Many years ago, a friend loaned me a book and said, “I just picked this up — I think you would really appreciate it. Let me know what you think.”
I was not long into the book, Henry Morris’s The Long War Against God, before I found myself fighting the urge to grab a highlighter and mark a passage or write a note in the margin. But it wasn’t my book! So instead I began putting post-its in the margins by the cogent passages. When I made it about half way through the book and as the side of the book began to take on a dominant yellow hue, I asked my friend if I might just purchase him a new copy of the book and keep his copy for myself.
The tenet of Morris is that evolution is not so much a scientific theory as it is a theological desire — an attempt to remove God from the world system freeing men to do what they like in appeasing their ungodly and self-serving passions. He offers a compelling argument.
In fact, a number of new authors espousing atheistic philosophies might not even quibble with his assertion (Nathan Busenitz also provides a good overview of the major writers and a Biblical response). Their hatred of God and Christianity is clear.
The problem with the removal of God, however, is how any kind of morality can then be upheld. If there is no God, then there is standard, no means to determine righteousness, truth, or morality. Now initially someone might say, “what’s the problem with that? It’s just me…” Except every individual’s decisions have cultural implications. And every culture must determine what standards to uphold as right and wrong (e.g., what actions should merit incarceration — public intoxication? murder? hate speech? libel? and on what basis are these determined to be wrong?) Most atheists would suggest that there is a standard of morality, but if they are pressed, such standards invariably become a matter of personal (or cultural) choice without any external intrinsically right standard.
Peter Singer, however, is an exception. He is an atheist who argues that there is no moral standard and no inherent truth. That declaration allows him to make preposterous proposals like the infanticide of children up to the age of 28 days — a fourth trimester abortion, if you will — more protection for animals, and less protection for humans who are “non-contributing” (infants, the elderly, and the mentally disabled). His positions are self-admittedly extreme, but the natural conclusion of the removal of God from the world.
Most atheists would reject Singer’s conclusions, but his desires are one of the realities of atheism of which makes atheists fearful:
Why haven’t the atheists embraced Peter Singer? I suspect it is because they fear that his unpalatable views will discredit the cause of atheism. What they haven’t considered, however, is whether Singer, virtually alone among their numbers, is uncompromisingly working out the implications of living in a truly secular society, one completely purged of Christian and transcendental foundations. In Singer, we may be witnessing someone both horrifying and yet somehow refreshing: an intellectually honest atheist. [Dinesh D’Souza, “Staring into the Abyss: Why Peter Singer makes the New Atheists nervous.]
Atheists delight to disparage God so they might indulge their desires without accountability. What they have failed to consider are the unintended consequences of such a belief system — both at a personal and cultural level.
Words of Grace 