Why I Am A Theist (February 1, 2004)

A friend of my son Ben is an atheist, something I have never been tempted to be. But talking with him has led me to ponder anew and re-articulate the reasons why I have long felt atheism to be untenable. That is, even if I weren't a Christian, even if God had never called me nor placed faith within me, I think that rational considerations alone would force me to acknowledge - willingly or not - a spiritual reality beyond the physical.

Suppose that there is no God. Presumably then, matter/energy would be all that exists. Which would mean that we ourselves are simply complex configurations of atoms that bounce off each other in a Brownian cacophony of random collisions that produce the illusion of order. While atheists (I think necessarily) acknowledge this fact, I wonder how deeply they have thought through the implications of it. Let me draw out one.

Atoms interact by trading and sharing electrons. That is pretty much all there is to chemistry - electrons moving from one orbital to another. It is fair to say that these electrons have no will of their own - they are subject, en masse, to forces that make them jump in certain ways. Though you never know what one electron will do, if (for example) you bombard enough of them with enough photons under certain conditions, they will necessarily carry out their part in a process like photosynthesis. They can't help it. They are subject to forces and laws.

If atheism is true, then every thought you ever had, every pain you ever felt, every injustice you ever denounced and every affection that ever tugged at your heart have involved nothing more than a large set of electrons jumping orbitals under circumstances precisely governed by the laws of physics. That includes your reaction to these words as you read them. You may think you are evaluating an argument, agreeing or disagreeing, looking for flaws, drawing inferences - but all that is really happening is that chemicals in my brain have sloshed together and fired neural messages to my fingertips to type these words, which in turn bounced and blocked a set of photons which reached (or significantly failed to reach) the chemicals behind your eyeballs which then wired messages to your brain cells for interpretation and response. But "interpretation-and-response," if you are an atheist, is simply a matter of chemicals responding to chemicals. There is no intellectual will, no "But on the other hand I think," no rational agreement or disagreement of any sort whatsoever. I write what I must write and you respond as you must respond because we are under the absolute tyranny of the chemical reactions that define us.

What we perceive to be rational thoughts and choices are, in a purely material universe, a grand collection of physio-chemical farces. Under atheism, all our choices are made for us, and all our thinking is done for us, by electrons acting with the same kind of regularity that makes sodium bicarbonate bubble up when you pour vinegar on it. Our brains' chemical reactions may be more complex than our sandbox volcano projects, but they are no less determined.

I am not saying that, since we would find it abhorrent to regard rationality as an illusion that froths up from a chemical bath in our brain cells, then it just cannot be so. Many abhorrent things are so. What I am saying is that rationality is a fact whether we like it or not. We do reason, and choose, and make judgments both rational and moral. If these inferences and judgments are necessarily the products of physical interactions (at the subatomic or any other level), then there is nothing true or false, or right or wrong, about any of them. While we reason with one another intellectually and admonish one another morally, these attempts to persuade and cajole have nothing (in atheism) to stand on. Try as you might, you can derive no "ought" (as in "You ought to believe this because it is true", or "You ought
not do this because it is wrong") from mere chemicals, no matter how complex, responding to stimuli, no matter how varied.

Then again, if God exists, then both true rationality and true morality are possible, because he provides a ground of reality which allows us to be more than chemicals in motion. The existence of a Reality beyond the physical means that our thoughts can be valid, our actions can be good, our choices can be governed by spirit, our outrages can have moral sanction, and our affections can embrace non-illusionary delights. The world as we perceive it is real, and our actions and thoughts within it are not simply non-rational products of the whole, but responses and initiatives that are genuinely true or false, good or bad, right or wrong.