Not That Many Atheists

Sprituality Column #47
October 2, 2007
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Not That Many Atheists
By Bob Walters

Any professing, active Christian – or Jew, Muslim, Jehovah’s Witness, Buddhist, Hindu, Scientologist – knows that faith takes a lot of work. Lazy faith creates a stew of doubt and guilt; active, working faith creates wonder and a true life’s purpose.

For that reason – and if God doesn’t exist it’s hard to figure where reason comes from – it must be miserable work being an atheist. Imagine if everything you did for faith, you did only to prove there is no point to any of it.

Maybe it’s too hard of work. Population polls consistently reveal just half of one percent of the population reports itself to be “atheist” – sure God doesn’t exist. I was surprised the number was so low.

Chuck Colson wrote recently that current atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris aren’t just atheists, they are anti-theists who want God off the map because religion is counter to humanity’s needs.

God is counter to humanity? C’mon guys … without God, there wouldn’t be humanity (or anything else).

C.S. Lewis astutely observed that atheists cannot explain religious impulses in human beings, make sense of religious experience, explain the existence of reason and free will, account for our ability to think and choose, or explain the existence and order of the universe.

Religious truth may frequently be in conflict with our felt needs or our own sense of order (i.e. – what I think is good for me), but God gives us the ability to think those thoughts, contemplate those doubts, and create our own stories.

To me the Triune God (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) is reality, while atheism is one of the stories we tell ourselves to ignore God’s enormous truths.

Evel Knievel, whose amazing conversion experience in Christ I wrote about last week, explained it this way: “A Christian wants to believe … everything about God and Jesus. An atheist does not believe in God because he doesn’t want to.”

That’s so simple and complete and profound – it really does come down to what we want.

The trick is to want God most, and work at it.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) spent many years as an agnostic, a Greek-based word for “without knowledge” that when run through Latin and then re-Anglicized becomes the word “ignoramus.” Ouch.