The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists

by Ravi Zacharias

You may remember how the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, one of Sam Harris's predecessors in the promotion of atheism over belief in God, described existence without God. In such a world, Nietzsche said, we stray through an infinite nothing, with

Sartre, as atheistic intellectual elites know but are embarrassed to acknowledge, denounced atheism on his deathbed as philosophically unlivable.* A few years ago, in a debate between atheism and Christianity, Antony Flew described a Christian philosopher's experience of knowing Christ as “grotesque.”

Has Harris read about Hitler's own spiritual journey? Has he read anything

about Hitler's dabbling in the occult? Is he aware that Hitler personally presented the writings of Nietzsche to Stalin and Mussolini? Is he ignoring the fact that others who were not Jewish were also slaughtered by Hitler? Did he read Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann's last words that refused repentance and denied belief in God? Does he know how many Russians were killed by the Nazi machine? Does he recall Hitler's words inscribed over one of the gas ovens in Auschwitz—“I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of a conscience, imperious, relentless and cruel”?23 Does he know that Hitler's point was that the destruction of the weak is a good thing for the survival of the strong and that “nature intended it that way,” as

is taught by atheistic evolution's tenet of natural selection (described by Voltaire in the poem I have already cited)—“the survival of the fittest”? None of these signs of the Holocaust point back to Christianity. For Harris to convince us that Hitler was wrong to do what he did, he has to borrow from an objective moral framework to support his point. Let me put it another way. If Harris's assertion that no moral order is visible in the world is true, we may well ask why Hitler couldn't introduce his own order. What was wrong with what he d...

Atheists do not need to riot. They have gradually taken away our right to even speak in the academy. They wish to silence us. When I was at Oxford recently, I was told about an article written by Richard Dawkins in which he advocated that any prospective student with a creationist point of view should be refused admittance into Oxford. And he criticizes the intolerance of religion? Dawkins is a professor at Oxford, a university whose motto is “The Lord Is My Light.”

He has been given privileges to teach because of the Judeo-Christian ethic of tolerance. And now that he is in the driver's seat, he wishes to evict not just Christian faculty but even students who do not subscribe to his atheistic views. Ask any Christian academician how careful Christian professors need to be about acknowledging their faith in a classroom. Now Dawkins and others want the students to be silenced as well. Underneath their dangerous political correctness is an agenda to stifle all thought but their own.

Some time ago, I read an article about a three-year-old girl in Elk River, Minnesota, who suffers from a rare malady that involves insensitivity to pain.33 It is called CIPA—Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis.

People with this disease feel no pain, nor do they sweat or shed tears. There are only approximately one hundred known cases in the world. Little Gabby Gingras has to be watched over constantly. At four months of age, her parents noticed that she would bite her own fingers till they bled, with no expression of discomfort. When she was two years old, she had to have her teeth removed to prevent her from biting herself and causing

serious injury. She could put her hand on a hot plate and burn herself without feeling a twinge of pain. She always has to wear safety glasses because in one instance she scratched her cornea badly. She plays sports with absolute fearlessness, never hesitant about banging into anything. She says she sometimes feels like crying, but she can't. The life of this little one is in perpetual danger. The average life span for a child with thi...

Harris also observed that Martin Luther King Jr.'s inspiration came from Gandhi (see Letter, 12). It might surprise Harris to know that Mahatma Gandhi thought much more highly of Jesus than he does and, in fact, carried a New Testament with him everywhere he went. In the museum at Gandhi's ashram in Ahmedabad is a quote by Bertrand Russell, of all people, with his assessment of why Gandhi was

successful in his campaign against British rule in India: “It is doubtful that the method employed by Gandhi would have ever succeeded, except that he was appealing to the conscience of a Christianized people.” Here is an ardent atheist referring to a pantheist and saying that the only reason he succeeded in his goal of national independence was that he was appealing to the conscience of theists. No matter how much Harris