City of Dis

Philosophy / Apologetics / Cosmicism

What Atheists Must Believe

The theology of a caricature - and why atheism does not automatically entail nihilism, despair, moral subjectivism, scientism or self-contradiction.

There is a recurring confidence in a certain kind of popular Christian apologetic, especially online. I do not mean the serious theologian, the historically literate believer, or the philosophically careful Christian who knows perfectly well that atheism is a denial of theism, not a complete operating system. Nor do I mean thinkers such as Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Robert Adams, or those in the Van Tilian presuppositional tradition, whose arguments deserve a more serious response than a shrug. I mean the more familiar rhetorical move by which atheism is inflated from a limited position about gods into an entire moral, metaphysical, psychological, and existential catastrophe.

For this kind of argument, atheism is rarely allowed to remain modest. It is not simply the view that there is insufficient reason to believe in gods, or, in stronger forms, that gods do not exist. It becomes a total worldview with compulsory doctrines, hidden debts, and unavoidable deformities. The atheist, we are told, “must” believe this, “must” deny that, “must” live as if nothing matters, “must” borrow from Christianity, “must” be unable to account for reason, morality, love, beauty, logic, science, consciousness, obligation, or the ordinary decencies of human life.

The word “must” is doing a great deal of work. Sometimes it introduces a serious philosophical challenge. More often, in popular debate, it means: “I need atheism to entail this, because otherwise my argument loses much of its force.”

Cosmicism sharpens the issue because it refuses a premise shared by many of these accusations: that human value requires cosmic endorsement. An indifferent universe may deny us metaphysical centrality without denying us love, obligation, curiosity, beauty or the capacity to matter to one another.

The alleged death of meaning

The first alleged compulsory atheist belief is that life has no meaning. If there is no God, then life is meaningless. Therefore the atheist, to be consistent, should collapse into despair, regard love as a chemical inconvenience, and wait patiently for entropy to conclude the paperwork.

But this confuses cosmic meaning with human meaning. An atheist need not believe that life has meaning inscribed into it from outside the universe by a divine author. That does not remotely entail that love, friendship, art, knowledge, kindness, courage, humour, curiosity, grief, loyalty, or justice are meaningless within human life. It only means they are not guaranteed by divine authorship. The Christian critic may argue that such meanings are fragile, local, or metaphysically incomplete. That is a serious claim. But it is not the same as showing that they are unreal.

The loss of cosmic endorsement is not the loss of all value. It may be a loss of metaphysical grandeur. It may be a loss of final security. It may even be, for some temperaments, a loss of comfort. But it does not follow that nothing matters. It follows only that what matters may matter to finite creatures in finite contexts, without the universe itself being organised as a theatre of human significance.

Morality without divine ownership

The second claim is that atheists must believe morality is purely subjective. This is a persistent argument because it appears to offer a clean contrast: either God grounds morality, or morality dissolves into preference. Yet atheism does not logically entail moral subjectivism. There are atheist moral realists, atheist moral naturalists, atheist constructivists, atheist contractualists, atheist consequentialists, atheist Kantians, secular Aristotelians, and atheists who understand moral language as arising from evolved social, rational, and affective life without being reducible to whim.

The Christian philosopher may disagree with these accounts. Quite fairly, he may argue that some of them fail to explain normativity, obligation, or the authority of the good. But he cannot simply announce that atheism equals “no objective morality” and treat the conclusion as established. That is not an argument against atheism. It is a refusal to distinguish atheism from one possible moral theory an atheist might hold.

A stronger moral argument deserves better treatment. In its serious form, it does not merely say that atheists cannot behave well. That would be absurd. It says that objective moral values and duties require a transcendent personal ground: goodness is rooted in the nature of God, and moral obligation is grounded in relation to a personal moral authority. On this view, God is not a cosmic policeman arbitrarily issuing commands, but the necessary source of moral reality itself.

That is a much more substantial claim. It also does not obviously succeed. First, it remains unclear why objective moral truths, if they exist, must be grounded in a person rather than in necessary normative facts, rational relations, human flourishing, or some form of non-theistic moral realism. Secondly, the Euthyphro problem still presses: if God’s nature is good, is it good because it is God’s, or is God’s nature good because it conforms to the good? Theistic ethicists have sophisticated replies, especially those who identify the good with God’s necessary nature rather than with arbitrary command. But the problem is not dissolved merely by moving from “God commands” to “God is the Good”. It becomes a question about whether that identification explains morality or redescribes it in theological terms.

The atheist need not pretend that secular ethics has no burdens. It has many. But a burden is not a defeat. Moral realism without God may be metaphysically demanding; moral constructivism may invite questions about authority; naturalist accounts may struggle to preserve the full force of obligation. Yet the theistic account has its own difficulties: divine hiddenness, moral disagreement among believers, troubling divine commands in scripture, and the question of how finite humans reliably identify the moral content of God’s nature. There is no honest route here by which the Christian simply owns morality and the atheist is left outside the building.

When moral ontology becomes moral psychology

There is also the related claim that atheists must secretly believe “anything goes”. This confuses moral ontology with moral psychology. People do not become moral agents by first solving metaethics. Children, neighbours, nurses, friends, judges, and rescuers do not usually consult a theory of divine command before recognising cruelty, betrayal, courage, or care. The origins and foundations of morality are philosophically difficult. The experience of moral seriousness is not confined to theism.

The anxiety inside “just animals”

The third claim is that atheists must believe humans are “just animals”. The word “just” carries much of the anxiety. Humans are animals, yes. Primates, mammals, organisms, evolutionary products, kin to the rest of life. That does not mean we are nothing but biological machinery with bank accounts. It means that our capacities, including language, moral emotion, symbolic thought, long memory, grief, technology, and art, arose within nature rather than being inserted into it from outside.

Some Christian critics assume that if something has an evolutionary history, it has thereby been diminished. But discovering the natural history of music does not make Beethoven disappear. Discovering the neurobiology of love does not make parental love fictional. Discovering that moral cognition has biological and social roots does not make moral judgement arbitrary noise. It means that human life is continuous with nature, and that the things we value have histories.

Plantinga and the reliability of evolved minds

Here Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism deserves mention, because it is among the more sophisticated attempts to press this point. The argument, very briefly, is that if both naturalism and unguided evolution are true, then the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable is low or inscrutable. Natural selection favours adaptive behaviour, not truth as such. If naturalism gives us reason to doubt the reliability of our minds, then naturalism becomes self-defeating.

That is a serious argument, and not the same as the crude claim that “evolution means we cannot know anything”. Still, I do not find it decisive. Evolution need not make truth incidental. In a stable environment, many true beliefs about predators, food, other agents, tools, memory, and causal patterns are highly useful. Creatures radically disconnected from reality tend not to flourish. Of course evolution also gives us bias, illusion, tribal reasoning, superstition, and error. But that is precisely why human beings develop corrective practices: logic, mathematics, criticism, peer review, instrumentation, replication, and public argument. Reliability is not assumed wholesale. It is disciplined.

Nor is theism automatically immune from parallel concerns. If human cognition is fallen, finite, passion-driven, culturally embedded, and prone to sin or self-deception, then the theist also needs an account of when and why our faculties are reliable. Appealing to divine design may help if one already accepts a particular theology of creation and providence, but it does not by itself establish the global reliability of human reasoning. Plantinga raises a real problem about knowledge, evolution, and trust in our faculties. He does not show that atheism as such is irrational.

Atheism is not scientism

Then there is the claim that atheists must believe science explains everything. This is one of the more common confusions. Most atheists do not believe anything of the kind. Science is an extraordinarily successful method for investigating the natural world. It is not a substitute for grief, a complete theory of aesthetics, a recipe for political wisdom, or a guarantee of moral maturity. An atheist can think science is our best method for studying empirical reality without thinking every meaningful question is a laboratory question.

The confusion usually arises because atheism, naturalism, materialism, scientism, and secular humanism are treated as interchangeable. They are not. Science is a method. Atheism is a position concerning gods. Naturalism is a broader metaphysical or methodological stance. Materialism or physicalism is a position about what exists. Secular humanism is an ethical and political outlook. These views may overlap in many people, but they are not identical. Serious criticism begins by distinguishing them.

The atheist who supposedly hates God

Another common claim is that atheists must “hate God”. This is less a philosophical argument than a psychological interpretation. One cannot hate a being one does not believe exists, except in the ordinary literary sense in which one might dislike Zeus, Voldemort, or Sauron. Many atheists dislike certain ideas of God. Many dislike religious institutions. Many object to doctrines of hell, inherited guilt, divine command, sexual shame, providential cruelty, or the sanctification of suffering. That is not hatred of God. It is moral and intellectual objection to claims made about God.

The apologist may then say that atheists “know God exists really”. This is a familiar move in some theological traditions, and it can be given a more serious form: unbelief is not merely intellectual error, but resistance to a truth disclosed in creation, conscience, or the sensus divinitatis. Again, this is not a trivial claim. But as an argument addressed to the atheist, it risks begging the question. It interprets disagreement from within the theology whose truth is at issue. The atheist is no longer treated as an interlocutor who may be honestly unconvinced, but as a rebel against knowledge he already possesses. That may be a doctrine. It is not, by itself, evidence.

Something from nothing

One also hears that atheists must believe the universe came from “nothing”. This is normally stated without much care for cosmology or metaphysics. Atheism by itself does not commit one to a specific cosmological model. An atheist may accept Big Bang cosmology, a quantum cosmological proposal, a multiverse hypothesis, an eternalist model, a brute-fact universe, or simply say “I do not know”. The last answer is often the most intellectually responsible. It is not a weakness to decline false certainty.

William Lane Craig’s kalam cosmological argument is a more serious form of the challenge. It argues that whatever begins to exist has a cause, that the universe began to exist, and therefore that the universe has a cause. Craig then argues that this cause must be immaterial, timeless, powerful, and personal. One need not dismiss this as crude. The argument raises real questions about contingency, causation, and the origin of spacetime. But even if one grants more than many philosophers would grant, the distance from “the universe has a cause” to “Christian theism is true” remains considerable. Cosmological arguments, at most, get one to metaphysical explanation. They do not, without further argument, get one to incarnation, atonement, scripture, Trinity, resurrection, or ecclesial authority.

Consciousness and free will do not belong to theism

There is also the claim that atheists must believe consciousness is an illusion. Some atheists do take hard reductionist or illusionist positions. Others do not. There are atheist physicalists, property dualists, panpsychists, neutral monists, emergentists, mysterian agnostics, and philosophers who regard consciousness as a difficult natural phenomenon rather than evidence of a soul. Atheism does not settle the philosophy of mind. It removes God from the explanatory ledger unless and until God is shown to be needed there.

The same applies to free will. Some atheists are determinists. Some are compatibilists. Some defend libertarian freedom in non-theistic forms. Some think the inherited debate is partly malformed by theological assumptions about souls, guilt, merit, and punishment. Christians themselves disagree about free will, predestination, grace, providence, divine foreknowledge, and human responsibility. It is therefore careless to speak as if atheists uniquely face a problem here. The problem belongs to anyone trying to reconcile agency with causation, character, history, and the structure of reality.

Nihilism is not the default

Another favourite is that atheists must be nihilists. But nihilism is not the same as rejecting divine purpose. One can reject a preordained purpose for the species while affirming created, discovered, negotiated, fragile, local, and serious meanings. Indeed, an atheist may regard meaning as more ethically urgent precisely because it is not guaranteed by cosmic management. There is no divine safety net beneath the nursery, the hospital, the courtroom, or the grave. That can make human responsibility heavier, not lighter.

The transcendental challenge

The presuppositional or transcendental argument presses a deeper version of this critique. In its stronger form, it does not merely say that atheists are immoral or irrational. It argues that the very preconditions of intelligibility - logic, induction, moral obligation, personal identity, and rational inference - require the Christian God. On this account, atheists can reason, argue, and make moral judgements only because they inhabit a reality whose intelligibility is grounded in God, even while denying that ground.

This argument has rhetorical power because it shifts the issue from isolated evidence to the conditions of evidence itself. But its weakness lies in the enormous claim it has to establish. It is not enough to say that logic, morality, and induction require a ground. One must show that they require the specific ground of Christian theism, rather than necessary abstract truths, features of reality, rational norms, pragmatic indispensability, conceptual structure, or some other metaphysical account. The argument often moves too quickly from “atheists use reason” to “therefore Christianity is the necessary condition of reason”. That is a large bridge, and it is not crossed by declaring every alternative impossible.

There is also a circularity problem. The presuppositionalist may say that all ultimate systems involve circularity at the level of final authority. Perhaps. But if so, the Christian should not pretend to have escaped the difficulty while everyone else remains trapped in it. The question becomes which circularity, if any, is virtuous, illuminating, and disciplined by reality. That is a serious philosophical discussion. It is not settled by saying that the atheist must secretly be spending Christian capital whenever he uses a syllogism.

Christianity does not own reason or science

Nor is the history of reason, morality, and science reducible to Christianity. Logic has ancient Greek roots. Moral reasoning exists across cultures. Scientific method emerged from many streams: Greek philosophy, Islamic scholarship, medieval scholasticism, Renaissance mathematics, craft practices, astronomy, medicine, commerce, instrumentation, and institutional experimentation. Christianity played historical roles, both enabling and obstructive, as large civilisational traditions tend to do. But the claim that atheists cannot use reason unless Christianity underwrites it is not established by the fact that Christianity contributed to the history of Western thought.

Apologetics by amateur diagnosis

There is also a social version of the critique: atheists must be angry, arrogant, damaged, rebellious, immoral, lonely, or trying to justify some preferred behaviour. No doubt some atheists are angry. Some are arrogant. Some are wounded. Some believers are serene, thoughtful, brave, and morally serious. Others are fearful, vain, incurious, or cruel. Human beings vary. A worldview may shape a person, but it does not abolish temperament, history, intelligence, trauma, class, education, or character. Amateur diagnosis is not apologetics.

The atheist as theological prop

The deeper error in all of this is the confusion of atheism with the most useful caricature of atheism. The critic does not ask what atheists actually believe. He infers what atheists “must” believe from what his argument requires atheists to believe. The atheist becomes a theological prop: the despairing materialist, the secret God-hater, the moral subjectivist, the science-worshipper, the nihilist, the borrower of Christian capital, the creature supposedly unable to live by his own lights.

But atheism is not one complete doctrine. It is not a church, creed, sacrament, metaphysic, political programme, or moral theory. At minimum, it is the absence of belief in gods; in stronger forms, it is the belief that gods do not exist. Beyond that, atheists disagree as vigorously as anyone else. They disagree about ethics, consciousness, politics, metaphysics, aesthetics, realism, naturalism, determinism, and the best way to arrange a civilised kitchen. The variety is not an embarrassment. It is what one should expect once atheism is understood as a position on one question rather than an answer to every question.

Atheism does have consequences

This does not mean atheism has no consequences. Of course it has consequences. If there is no God, then certain religious accounts of meaning, morality, providence, judgement, prayer, salvation, and destiny are false. If there is no God, then human beings must think differently about death, justice, hope, and the foundations of value. The atheist should not pretend otherwise. But consequences are not caricatures. The fact that atheism removes one kind of foundation does not prove that it removes every foundation. The fact that it denies divine purpose does not prove that it denies all purpose. The fact that it rejects heavenly command does not prove that it rejects moral seriousness.

Many of the popular accusations reveal less about atheism than about the anxieties of the person making them. If someone thinks morality requires surveillance, meaning requires cosmic applause, and goodness requires reward or punishment after death, that is not a decisive critique of atheism. It is a revealing account of what that person thinks value needs in order to survive. The atheist may simply disagree. He may think moral life begins not with celestial enforcement, but with vulnerability, reciprocity, reason, sympathy, dependence, memory, and the fact that conscious creatures can be harmed.

Finite creatures under an indifferent sky

The atheist need not believe life is worthless. He need not believe morality is arbitrary. He need not worship science, hate God, deny beauty, abolish love, reduce persons to objects, or pretend grief is unreal because it has a biological substrate. He need only say that the God claim has not been established. Everything beyond that must be argued for, not attached to him as a compulsory doctrine.

The universe may not be arranged around us. Meaning may be local. Morality may be a human achievement rather than a heavenly dictation. Consciousness may be natural. Love may be mortal. Justice may have no cosmic guarantee. None of that makes these things trivial. It may make them more exposed, more precarious, and more dependent on us. That is not a small conclusion. It is a demanding one.

The more serious Christian philosopher is right to ask whether atheism can give a sufficient account of reason, value, consciousness, and hope. Those are real questions. But the atheist is equally entitled to ask whether theism explains them or consecrates them; whether it solves the problem or names it; whether it grounds morality or relocates mystery into God; whether it gives meaning or assumes that meaning must be bestowed from above.

The mature conclusion is not that atheism wins by default, nor that Christianity is intellectually negligible. It is that atheism does not entail the collapse so often advertised. It does not logically require nihilism, moral subjectivism, despair, scientism, or self-contradiction. Those claims require argument, and the better Christian philosophers know this. The poorer arguments merely assume what they need to prove.

Finite creatures may matter to one another without needing the whole cosmos to applaud. That may not satisfy those who want metaphysical splendour, final judgement, and eternal consolation. But it is not nothing. It is the difficult dignity of life without guaranteed witness: local, mortal, answerable, and still worth defending.

Cosmicist coda. Finite creatures do not become worthless because the universe fails to certify their importance. If anything, an indifferent cosmos removes the temptation to outsource responsibility. Meaning, care and justice become things conscious beings must make, protect and answer for themselves.

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