The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists

by Ravi Zacharias

everyone has a worldview. A worldview basically offers answers to four necessary questions—questions that relate to origin, meaning, morality, and hope that assures a destiny. These answers must be correspondingly true and, as a whole, coherent.

Let me take this a little further. Donald Page of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Science has calculated the odds against our universe randomly taking a form suitable for life as one out of 10,000,000,000124—a number that exceeds all imagination.

Astronomers Fred Hoyle and N. C. Wickramasinghe found that the odds of the random formation of a single enzyme from amino acids anywhere on our planet's surface are one in 1020

But at least Voltaire, Sartre, and Nietzsche were honest and consistent in their views. They admitted the ridiculousness of life, the pointlessness of everything in an atheistic world. Contemporary atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, however, are so blind to the conceit of their own minds that they try to present this view of life as some sort of triumphal liberation.

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.

How conveniently the atheist plays word games! When it is Stalin or Pol Pot who does the slaughtering, it is because they are deranged or irrational ideologues; their atheism has nothing to do with their actions. But when a Holocaust is engendered by an ideologue, it is the culmination of four hundred years of Christian intolerance for the Jew.

If the murder of innocents is wrong, it is wrong not because science tells us it is wrong but because every life has intrinsic worth—a postulate that atheism simply cannot deduce.

Russell's agnosticism and ambiguity about his own views on ethical values were at least more honest than Harris's morality concocted in his own mind—as if morality should be self-evident to everybody, regardless of whether God exists or not. Harris's antagonism toward God ends up proving that he intuitively finds some things reprehensible. But he cannot explain his innate sense of right and wrong—the reality of God's law written on his heart—because there is no logical explanation for how that intuition toward morality could develop from sheer matter and chemistry.

Popularly stated, I would put it in this way: • When you assert that there is such a thing as evil, you must assume there is such a thing as good. • When you say there is such a thing as good, you must assume there is a moral law by which to distinguish between good and evil. There must be some standard by which to determine what is good and what is evil. • When you assume a moral law, you must posit a moral lawgiver—the source of the moral law. But this moral lawgiver is precisely who atheists are trying to disprove.

This leaves us with a third option—one that Harris has completely ignored or refused to consider: he is selectively borrowing from the biblical revelation of justice and retribution while ignoring the big story into which it fits and by which it gains its purpose.

Christianity teaches that every single life has ultimate value. In secularism, while there is no ultimate value to a life, the atheist subjectively selects particular values to applaud.

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.

Marx said that religion is “the opium of the people.” Yes, everybody who hates religion remembers this quote. But they forget, deliberately or otherwise, what Marx said in continuation of that thought: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people…. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”

God has put enough into this world to make faith in him a most reasonable thing. But he has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason alone.

In this first stage of the argument, then, we have not posited a God; we have just posited a nonphysical entity that explains its own existence and is uncaused.

Stage two gives a challenge to demonstrate one example of order coming from disorder. Now to stage three, which deals with the course of human events—historical, social, and individual.

A look at human history—and specifically at the person and work of Jesus Christ—shows why he was who he claimed to be and why millions follow him today. A comparison of Jesus, Muhammad, Krishna (if he ever actually lived), Buddha, and Mahavira quickly shows the profound differences in their claims and demonstrations. In fact, none I have mentioned here except Jesus even claimed to be divine.

Krishna came the closest, but considering him in the context of the Vedas and the Gita, one cannot even be certain that he truly lived.

Technological advance without virtue in the technician is the nuclear button in the hands of a madman.

Only in worship that is offered both in spirit and in truth can the heart, mind, conscience, imagination, and will be brought to coalesce with high respect for both the flesh and the spirit. This was symbolized in the Eucharist as touch and taste, as the transcending meaning of the Eternal was brought into the temporal. This very act gives meaning to history. The apostle Paul wrote, “Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup [now], you proclaim the Lord's death [the past] until he comes [the future]” (1 Corinthians 11:26).

The Word, the logos, combines two notions, one Greek, one Hebrew. For the Greek the logos was the rational ordering principle of the universe. For the Hebrew the word of the Lord was God's activity in the world. [In Hebrew dabar means both word and deed. Hebrew is a language based on verbs, on action.]