Apologetics — What the New Atheists Borrow Without Acknowledging
Richard Dawkins is morally outraged. Christopher Hitchens was morally outraged. Sam Harris is morally outraged. This is worth pausing on, because outrage is not something a blind and purposeless universe can produce.
The New Atheism—the movement that crested in the 2000s with Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, and Harris’ The End of Faith—is not a philosophy of detached indifference. It is shot through with moral passion. Religion is evil. It causes harm. It is wrong. The tone is not merely descriptive. It is prosecutorial.
The problem is that on the terms the New Atheists have set, they have no grounds for that prosecution.
The Borrowed Capital Problem
If the universe is the product of blind, purposeless, undirected processes—if there is no God, no mind behind existence, no design and no designer—then there is no objective morality. There are preferences. There are social conventions. There are evolutionary adaptations that produce cooperative behaviors in social primates. But there is no “wrong” in any meaningful sense of the word.
Dawkins himself acknowledges this in River Out of Eden: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
And then he writes The God Delusion arguing that religion is dangerous and wrong.
This is the borrowed capital problem. To argue that something is truly wrong—not merely displeasing, not merely evolutionarily disadvantageous, but actually, objectively wrong—you need a standard that exists outside of the universe. You need a moral law. And a moral law requires a moral lawgiver. The New Atheists borrow the framework they need from the worldview they are attacking. They use the categories of good and evil to prosecute the source of good and evil. The argument collapses the moment you take the atheist premise seriously.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.
Romans 1:18–19, NASB1995
Paul says the knowledge of God is not hidden. It is suppressed. The atheist who argues with moral passion is arguing from evidence he refuses to acknowledge. He knows there is such a thing as wrong. He cannot account for that knowledge on his own terms. The very fire he uses to attack faith is fire he borrowed from the source he denies.
The Cosmological Question They Cannot Answer
The second major challenge to New Atheism is cosmological. Some physicists have proposed models in which the universe generates itself from a quantum vacuum—a so-called “something from nothing.” But a quantum vacuum is not nothing. It is a sea of energy with structure, governed by physical laws. The question has simply been pushed back: where did the quantum vacuum come from? Where did the laws of physics come from?
Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist—this is now the scientific consensus, grounded in the Big Bang and the thermodynamic evidence that points to an absolute beginning. Therefore the universe has a cause. That cause must be outside the universe, uncaused itself, and sufficient to produce all the matter, energy, space, and time the universe contains. That description fits the God of classical theism. It does not fit nothing.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1, NASB1995
The Bible’s first sentence is not scientifically naive. It is a precise metaphysical claim: before the universe existed, a being who is outside of time and space brought it into existence. Modern cosmology has confirmed what Genesis assumed: the universe had a beginning. The New Atheists have yet to produce a coherent explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. “We don’t know yet” is an honest answer; “nothing caused it” is not.
The Case the Resurrection Makes
Dawkins’ most common move against Christianity is to argue that miracles are improbable. He is correct that resurrections do not ordinarily happen. But the argument for the resurrection of Jesus does not require that resurrections are common. It requires only that this one happened—and the historical evidence is substantially stronger than the New Atheists acknowledge.
Four facts are accepted by the substantial majority of New Testament historians, regardless of their theological commitments:
- Jesus died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.
- His tomb was found empty on the third day.
- Multiple individuals and groups claimed to have seen him alive after his death—including a group of five hundred mentioned by Paul, most of whom were still alive when he wrote (1 Corinthians 15:6).
- The disciples were so convinced of the resurrection that they died for it—not as believers in a cause, but as eyewitnesses willing to face death rather than recant what they said they had personally seen.
The question is what best explains these four facts. Alternative explanations—mass hallucination, rapid legend development, theft of the body, the swoon theory—each fail on their own terms and fail to account for all four data points. The resurrection is the most historically defensible explanation for the evidence on the table.
And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.
1 Corinthians 15:17, NASB1995
Paul understood the stakes and stated them plainly. The resurrection is not peripheral. It is the load-bearing wall. If it happened, Christianity is true and the New Atheists have a serious problem. If it did not, Paul says Christianity deserves to be abandoned. He was willing to stake everything on a fact that could have been refuted in 33 A.D. by producing the body in Jerusalem. No one produced the body.
The God the Atheist Suppresses
Here is the pastoral point beneath the apologetic argument: the person arguing most loudly against God is still a person made in the image of God. Their moral outrage—even when misdirected—is a misfired form of something God placed within them. Their longing for justice, their sense that wrong things are actually wrong, their refusal to accept a universe of pure indifference—all of it testifies to the God they are suppressing.
In Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, “For we also are His children.”
Acts 17:28, NASB1995
Paul told the Athenian philosophers—pagan thinkers who did not recognize the God of Israel—that they were living and moving inside the very God they did not yet know. The New Atheist is in the same position. He uses the categories God built into creation to argue that God does not exist. He borrows the light to deny the sun.
The answer to New Atheism is not primarily a cleverer argument. Clever arguments matter, and the Christian can engage them without embarrassment. But the deeper answer is a patient, clear-eyed witness to the God who is already evident—in the structure of the universe, in the moral knowledge that will not stay suppressed, in the empty tomb that no one has ever explained away.
The God they resist is also the God who died to reach them.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist