Why atheism fails

This could be a very long post. But atheism's abounding failures can be succinctly posted to three failures.

1) Atheism is bookless.

By that, I don't mean that it is without apologetic literature-- there have been many efforts to justify it, by many learned men. That is evidence for it's weakness. After millennia of variations of "God is not Great", atheism remains bookless. There is no systematic atheology, analogous to systematic theology. Theist philosophers such as Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Maimonides and Averroes and Aquinas and Bonaventure produced more or less systematic understandings of existence and of man's role in it using theist precepts.

There is no cogent systematic effort to explain the world using atheist precepts.

Atheism-- older than Christianity and as old as Judaism and the philosophy of the Greek world that were illuminated and given metaphysical coherence by the Church-- has no summa and no ways of demonstration of God's inexistence and of the source for nature's or for man's existence. Even developed philosophical systems such as Confucianism are not atheistic inherently; they are ethical systems that sidestep the deep metaphysical questions of God's existence and creation that are addressed in the theist systems.

Atheism lacks explanatory power. It lacks a body of metaphysics and natural philosophy and anthropology in which the presupposition of atheism sheds light on existence or nature or man.

2) Atheism is purposeless.

Atheism lacks any basis for morality. Atheists insist that atheists can be moral people, and of course they're right. Although trends certainly seem to suggest that Christians and other theists are more moral, there are countless atheists who are personally very moral, more moral than many Christians. Morality is written in the human heart. Even when we violate it, we nearly always know it.

But an atheist can only be moral by implicitly denying atheism.

If atheism is true, there is no transcendent morality. There is no objective morality, no genuine right and wrong. There is no actual ought. There is only is, which we naively take to be moral imperative, when it is merely a survival imperative.

Atheists claim that man makes his own morality, his own purpose. But if the universe has no purpose, nothing in it has purpose. And purpose is then everywhere an illusion.

Without God, there can be no morality. There can be only human opinion. Opinions alone, without transcendence, can be effective or useless, beneficial or destructive, but not right or wrong.

Genuine morality-- objective morality-- must transcend man, or it is no morality. Just strategy.

3) Atheism is giftless.

Boris Pasternak in Dr. Zhivago enraged the atheist Soviet Government by thinly veiled observations about the brutal soulless rule of atheism in power. He lamented the inevitable

... sanguinary swinishness of the cruel, pockmarked Caligulas, who did not suspect how giftless all oppressors are... Ages and generations breathed freely only after Christ.

State atheism has produced only pockmarked giftless Caligulas-- Danton, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Ceausescu, Honniker, Castro, Pol Pot. The Pan-atheon is a monument to unprecedented cruelty.

Where is atheism's critique of its pockmarked spawn? The only manifestation of atheism in state power is totalitarianism. No exceptions. For two centuries-- from 1789-- every atheist philosophy that has risen to power has brought hell to earth among the people under its boot. Atheist 'secular humanism' has one salient characteristic-- it never survives the rise of atheism. What begins with an edited Jefferson always ends with a pockmarked Caligula.

Atheists expend tons of ink denying the obvious link between atheism and totalitarianism. What is needed, rather, is humble soul-searching about the only consistent manifestation that atheism has taken in politics at the level of the nation-state-- the level where atheism has real power. Atheism in power has always been totalitarian.

                                                                          ...

To engage atheism with respectful discourse is to compromise with it, to participate in the lie. Sometimes, for rhetorical reasons or for humane reasons-- the desire to help our friends escape atheism's intellectual and moral and historical sewage-- such lying is perhaps justified. Respectfully engaging offal may be an effective tactic just to show it to be offal.

But I insist that reasoned debate with atheism is always a sham. A noble sham, perhaps. But we must not forget that atheism is nothing but lie. It is a pitiful self-refuting sewer of narcissism and ignorance and malice.

The only entirely honest response to atheism is contempt and derision.