Postmortem on the Apostate

And of course, these are the ones that hit the headlines, fill up newsfeeds and make big splashes. But there are many more “average-Joe” types that regularly declare the same on a daily basis all around the world. And if you’ve been in church for a while, I would guess you’ve seen it happen. Many believers experience it in their own home.

Perhaps it was “friends, aquaintances or family members who were coming to your church/youth group/Bible study ets., who began to come less often, until finally they stopped coming at all. Perhaps they turned hostile or just became distant to any conversation concerning God/the Bible etc.? . . . But now [just like the ones we all hear about in the media] they say they are an atheist.”1

I mean, on a basic, practical level, what happened?2 Answers in Genesis is a non-denominational ministry, so I’ll leave the aforementioned context up to you. But beyond that, let’s simply ask this question: What has to happen intellectually for someone who started with a profession of faith to declare atheism later ? What specifically do you have to believe to conclude that there is no God?

Head or Heart?

“Some Christians claim that intellectual barriers are not the major reason why people turn away from their faith and claim it is primarily a ‘heart’ issue.”3 But the fact is, many people have claimed it was intellectual barriers that caused them to reject belief in God, myself included. However, it’s true that many “atheists who were once connected with a church often point to certain hurtful events which they say caused them to turn away from God.”4

Many times, those “hurts” related to a church’s stance on biblical standards regarding sexual ethics, marriage, or identity issues, and many also say they just couldn’t understand how a loving “God could allow a loved one to die tragically, and so concluded He doesn’t exist.”5 Whether sincere or self-serving, “all of these stories have a ‘sin’ component to them, whether it was the person who was hurtful, the sin of the person turning away or the tragedy of death caused by sin.”6

Regardless, “once a person is motivated to jettison their faith [and embracing atheism], they need a logical way to back up their beliefs . . . to embrace their new worldview intellectually.”7 Many times, these are the same beliefs that caused them to doubt Christianity in the first place. So logically, what would they be?

The “Fundamentals” of the Atheistic Faith

Although atheists as a group aren’t monolithic in their beliefs, and every one of these folks we read about or know personally has their own story, “the journey from professing Christian to apostasy [atheism] must include certain intellectual steps (unless the apostate [atheist] just shuts down his/her thinking!)”8 All logically thinking atheists must believe the following three things:

1. Belief that God’s Word (the Bible) cannot be trusted as plainly written.
2. Belief in millions of years of time having occurred in the past.
3. Belief in biological evolution of some sort.9

Why? Well let’s start with number 1. “Since all atheists must have a way of explaining how they came into existence without God, [some form of] evolution is a requirement for that belief system.”10 Why number 2 (belief in millions of years)? Well, the story of “evolution (pond scum to people) cannot have occurred quickly, so a belief in millions of years [of earth history] is also required for atheism. And of course [number 3] atheists cannot take the word of God as plainly written because it claims to be the revelation from God, who they profess doesn’t exist!”11

These are the “fundamentals” for the atheistic faith. But do you want to know what is truly spiritually terrifying? The average 13-year-old child from a Christian home that attends public school believes all three of those things by grade 8. That’s right, statistics show that the average 13-year-old from a Christian home already believes the fundamentals of the atheistic faith, and they are ripe for apostasy.

But they aren’t the only ones. Sadly, the vast majority of Bible scholars, Christian professors, authors, and influential pastors also believe at least two of these points and are standing somewhere along the slippery slope to unbelief, whether they realize it or not!

Christians Embarrassed by the Bible

“Christians who do not accept Genesis as plainly written sometimes express embarrassment at us ‘unsophisticated’ Christians [like myself] who do.”12 In their seeming bid for intellectual credibility among academics, they profess that “in our modern scientific age, a belief in a plain reading of Genesis 1–11 (young earth, dinosaurs and man co-existing, a global flood, a talking serpent) is just too fantastic to believe.”13 They often go even further, claiming it creates intellectual barriers and stumbling blocks in non-believers, impeding our witness and bringing shame on the gospel.

“But what about the talking donkey in Numbers 22? What about the dead people that came back to life and the virgin that gave birth in the gospels? Secular ‘science’ doesn’t support those either, so which other parts of the Bible should we be ashamed of?”14 The fact is, for most Bible skeptics who are naturalists, when you tell them you sincerely believe a dead man came back to life, they already think you are crazy because they’ve accepted an atheistic, evolutionary view of life already. So compromising with evolutionary ideas only reinforces their view; it almost certainly won’t help them.

Most Christian Institutions Accept and Teach Atheism’s Core Beliefs

Answers in Genesis “is often attacked by other Christians or Christian organizations who do not hold to the biblical account of creation in the same way that we do. They sometimes characterize creationists as ‘alarmists,’ saying we should not make a big deal out of this issue [the age of the earth], and that we should just concentrate on ‘the gospel’ etc. Some have even tried to paint creationists as ‘anti-intellectual.’”15

“But let’s think about this. Any other stance on origins . . . (such as theistic evolution, day age theory, gap theory, framework hypothesis, progressive creationism, etc.) involves [accepting] millions of years and/or evolution.”16 And how does that relate to the three fundamental beliefs of atheists?

Well, “because the Bible does not support millions of years and actively teaches against it, a Christian who accepts that paradigm [step 2] cannot claim to believe in God’s word as plainly written [step 3] and believes that ‘science’ should tell Christians what the Bible means (‘science’ dictates their exegesis of scripture).”17

“As soon as a Christian accepts the first two requirements for atheism they are now intellectually ‘open’ to accepting the thirs requirement—evolution. After all, if they accept the secular [historical, not observable] interpretations of scientific data in one area (MOY), there is no logical reason not to accept such interpretations in other areas (evolution).”18

The Anti-Deistic Diagnosis

“Now [accepting] these 3 requirements do not automatically result in apostasy.”19 We know that due to blessed inconsistency, “there are many saved Christians who are evolutionists (therefore satisfying all the intellectual requirements for atheism)”20 yet are truly saved.

But of course, as we have all observed an increasingly rapid pace in which “many professing Christians who have taken these three steps eventually become consistent thinkers.”21 Just read some of the testimonies of the many famous “former Christians” we’ve discussed, and you’ll see that in addition to any other excuse they might use to justify their conversion to atheism, they came to realize that if millions of years of evolution were true, “they already have a way to explain all of existence without God, then why bother believing in God?”22

So we can conclude, although Christians who adhere to the fundamental beliefs of the atheistic faith might not always result in spiritual deadness, those who are spiritually dead that identify as atheists always have those three symptoms before they expire spiritually.

The Best Biblical Immunity

From an intellectual standpoint, belief in “biblical creation (founded in an understanding of presuppositional apologetics [and biblical authority]) is one of the best immunizers against the atheistic worldview.”23 Although the Lord’s ways are far higher than ours, and we may not have a full understanding of how all things work salvifically, Scripture is clear that we have a biblical mandate to have a reasoned defense of our faith (1 Peter 3:15) and that we should use that to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5 ESV).

An intellectual defense of the faith (apologetics) is actually more for the church than for the world, as it keeps believers from error. “And far from being a hindrance to the Gospel, it is actually one of the ways the Lord uses to win people to Himself, as many have testified.”24