One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from G. K. Chesterton: “If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” I keep seeing it quoted on X, floating around in Substack notes, passed along like a clever bumper sticker.
Some of you saw me quote it a day or so ago.
Many read it and think “no God” means no Creator, no Creator means no humans, so atheists wouldn’t exist as humans without God.
That’s part of it. But Chesterton says something far more profound.
Strip out the very idea of God, not just the Being but the concept, and atheism has nothing left to define itself. It becomes nothing but ash. The whole of their secular religion only makes sense as a reaction to God. Both the person and idea.
You can’t build an identity out of rejecting the foundational something that was never there to begin with. If God doesn’t actually exist and the idea of him is really just made up, then there are is no atheism.
“So what? Atheists could just redefine themselves however they want.”
No, because without God, you can’t define anything. He’s essential. Here’s why…
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A Little Journey Through Ontology
Chesterton pulls straight from the ontological argument, first laid out by Saint Anselm in the Middle Ages, covered in chapter 9 of The Atheist Conversion Manual.
God is defined as the Greatest Conceivable Being, maximal in every way. Perfect. Transcending everything else in reality and grounding all of it. Spaceless, timeless, immaterial, intelligent, personal, powerful, unbeatable. Necessary.
That’s exactly how the Israelites, Jews, and Christians pictured him since the Old Testament. The Uncaused First Cause.
Anselm rightly argued that a Being than which nothing greater can be conceived has to exist in reality, not merely inside your head, because existing in reality outranks existing only as a mental picture.
A God who lived only in the imagination would fail to be the greatest conceivable Being. But since all humans can conceive of a Greatest Being of all beings, and have since the dawn of time, such a Being must be there and must exist in every possible reality.
So that you can understand Anselm’s argument isn’t mere mental games, I reframe it this way on pages 134-135 of the manual:
Reality has a necessary beginning
A necessary beginning requires a necessary pre-existent Being
Humans can conceptualize such a necessary pre-existent Being in their minds
A necessary pre-existent Being is necessary in mind and reality
A necessary pre-existent Being must exist or it isn’t necessary in mind or reality
Therefore, a necessary pre-existent Being exists
By “reality,” I mean this universe, based on the cosmological argument (chapter 7). The universe had a clear beginning point, so the universe must have a Cause. The beginning and the Cause are both necessary. And since the Cause pre-exists the universe, it must be wholly other from it.
The universe would also necessarily possess some (though by no means all) traits derived from the Cause since the Cause made everything.
Following Anselm’s logic, since such a Being is possible in mind and evident in reality, he must exist in every possible world, not just ours.
No atheist has ever managed to refute the ontological argument. To do so would be to deny maximal greatness, even though we all believe greatness real and achievable, or declare the whole concept of a necessary Being illegitimate while still leaning on ideas of “necessity” and “possibility” everywhere else in their reasoning.
But reason itself, which atheists worship so much, becomes impossible without necessity and possibility, all three of which (reason, necessity, possibility) have no place in a purely material, uncreated reality…
Matter Can’t Trust Itself
C. S. Lewis is the one who artfully articulated the contradiction between matter and thought.
Take away spirit and soul, and all that’s left is matter, bouncing around randomly, aimlessly, with no design and no order behind it. If that’s genuinely all thought is, chemical noise with no order and no purpose, then thought itself becomes untrustworthy because it is random chaos from atoms and neurons arranging themselves haphazardly and spurting the illusion of consciousness.
Atheists try to skirt the issue by arguing for emergent properties, that thought necessarily emerges from material interactions in the brain.
But that argument fails because it offers no validation for the immaterial abstractions of thought, reason, trustworthiness, necessity, possibility, or any others, nor can it explain how those abstractions could possibly arise from the material.
Atheists have to think of a valid alternative to material, and what is there? Energy? Energy just is. It doesn’t do anything apart from emit from sources, so in accordance with the theory, it too is an emergent property, one atheists think is eternal. But if it’s eternal, then it must have an eternal source, which can’t be the universe, so we’ve circled right back to God.
A materialist bridge from brain chemistry to inner experience has been theorized plenty of times and demonstrated exactly zero and emergent properties turn out to be no salvation.
Furthermore, cognitive faculties, according to atheistic evolutionary theory, are shaped only for survival and were never aimed at producing true beliefs. Only at keeping an organism alive long enough to reproduce. Therefore, any perceived beliefs are meaningless unless they have some alleged survival benefit.
What’s the benefit of believing in God if he doesn’t actually exist? What’s the benefit of atheism? And how do we know what a benefit is since beneficence is an immaterial abstraction itself?
Reasoning itself dissolves on atheism and requires God. So where did atheists get the notion that reason itself is a worthy idol?
I Think, Therefore I Might Be
Atheists get the idea of reason as the ultimate eternal starting point from none other than Rene Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.”
They argue that if you don’t think, then you aren’t actually a being.
That argument surfaces most bluntly in the abortion debate. Abortionists (mostly atheists and progressives) claim that babies in the womb are expendable because they lack personhood, which is defined as conscious awareness. Derived straight from Descartes.
A major problem with that (there are many, but we’ll focus on just one) is in history according to the Bible, and even the alleged history of evolution, if we go back far enough, there was a time with no humans, and humans are the only thinking beings. Animals, of course, have instinctual “thought,” but again, Descartes refers to actual conscious awareness. The ability to contemplate and ponder the cosmos.
There was a point where there were no humans, and therefore there were no thinking beings. Ergo, there was a time where there was no being, just substance. Yet, according to Descartes’ theory, beings are the only ones that are ontological. They also happen to be the only ones that can willfully create.
So where did the substance come from? Substance itself is thoughtless and inactive, and if it came first or just is, then nothing else would exist. Life can’t come from non-life. There would be no being. But there are beings, with conscious thought aimed outside the thinker, so there must be an ultimate Being beyond humanity.
And just like that…Anselm wins again.
To go against God is intellectual suicide.
Intellectual Suicide
Chesterton sees both arguments issued by Anselm and Lewis and lands on a stark realization.
Atheists are willing to erase themselves to erase God.
They don’t just look into the abyss. They dive in headfirst, laughing like maniacs as they vanish into oblivion.
Atheism can only exist if the idea of God exists, and ideas only exist inside conscious minds. Deny God, and you lose the idea of him along with any mind capable of containing it, which means you lose atheism too. Neither God nor the idea of God nor the atheist thinking about either one survives the fall.
Knock out the first domino and all the rest go tumbling down until you’re left with nothing but a heaping pile of rubbish.
But atheists and other humans obviously exist and obviously think, which means the mind capable of conceiving God exists, which means the Being that mind was built to receive must be real. He’s the necessary Being. And if the necessary Maximally Great Being (God) is real, atheism is false by definition.
All that packed into a single quote by a master thinker.
Atheism is one giant contradiction. Parasitic rebellion masquerading as pursuit for truth. Squashed like a bug by the eternal Maker.
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