“A little science makes you an atheist, but in-depth knowledge of science makes you a believer in God.” – Louis Pasteur
The Myth of Neutrality and the Hidden Faith
Few today realize how prophetic Pasteur’s insight was, because beneath the surface of modern atheism lies not evidence but faith — cleverly disguised as objectivity. Atheists often pride themselves on being the champions of reason — yet their worldview begins with unreason. Every worldview — whether dressed in religious robes or lab coats — requires faith. The question isn’t whether you believe, but what you believe about the things you can’t prove.
We all live by a worldview — a framework that answers life’s most fundamental questions: Where did we come from? Who are we? Why are we here? How should we live? And where are we going? Whether you’re a Christian, a Buddhist, or a naturalistic atheist, you must answer those same five questions. Atheism, despite claiming neutrality, is no exception. It is not the “absence” of belief; it’s a metaphysical system built on unprovable assumptions about ultimate reality — and therefore, requires faith. Ironically, the worldview that began by claiming to champion reason ends by undermining it.
Defining Naturalism (The Atheist’s Starting Point)
At the heart of atheism lies philosophical naturalism — the belief that matter, energy, and the laws of physics are the uncreated, eternal, and self-existent foundation of all that exists. This, of course, stands in sharp contradiction to modern cosmology, which reveals the universe had a beginning — a point where time, space, and matter came into being. Naturalism, by definition, denies anything beyond the material world, including God, souls, or even a mind distinct from the brain (and technically morality, altruism and many other immaterial realities we experience every day).
Then there’s methodological naturalism (MN), the rulebook of modern atheism. It insists that all explanations — even for ultimate origins — must appeal only to material causes. But here’s the catch: this is not an evidence-based conclusion. It’s a philosophical assumption — one that bars intelligent or supernatural explanations before the investigation even begins. In other words, naturalism rigs the game before the first experiment is run, by insisting on material and natural causes for everything (including the immaterial and supernatural).
That’s not science; that’s circular reasoning masquerading in a lab coat.
I. Atheism’s Unprovable Axioms: Explaining the Uncaused Cause
Atheism rests on a series of beliefs it cannot prove — and yet demands everyone else accept as “settled science.” Ironically, it requires blind faith in material causes that are logically and physically incapable of explaining ultimate origins.
A. The Origin of the Universe (Matter Arising from Non-Matter)
The Big Bang confirmed what Scripture has said all along: the universe had a beginning. All of time, space, matter, and energy came into being at once — “the universe exploded into existence out of nothing.”
But naturalism faces an impossible dilemma: the cause of the universe must exist outside of the universe itself, since no effect can precede its own cause. Natural laws didn’t cause the Big Bang, because natural laws began at the Big Bang. So who — or what — did?
Atheists often retreat into the vague language of “quantum fluctuations” or multiverse speculations or even mysterious floating mathematical matrices in nothingness, but these diversion tactics just push the question back yet another step. You still need a cause for the thing doing the fluctuating or whatever invented these mysterious matrices. Saying “the universe created itself” is as nonsensical as saying “a book wrote itself.”
To claim that “nothing” somehow produced everything is not science — it’s magic without a magician. It’s a fairytale. It’s nonsense.
Logic demands a First Cause that is uncaused, eternal, and transcendent — something outside of time, space, and matter. Since naturalism denies anything beyond the universe, it can never provide a causally adequate explanation for the universe’s beginning.
B. The Origin of Life (Abiogenesis and Information)
Even if we grant the universe’s existence, naturalism immediately runs into another brick wall: life.
The simplest living cell contains the informational equivalent of over 1,000 encyclopedias — encoded, stored, and executed with machine-like precision. DNA is not random chemistry; it’s language, instruction, and logic — all hallmarks of design.
Our uniform and repeated experience tells us that information is always derived from intelligence. Every time we find code — from computer software to Morse signals — we know it came from a mind. And yet naturalism insists the most sophisticated code in the known universe (DNA) somehow wrote itself by accident. That’s not “following the science”; that’s ignoring every single instance of what science and evidence has ever revealed.
Even Nobel laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA and a committed materialist, admitted:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.”
When your own theory leads you to words like miracle, maybe it’s time to reexamine your assumptions.
Naturalists appeal to “abiogenesis” (the formation life from non-life) but this has never been observed, replicated, or logically explained. It just… magically happened… so please don’t question it. Even the famous Miller-Urey experiments, long touted as proof that life could form spontaneously, actually demonstrated the complete opposite. They used an artificially controlled environment that didn’t fit theories of early Earth, and their results only showed how impossible the process would be naturally. It’s like proving you can bake a cake only by starting with a fully stocked bakery.. and still failing.
Yet rather than rethinking the premise, naturalists doubled down — turning methodological materialism into dogma and recasting faith in blind chance as “science.”
II. The Illusion of Conflict: Science and Intelligent Design Are Not Incompatible
We’ve been told that “science and religion are at war.” But that narrative isn’t history — it’s propaganda. The truth is, modern science was built on the belief that the universe is rational, ordered, and intelligible — because it was designed by a rational, orderly, and intelligent Creator.
A. Science Built on Theistic Foundations
The early pioneers of modern science — men like Newton, Boyle, Kepler, and Pascal — didn’t see their work as competing with God; they saw it as thinking God’s thoughts after Him. They assumed the universe could be studied precisely because it was the creation of a rational Mind, and that the human mind, made in God’s image, could eventually understand it.
Science, rightly understood, isn’t a search for materialistic explanations. It’s a search for true explantations. Newton didn’t try to exclude God from his equations — he marveled at the laws He had written.
Truth is absolute — and if Christianity is true, science and faith cannot be at odds, because both come from the same Author.
B. Intelligent Design Is Scientific
Intelligent Design (ID) doesn’t start with Genesis; it starts with data. It uses the scientific principle of inference to the best explanation — the same reasoning used in archaeology, forensics, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
When we find information, irreducible complexity, and purpose, we infer an intelligent cause — not because we’re religious, but because that’s where the evidence leads. The only reason ID is rejected by some is because methodological naturalism forbids it by definition.
If your definition of “science” excludes intelligent causes from the start, of course you’ll never find one — but that’s not discovery; that’s dogma.
III. Dogmatic Admissions: Rejection of Intelligence by Force
For all the talk of “open-minded inquiry,” leading atheists and naturalists have made some stunningly candid admissions about their philosophical bias. Many freely acknowledge that they reject intelligent causes — not because of evidence, but because their worldview simply won’t allow it.
A few confessions worth noting:
That’s not following the science — that’s close-minded bias and philosophical stubbornness.
When a worldview must remind its adherents to ignore the appearance of design, it’s not science anymore; it’s creed enforcement. And when dissenting scientists are silenced or shunned for questioning Darwin, we’ve officially replaced reason with religious zeal — just in a different denomination.
As one observer put it, modern materialism has “priests in lab coats and excommunication by peer review.”
The Cost of Absolute Materialism
If materialism were true — if our minds are just chemical reactions in skulls — then reason itself collapses. Because if thoughts are determined by physics rather than logic, then reason itself dissolves. Under naturalism, truth is just neural noise. Yet, atheists must rely on rational thought to argue their case — a self-defeating paradox if ever there was one. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.”
In the end, atheism asks you to place blind faith in chaos — to believe that nothing became everything, that mindless matter produced mind, and that logic emerged from the illogical. Christianity, by contrast, asks you to trust that intelligence preceded information, and that reason itself points back to a rational Creator. The real divide isn’t between faith and reason — it’s between faith in blind materialism and faith in the Intelligence behind it all.
And as Douglas Wilson memorably told atheist Christopher Hitchens, “Given your premises, you will have to come up with a different reason for rejecting Christ as you do. But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.”
