Monroe County |
For several reasons, I could never be an atheist.
One reason is this: my belief in objective morality. As Walls and Baggett write,
"most all of the abuses, perversions, corruptions, and various instances of cruelty, inhumanity, and meanness are best identified for what they are and denounced for being as bad as they are only by holding fast to the category of objective moral truth, without which we lose the resource to renounce them robustly." (God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning, pp. 1-2. Oxford University Press.)
Morality simply makes better sense, constitutes a better fit, in a theistic world than an atheistic world.
If you are a Jesus-follower, and wish to study this in depth, here are some resources I find valuable.
- David Baggett and Jerry Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning.
- Baggett and Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality.
- Justin Brierley, Unbelievable: Why After Ten years of Talking with Atheists, I'm still a Christian, Ch. 3, "God Makes Sense of Human Value."
- David Baggett and Marybeth Baggett, The Morals of the Story.
- Christian Smith, Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can't Deliver.
- J. P. Moreland, Scientism and Secularism.
- James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedilesky, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality.
- R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge: Overcoming the Fact-Value Dichotomy.