Welcome back to our series based on Josh McDowell’s best-selling book, More Than a Carpenter, in which Josh shares the historical evidence for the divinity of Christ, and how Judeo-Christian standards have long benefitted the world.
Modern atheists, however, assert that religion is the bane of human existence … that science has disproved God … and that society will flourish when atheism is embraced. Really? Let’s discuss!
Is Life Better With Atheism?
Atheism is not new. About 1,000 years before Jesus Christ walked the earth, King David described a person who says in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1). There have always been people who deny the existence of God, but recent polls indicate that U.S. adults increasingly identify as atheist or agnostic. This is due, partly, to atheist influencers receiving a warm welcome in classrooms and the media. But it’s also due to Christians being less committed to actively living out their faith.
Per a December 2021 article by Pew Research Center, the religiously unaffiliated population in the U.S. is 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago and 10 points higher than a decade ago. About three-in-ten U.S. adults are now religiously unaffiliated. As more U.S. youth are being raised by non-religious parents, they are easy marks for atheist claims.
“The latest cognitive research,” states University of Kent Research Fellow Lois Lee in her article Why Atheists Are Not as Rational As Some Like to Think, “shows that the decisive factor is learning from what parents do rather than from what they say. So if a parent says that they’re Christian, but they’ve fallen out of the habit of doing the things they say should matter – such as praying or going to church – their kids simply don’t buy the idea that religion makes sense.”
Another report states that about 40 percent of U.S. atheists are between the ages of 18 and 29, and 37 percent are between 30 and 49. Millennials and Gen Z are the most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse generation to date.
The influence of modern atheist authors such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens has spread far beyond the publishing world. Their goal: eradicate any rational grounds for religious belief. In their view, Christianity poisons society.
It’s not a stretch to say that contemporary atheists celebrate the death of God. They hold zero tolerance for religious faith. It must go. The sooner, the better. They assume, notes Professor John Haught of Georgetown University, that we “can just drop God like Santa Claus without having to witness the complete collapse of Western culture — including our sense of what is rational and moral.”
Many have bought into the argument that Christianity is a dangerous relic that needs to go. But if we do a side-by-side comparison of atheism and Christianity, will we find that banning God and Judeo-Christian standards from society is a good thing?
Is life better with atheism? Let’s discuss further in our next post when we look at the atheist claim that atheism is more reasonable than Christianity.
Jesus: He’s More Than a Carpenter!
> FREE download: Read the first chapter of Josh’s bestseller, More Than a Carpenter. You can buy the book here.
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