By Ron Galloway

The rationality of a collective witness is something we all experience daily. I have never been to New York, but it is perfectly rational for me to believe in New York based on the experience of others who have been there.

This scenario about a New York never experienced by anyone illustrates why atheism is completely irrational. The great irony is that atheism is beyond individual or collective experience. Atheists believe that lifeless matter brought intelligent life into being. Yet no one in human history has experienced an event of this sort, either individually or in plurality. For this reason atheism is inherently irrational, a kind of Freudian wish, a fantasy projection for people who prefer irrationality to belief in an intelligent creator.

Of course, it is true that there are many things we believe in that people do not directly or collectively experience. But to be rational these things must be based on deductions grounded in experience.

For example, I do not directly experience the shape of atoms or the countless reactions going on in outer space. But all such phenomena presuppose a causation of some kind that can be detected (experienced) and thus added to the sum of human understanding. This is the case whether we are speaking of the atom or the force of gravity. Both are inherently rational because they are based on a causal deduction based on human experience. No one can see an atom with the naked eye, but we can detect its presence and thus deduce the structure of atoms. Nor can gravity be detected by any normal means, yet its effects are everywhere seen.

Why, then, do some scientists and biologists, such as Richard Dawkins, imagine that through “hard” scientific work they will be able to show that lifeless matter brought intelligence into being? Whether scientists of this persuasion are aware of it or not, they are attempting to bring life from non-life, not because they are driven by rationality, but because they have an irrational desire to avoid dealing with a being higher than themselves. Their desire must be an irrational desire because no scientist has ever experienced anything that would rationally suggest lifeless matter as the source for intelligence.

In their search to understand the basic building blocks of existence, scientists are not encountering greater and greater simplicity, but rather more and more complexity and precision. This naturally leads rationally thinking human beings to search for an intelligence behind the complexity. This is why famous atheist Anthony Flew finally conceded that the complexity of laws and processes in the universe require a lawmaker.  As far as we know, Flew never became a Christian, but as an old man he finally admitted the irrationality of atheism and the rationality of faith in a higher being.

This same irrationality is why atheism comes up with notions such as the idea that good and evil are fictional, and that there is no such thing as right or wrong. Statements of this kind simply fly in the face of the world’s collective experience. Try as we might, we cannot dismiss from our laws, our courts, or our individual lives the sense of good and evil, right and wrong. These must have been embedded in human understanding by an intelligent designer. This is the only possible explanation as to why Marxists and other atheists often cry out against injustice. They cannot get away from pontificating about right and wrong, even when they deny existence to both. Such obvious irrationality mystifies the casual observer, but I stand on solid ground when I say it stems from their initial irrationality of wishing that lifeless matter could bring intelligence into being.  

A New York never experienced by anyone, and a universe in which non-intelligence brings intelligence into being, are bedfellows.