Taking every thought captive for obedience to Christ (2 Corinthians 10.5)

The Question
What does someone mean who claims to be an atheist? (9)
We need to broach one more important matter with your friend who claims to be an atheist.

As we have been able to discover, your friend is really only an aJehovahist– he only doesn’t believe in the God of the Bible. At the same time, he is an autotheist – he believes in himself and his own ability to determine what’s right, good, true, and best for him. He is the master of his fate, the captain of his soul.

Your friend may have, what seem to him, good reasons for believingthis way; but we will want to make sure he understands that, at the end of the day, his approach to life differs from ours only in substance, not in form.

An atheist will typically insist that he doesn’t need religion to get by in life – reason, experience, determination, trial-and-error, or whatever, works for him. He doesn’t need faith.

However, he cannot escape living by faith because, as we’ve managed to point out, he can’t know everything. As a matter of fact, he can’t really know very much at all, when compared with the universe of things to know and the uncertainties of the future. He can’t know whether his chosen way of life is really what’s best for him. He can only hope this is so. He can’t know whether the course of life he is following will lead to the end he desires. He can only hope it will. He can’t know whether the sources and authorities he is banking on to support his choices, decisions, and lifestyle are reliable and sure. He can only hope they are.

Indeed, he can’t even know whether he will live to see tomorrow. He can only believe and hope that he will.

All this hoping and so little true knowing adds up to living by faith. And faith is a critical component of religion – all religion. Your atheist friend cannot not be religious. His way of life differs from yours only in substance – what he believes in and how he hopes to attain to that – and not really in form. He lives by faith in unseen things which to him appear to be the greatest good to which he can aspire.

So we may like to ask an additional question or two: First, how can your friend be so sure that his own judgment – his ideas, plans, hopes, and beliefs – can be relied upon to deliver the good he seeks? Put another way, What makes him, as his own deity, any more reliable a source for the good life than anybody else who thinks the same way? Or than the God of the Bible, for that matter?

The only possible answer to this is one or another form of, “Well, I just believe!” It will be important that your friend hear himself saying this.

We will want to follow-up: “Does this imply that you think everybody should live according to what youbelieve?” “Of course not,” he will reply. “This is my life. Everyone needs to sort these matters out for themselves.”

“And you are content for everyone else to determine their own greatest good, to hope for it fervently, and to conduct their daily lives in pursuit of that as they best see fit?”

He can only answer in the affirmative, and then we will want to ask him how – other than brute power – he proposes to arbitrate between people who hold conflicting beliefs and goals, especially when whatever someone else wants in life seems to threaten your friend’s ability to pursue his own chosen course?

“Well,” he will insist, “there must be laws, of course, to protect us from harming one another.”

To which we will answer, “Why? And precisely where do such laws come from? And why should I or you or that person whose worldview conflicts with yours deny our own desires merely to conform to some arbitrary laws imposed out of the worldviews of other minds like ours?”

“Or,” we will continue, “do you mean to suggest that there are standards higher than your own mind – what you think or want or believe? That someone, somehow, in at least some situations, has the authority to challenge, deny, or curtail and restrain your preferred beliefs? And if this is so, how can you know whether or not that authority is reliable? Is there some authority above thatauthority to which it must submit in order to ensure it acts on your and everyone’s behalf in a manner you would consider to be just?”

Just what, we will want to know, does your friend believe about such matters?

For reflection
1.  Why is it absurd for someone to insist – as the famous “mystery clause” in the Supreme Court judgment Planned Parenthood v Casey insists – that everyone must be free to decide his own worldview, beliefs, and lifestyle?

2.  Why is it important to point this out to people who claim to be atheists or not religious?

3.  Meditate on Proverbs 26.4, 5. How can you see that this is what we’ve been doing in this series?

Next steps: Pray daily for the unbelievers you will see that day. Ask the Lord to give you opportunities to get to know them and to begin conversations with them.

T. M. Moore
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