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Are atheists unbiased about the question of God’s existence?

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Brian Auten has a book review posted up at Apologetics 315.

The book is “If There’s A God, Why Are There Atheists?”, by theologian R.C. Sproul. R.C. Sproul is one of my favorite theologians. The book in question has a very, very special place in my heart, because I think that it is one of the major reasons why I was able to resist pernicious ideas like religious pluralism and postmodernism for so long. Once you put on the glasses of Romans 1 and see for the first time what man is really doing with respect to God, you can never see things the same again. I’ll say more about this at the end, but let’s see what Brian wrote first.

The review

So often, you hear atheists complaining about religion is nothing but wish-fulfillment or some sort of crutch for people who are frightened by a variety of things. They think that God is invented to solve several problems. 1) how does the world work?, 2) is there meaning to suffering and evil?, 3) why should I be moral?, and 4) what will happen to me and my loved ones when I die?. On the atheistic view, God is just a crutch that people cling to out of weakness and ignorance. But is this really the case?

Sproul starts the book by investigating three atheists who sought to explain religious belief as a result of psychological factors.

Brian writes:

Before tackling the psychology of atheism, Sproul spends a chapter on the psychology of theism, from the perspective of Freud’s question “If there is no God, why is there religion?”11 What follows is an overview of various psychological explanations of theistic belief: Feuerbach’s “religion is a dream of the human mind.”12 Marx’s belief that religion is “due to the devious imagination of particular segment of mankind.”13 And Nietzche’s idea that “religion endures because weak men need it.”14 The author properly reiterates: “We must be careful to note that the above arguments can never be used as proof for the nonexistence of God. They can be useful for atheists who hear theists state that the only possible explanation for religion is the existence of God.”15 That being said, Sproul also reveals what these arguments presume:

Their arguments already presupposed the nonexistence of God. They were not dealing with the question, Is there a God? They were dealing with the question, Since there is no God, why is there religion?16

Sproul points out the weaknesses of each of these approaches and says “there are just as many arguments showing that unbelief has its roots in the psychological needs of man.”

Wow, could that really be true? What are the real reasons why people reject God? Does the Bible have anything to say about what those reasons are?

Brian cites Sproul’s contention:

The New Testament maintains that unbelief is generated not so much by intellectual causes as by moral and psychological ones. The problem is not that there is insufficient evidence to convince rational beings that there is a God, but that rational beings have a natural hostility to the being of God.

[…]Man’s desire is not that the omnipotent, personal Judeo-Christian God exist, but that He not exist.

In Romans 1:18-23, the apostle Paul explains what is really going on:

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,

19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Do you believe that? I believe that. I have never in my life met an atheist who varied from what Paul is saying here.

On this blog, I have presented many, many arguments for theism in general, and Christian theism in particular:

Sproul explains why atheists cannot allow themselves to live according to the evidence that is presented to them:

The cumulative effect of this knowledge that is clearly seen is to leave men ‘without excuse.’ Herein lies the basis of the universal guilt of man. No one can claim ignorance of the knowledge of God. No one can cite insufficient evidence for not believing in God. Though people are not persuaded by the evidence, this does not indicate an insufficiency in the evidence, but rather an insufficiency in man.

[…]The basic stages of man’s reaction to God can be formulated by means of the categories of trauma, repression, and substitution.

[…]If God exists, man cannot be a law unto himself. If God exists, man’s will-to-power is destined to run head-on into the will of God.

So, it’s pretty clear that there are huge implications to the question of God’s existence, and that the atheist will be affected by these implications when weighing evidence.

Here’s something Thomas Nagel, an excellent atheist philosopher, said:

“In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

(”The Last Word” by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press: 1997)”

The rest of the book review, and the book, deals with explaining in detail how atheists respond to an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing Creator/Designer. I encourage you to click through and read the whole book review. You can read the review, and the book, and then investigate for yourself whether the atheists are effected by this bias against moral accountability.

News

J. P. Moreland on the Pat Flynn podcast to discuss theories of mind

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After Rose and I managed invted Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary onto the Knight and Rose Show to discuss their new book about mind, we made lists of podcasts and articles to review in order to refresh ourselves on metaphysics and theories of mind. My favorite two podcasts (first, second) were from a three part series that Pat Flynn did with Michael Egnor.

And now there is a new episode of Pat Flynn, but this time with J. P. Moreland. When I was just still doing my undergraduate degree, I read two books by J. P. Moreland: “Scaling the Secular City” and “Christianity and the Nature of Science”. I actually taught the first one chapter-by-chapter, in my basement, to other students. I also listened to many of his Veritas Forum and Stand to Reason lectures, including the famous Wonmug lecture.  He also has a STEM undergraduate degree (chemistry).

There are 3 parts:

Here is the description from Mind Matters:

Moreland turns to an older philosophical idea: the concept of a substance. Unlike an aggregate (a pile of wood, for example), a substance is a unified whole. It exists as a single thing. A deeper unity allows it to stay the same even as it changes in minor ways.

A human being, in this view, is a substance. Your soul is the organizing principle that gives you identity and holds everything together — even when your body changes. Moreland explains that the parts of a substance are inseparable; they only exist as part of the whole. For example, a hand that’s been cut off is no longer a real hand because it has lost its role and function.

This idea goes all the way back to Aristotle (384–322 BC). He said that substances are more basic than their parts. Your identity doesn’t come from the combination of your parts — it’s your identity as a substance that gives your parts their meaning and function.

Naturally, I like the scientific evidence from Egnor and O’Leary better than philosophical arguments. But I do think it’s worth it for even sensible people to know a little squishy nonsense about metaphysics and mind. There are good arguments against naturalism from philosophy, and we should all know about them. I find that it’s always better, in a discussion, to say “I have 10 reasons for what I believe, and you haven’t got any reasons for what you believe”.

By the way, here are the different views of mind that I learned about when I was younger, by listening to all these old on-campus lectures with Christian scholars:

  • substance dualism
  • thomistic dualism
  • idealism
  • physicalism

I asked Grok to list out the useful arguments for dualism. So, if you’ve never heard of any of this before, then you can check that out. If I were going to defend dualism using philosophy, I would argue from first-person knowledge of my own thoughts, intentionality, and persistent identity over time. Grok has two more in the list that I don’t use.

News

Life’s fragile towers: why proteins and RNA need a Designer’s hand

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Non-theists are committed to the idea that the building blocks of life emerged spontaneously from chemicals on the early Earth. Well, Dr. James Tour and a couple of colleagues have written a new article that argues that proteins and RNA both break down faster than they can be formed in a realistic early Earth environment. To get them formed, you would need an intelligent designer.

Before we get to the paper, I should say what a protein is. A protein is a chain of amino acids. If you imagine a chain of kid’s blocks that can chain together, then the amino acids are the blocks, and the chain of blocks is the protein. Once the chain of amino acids is long enough, it can fold up into a shape to do things in the body. BUT the chain only folds into a useful shape if the sequence of blocks is in the right order. It’s similar to how Scrabble letters can form words and sentences. If the amino acids make meaningful words and sentences, then they will fold up, and be useful. Otherwise, they are junk.

RNA is like a messenger that reads recipes out of a book of recipes (DNA) and carries them to the kitchen (cells) where the recipes can be followed to make dishes. The recipe tells the kitchen how to put the blocks (amino acids) together to make a protein chain (a meal). Without RNA, the body wouldn’t know how to build the right proteins to perform biological functions. Again, the RNA itself is another chain, but this time it’s a chain of nucleotides. Nucleotides are also like letters, but more complex than amino acids.

So, the paper is asking the question: could these chains of components arise in the early Earth, without an intelligent designer to arrange them?

The paper was published in the journal BioCosmos, and it’s posted on Sciendo. You can read the full text and even download the PDF.

Anyway, Evolution News reported on the article, and here is what they said:

Rice University chemist James Tour, along with co-authors M. C. Parker and C. Jeynes, recently published an article in BioCosmos titled “Thermodynamic Limitations on the Natural Emergence of Long Chain Molecules: Implications for Origin of Life.” The study demonstrates that proteins and RNA degrade at rates that render their spontaneous formation under natural, undirected conditions highly implausible. To date, no origin-of-life researcher has provided a substantive response to the thermodynamic challenges outlined in the paper.

The early Earth environment is a much more messy place than a university lab, and as a result, chains tend to break down. It would be like trying to chain together blocks while running or swimming.

The authors calculate the decay time of proteins and RNA, to see how quickly they break down. And it turns out that the longer the chain is, the faster it breaks down.

Here’s how Evolution News explains it:

More specifically, the half-life of a dipeptide — two amino acids linked by a peptide bond, as found in proteins — is approximately 7 years. Therefore, a polypeptide chain of 200 amino acids, which is typical for many functional proteins, has a half-life of only 13 days. The situation is even more severe for RNA. A chain of two nucleotides has a half-life of about 100 days, meaning that an RNA strand of 200 nucleotides would degrade in roughly 12 hours. Both classes of molecules decay far more rapidly than they could plausibly form under natural conditions, making their spontaneous emergence highly unlikely in any undirected origin-of-life scenario.

The key point again is that the longer the chain gets, the faster it breaks down. But how fast is the building up rate?

In comparison to a protein’s half-life, the rate of polypeptide chain elongation under prebiotic conditions is very long. Yang et al. (2025) identify numerous barriers to sustained polypeptide growth, including the formation of non-peptide linkages and cyclic structures, stringent environmental requirements, and unfavorable thermodynamics. Their analysis establishes that the rate of growth must be far smaller than one added amino acid per chain per day.

Even assuming one addition each day, synthesizing a protein of 200 amino acids would require over six months. However, the growing chain would almost certainly degrade in a much shorter time span. The challenge is even greater for RNA, which has a significantly shorter half-life and encounters additional chemical and structural hurdles during formation.

So the building up rate for proteins and RNA is much slower than the breaking down rate.

I’m not a biochemist, I’m a software engineer. So my job is to try to come up with a good analogy for you so that you remember this well enough to use it in a conversation, later. After all, we must help the evolutionists to come to their senses!

Imagine building a tall tower of toy blocks on a windy beach. You carefully stack each block (amino acids or nucleotides) to make a protein or RNA chain, but it’s slow work—maybe one block a day. Meanwhile, big waves (the harsh early Earth environment) keep crashing in, knocking your tower down faster than you can build it. For a 200-block tower (a functional protein), it’d take months to stack, but waves destroy it in days (protein half-life: 13 days). For RNA, it’s even worse—your tower collapses in hours (half-life: 12 hours)! Without a skilled builder (an intelligent designer) shielding and guiding the process, the tower will never get built.

Well, I think this is a very interesting piece of work these gentlemen have put together, so we shall see how good of a job the other side does at finding an answer. If you have ever seen Dr. Tour debate, he likes to draw a formula on the chalkboard, and then hand the chalk to his opponent and ask them to solve it. Will they be able to solve this problem? If not, then they should quit being so bold about their naturalistic view of life!