Best Argument for Atheism
In the realm of religion, there is a discipline known as Apologetics. Now, apologetics doesn’t mean you’re “apologizing for” something in the same way we would use the term apology. It comes from the Greek word “apologia” which means “an answer given in reply.” Apologetics is a field that specializes in answering critiques or criticisms against a certain belief system. You can have apologists for Buddhism, Islam, Mormonism, or any other religion or strongly held philosophical way of thinking. In Christianity, our apologists defend the faith against those who bring up arguments against it. I’ve watched a lot of apologists, listened to a lot of debates, and there’s something I’ve heard several say that just bothers me.
Several Christian apologists have said, “There’s no good argument for atheism.” Now, I think this is just wildly untrue. Atheism, like any belief system, has better and worse arguments for its propositions, just like Christianity. There are great reasons to be an atheist, and there are terrible reasons to be a Christian. I wanted to delve a little deeper into that today.
Now, if you’re a lifelong Christian, you may be offended or surprised to hear from a Theologian that there are terrible reasons to be a Christian. I am of the opinion that everyone should be Christian, but the reasons for becoming one will vary in quality, just like the reasons for being an atheist will vary in quality from good reason to mediocre reason. Imagine if someone told you they are an atheist because going to church has always bored them, they couldn’t stand it, so they left. That’s a pretty terrible reason to become an atheist. It doesn’t follow intellectually, doesn’t engage with the deeper reasons for Christianity, and doesn’t explore the nuances of belief in God. Likewise, if someone says they are a Christian because they wanted something to do on Sundays and found church services entertaining, well, that’s a pretty mediocre reason for being a Christian. In the same way as the atheists reasoned earlier, it never truly engages with the depth of history and logic behind the Christian faith. There’s a lot more I could say on this, but I want the focus of this article to be on atheism, not on Christianity’s response to it. That is a topic for a later time. For now, all you need to know is that arguments for a particular worldview should be compelling, logical, and not unduly subjective to the point that they are unverifiable from an outsider’s perspective.
I hope that explanation makes a little sense. The idea of a “best” argument is subjective, as not everyone will respond equally to the same argument. But there are other arguments that, by their nature, are more sound, appealing, and coherent than others. If someone instead says that they are an atheist because they don’t see any proof of God, well then, now we’re getting somewhere. That statement shows it’s something they’ve thought about, they have a particular worldview they’re working from, and what they’ve seen so far has been insufficient to intellectually sway them. I would still say it’s not the best reason, but it’s one of the better and more understandable reasons.
There are a lot of arguments for atheism, but one I find the most compelling, and the one that has turned away the most people from the faith, is the argument from suffering. This is a doozy of an argument that challenges all of us, with tomes and volumes having been written on it by the brightest minds history has produced, and it still continues to challenge us to this very day. At its most basic premise, it asks the question: “If God is all-loving and all-good, why does he allow so much suffering?” It is an argument that cuts both logically and emotionally, asking us to respond in a way that is both logically coherent and appeals to us at a hurting, emotional level. Unfortunately, I’ve seen Christians, both laity and pastors, overly respond from either a logical level or an emotional one, both of which can cause serious harm to the person asking the question.
Imagine you lost someone you love in a tragic accident. You’re at the funeral, hurting, grieving, and the pastor tells you that this was supposed to happen, since God is in control of everything. You would be hurt and furious. God looks like a monster in that scenario, purposefully killing your loved one for no apparent reason. That is an overly logical appeal to theology. New scenario, the pastor approaches you and says that, despite all this pain, God still loves you and he loves your loved one. It might make you feel better for a moment, but you start asking why, if God loved them so much, did he let them die so horribly? Why didn’t he stop it? Why did he let this happen? That is an overly emotional appeal, one that might be a temporary balm to the situation, but leaves so many unanswered questions. As you can see, in either scenario, the person going through the loss has perfectly valid reasons for rejecting God based on their experience, reasons that we have a hard time answering at any satisfying depth.
What’s more, there are other arguments from suffering. Why does God allow animal suffering? Why doesn’t God intervene in human suffering? Why do people die of painful diseases if God is able to remove them? All of these are really good questions, questions we must all struggle with. And I picked those examples intentionally, as they are not so easily answered with a simple “humanity has free will” response that many amateur theologians seemed tempted to turn to. If suffering is a result of humanity’s free will, then how is free will affected by a deer, alone in the forest, bleeding out over the course of several days as it succumbs to injuries inflicted by an accident? If suffering is the result of humanity’s free will, how does infant cancer play a role in that, a disease we did not cause and cannot cure?
Out of all the arguments for atheism, the argument from suffering is, by my estimation, the most compelling. It hits us in both our logic and our emotions, two things we value most highly as Westerners. What’s more, it can run into difficult situations if someone answers too hastily, causing more harm than good, as we saw in the above examples. Other arguments, such as the existence of God, I feel, are well answered by the Kalam cosmological argument or the divine tuning of the universe argument. But the argument from suffering? That’s a really challenging one that doesn’t have satisfactory answers for everyone. So, long post short, there is at least one really good argument for atheism, and it’s one we need to understand and contend with, because, sooner or later, someone is going to ask us those challenging questions, and we’ll need to know how to respond.
P. S.
A response to the argument from suffering is called Theodicy, which is the study of suffering in the Christian tradition. As you can see, dealing with this one argument is so difficult that an entire field of study is devoted to answering it, rather than just a few classes of arguments. I will be posting a much longer article about theodicy, types of theodicies, and their histories at some point. But for now, if you want to know more, I would recommend you look into Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering by Timothy Keller and A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis. Neither are light reading nor particularly enjoyable, but they are fantastic resources to begin your Theodicy.