such, everything is thus in a state of flux and nothing is fixed as man struggles to figure things out against the backdrop of a cold and purposeless void.

Not even fundamental issues such as individual rights, personal ethics, or social institutions can afford to remain fixed and stagnant. And if innocent human lives are ruined or destroyed, that may seem regrettable at this moment along the long evolutionary chain, but mankind will ultimately get things worked out and the piles of corpses littering history’s ditches will not seem so nauseous upon further enlightenment.

Of these ideas, Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” Any history book objective enough to attest to the horrors of the twentieth century testifies to this startling truth.

Standing in contrast to the lonely pointlessness of atheism is Judeo-Christian theism recognizing God as the fundamental proposition of the universe. Like atheism, the Judeo-Christian tradition builds its system around its conceptual foundation as well. But since its basis is drastically different from that of atheism, the conclusions drawn by Christianity are considerably different.

Christianity holds that, since the universe was created from nothing through the Word of God, all creation is dependent upon Him at all times. Colossians 1:17 says, “…by him all things consist.”

Since man is God’s creation, it is therefore God’s right to determine the standards by which man shall conduct his own affairs. And since God loves His creation, it follows that His standards are for the benefit of His children. These standards are communicated to mankind in a number of ways.

One such way is through individual conscience. Romans 2:14 says, “For when Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature things contained in the law, these having not the law, are a law unto themselves.” While God has written the Law across the heart of man, man has suppressed this truth through sin.

God has overcome this development by making Himself known in the person of His Son Jesus Christ and through the direct propositional revelation of His Word and the Holy Bible of which II Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” It is within this framework of Law and Grace that the balance between the individual and society is found as this system and the objective standards established by it protect the individual since it recognizes the worth and fallen character of each. That is why Psalms 33:12 says, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

Atheism remains one of the most serious intellectual challenges faced by the contemporary Christian. Despite its obvious scientific and sociological shortcomings, the powerful adherents of this system positioned in influential sectors of society such as government and academia have enshrined this worldview as the official dogma of civilization nearly as stifling as anything allegedly imposed by the medieval Catholic Church.

Yet despite considerable efforts to enforce this system as an orthodoxy that goes so far as to jail students daring to pray around a flagpole, like its sister system in the former Soviet Union, Western atheism is a decaying ideology. It is amid this decay often resulting in social and individual ruin that the Christian is able to proclaim the superiority of the theistic alternative and the God of its adoration.

© Dr. Frederick Meekins

 

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