The Gods of Atheism by Kenneth Westby

Atheists have always been a minority. In fact, until more recent times it was considered unintelligent to suppose there could be no god or gods. Cultures varied in the god or gods they held dear—from the sun, moon, and thunder gods of ancient paganism, to the animistic deities of darkest Africa, to the more sophisticated religions of the East, to the great monotheistic faiths of the Western world.

People would disagree or even fight over whose god was really God, but it was assumed that there was a god—or gods. How else could the universe, earth, life and all the observed cycles and powers be accounted for? Man was small compared to all the wonder about him and it was natural to assume some greater power (or powers) was at work and was behind the order and unexplainable "miracles" that are a part of daily life. How did little seeds produce plants and trees? How did new human life develop within the body? How did the planets and stars move about the sky? There were millions of such observations to which the only answer seemed to be that a power and intelligence greater than man was behind it all, and had designed it all.

Today we laugh at some of the silly notions the ancients had as they tried to explain the workings of nature. Yet within their limited thought-world (limited by scientific information not by intelligence), which varied by culture and knowledge, they knew there had to be powers at work greater than man. They did not assume an accidental, chance, or naturalistic origin to the ordered world they observed. Any such assumption would have seemed contrary to logic and common sense.

It is said man is a religious animal and that is certainly the case. He has good reason to be. The argument over God's existence is not one that can be settled by a supreme court composed of brilliant scientists. God's existence is a matter of faith, but it can also be logically inferred from the intelligent design of creation itself. The only argument should be: 1) who is the True God? and 2) what he is up to with man? The most comprehensive answers to these questions are what an intelligent religion should offer.

The Hebrew Bible says, "Only a fool has said in his heart there is no God." We can argue with that bold statement, but its logic is compelling. In the Judeo-Christian faith God is seen as the first cause of everything—the cosmos and all of creation. To believe that everything came into existence without God is to believe that things brought themselves into the highly ordered existence in which we find them. But there is no observable experience that highly sophisticated, intricately designed machines, buildings, or life forms have brought themselves into existence or materialized by accidents, blind chance and "naturalistic law."

It is evident that there are but two options to explain man and the cosmos:
1) A god created it;
2) Everything came into existence by some other way since there is no god.

Yet the universe, life, and man are of such immense complexity and marvelous design it is quite logical and intelligent to see a powerful designer behind it all.

If one came upon a beautiful house while walking in the woods and observed that it was finished with fine doors, windows, trim, tile roof, sidewalks, surrounded by landscaping, a patio, and furnished inside with beautiful chairs, fresh flowers on the tables, beds, soft music coming from various speakers, equipped with electronic appliances with LED clocks, quality lighting, and with a roast cooking in an oven, could one logically conclude that it made itself or somehow came to be by an accident of "nature," or just evolved to its present state over millions of years? For the walker in the woods to conclude the house was anything other than the result of intelligent design should make us all suspect he'd eaten too many strange mushrooms along the way.

Yet by comparison to a little sparrow watching our walker from the home's tile roof, such a beautiful house in the woods is unsophisticated and crude. Life forms like a sparrow are infinitely more complex than a modern house, an F-18 warplane, or the space shuttle.

Along comes the doctrine of evolution which attempts to answer the obvious conundrum: How did we get this spectacular creation of life and limitless cosmos without an Intelligent Creator/Designer? Charles Darwin's theory of evolution provided a desirable way out of the "God problem." His theory gave rise to a powerful rival to Christianity and Judaism. It proposed an attractive "superior" explanation to the origin of the species. It spawned a new god-less religion with various denominations called secular humanism, naturalism, rationalism, materialism, or scientific atheism.

As the first century apostles of Jesus established the Christian faith, nineteenth and twentieth century apostles of atheism spawned the religious isms listed above. Four "gods" of atheism stand out as pillars: Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. We will take a brief look at these men and the legacy of destructive isms thrust upon the world by their disciples—Hitler, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

Religions have their prophets. Atheism also has its prophets—the "gods of atheism" who are afforded great respect in academia. They have been cloaked in imaginary robes of sanctity and of a kind of infallibility that the pope could only envy."1

Charles Darwin

While Darwin is claimed by atheists to be the greatest scientist of the 19th century, Darwinism has been all but abandoned. His theories have been weighed and found wanting, nevertheless his naturalistic explanation of the origins of life has been embraced in virtually every corner of the scientific community. Darwin, above all others, provided the ammunition for skeptics to attack the Bible and the notion of a creator God. After Darwin, God became unnecessary.

Darwin was born February 12, 1809, the same day as Abraham Lincoln, into an upper-caste wealthy family with servants.

Charles Darwin was a decent man who hated slavery—and said so at the risk of controversy. He was a devoted husband and father. He was also a keen observer of animal life. His defects lay in a strong and subjective antireligious bias which seems to have been rooted in his childhood but became increasingly powerful as he grew older.2 His father, Robert, was a gifted medical doctor who hated medicine and is described by Charles as "the largest man I ever saw" (six feet, two inches tall in a day when most men were five-feet-six, and he weighed 345 pounds). His father was overpowering, domineering, coldly strict, and in Charles' words, "almost supernatural." Yet the brilliant doctor was helpless to save his wife from an illness that left Charles a motherless child. Biographers have noted that the young Charles was intimidated by his father and even hostile toward him. It is suspected that he transferred some of that antipathy toward his concept of God derived from his Christian exposure.

Robert brought his son into training for his medical practice, but Charles did not take to it. His father then decided Charles should be a clergyman since he didn't seem to be of any other use. His father wasn't religious but having his son become a clergyman was a respectable job in the caste-conscious society of pre-Victorian England. He studied for the ministry for two years and then quit to pursue his greater pleasure of wandering the countryside shooting birds and collecting beetles.

It was at this time in 1831 that young Charles signed on as a naturalist on the ambitious five-year voyage of the vessel Beagle. He didn't keep precise records of where he obtained the various species he collected, but upon returning to England he reviewed his notes and began to construct the beginnings of his theory of evolution (others of his time had preceded him—Charles Lyell, Alfred Russell Wallace—with various naturalistic proposals to explain life). His visit to the Galapagos Islands off the west coast of South America was key to helping him theorize how species could adapt, change, and even morph from one to another.

In Darwin's theory, a single species diverges into several varieties, then into several different species, through the action of natural selection.3 His term, natural selection, then became the universal solvent, like water, with which the origins of the life, in all its complexities and myriad forms, could be explained. Not everybody bought his explanations when his book The Origin of Species was published. He admitted to serious gaps and "problems" with his theory, but was committed to the idea that some force other than God must be responsible for life. Reading his biography, it is clear there were personal family resentments and anti-God attitudes that probably had more effect upon his embracing naturalistic evolution than any "evidence" he discovered on the Galapagos Islands.

Darwin spent the rest of his years trying to bolster his argument and answer critics. Unfortunately for him, they were years of continual depression and sickness allowing him only a few hours a day with which to work. His legacy is huge in that his theory took root and has animated modern science ever since—and not just science. The theory of evolution has powerfully influenced the fields of philosophy, psychology, politics, and just about every area of culture and society.

Thomas Henry Huxley

You could call him the first Agnostic, in fact, he was the first to coin the term "agnostic." For Huxley, agnosticism was an attitude of healthy skepticism, a tool of the intellect, essential to the working scientist. It has none of the stigma of "unbeliever" or "atheist," and in Victorian society that was important to be accepted socially.4 The distinction was mere camouflage. Edward Aveling, Karl Marx's son-in-law, once extended his friendship to Darwin as a fellow atheist. Darwin corrected him that he was an agnostic. Aveling later wrote, "Atheist is only Agnostic writ aggressive, and Agnostic is only Atheist writ respectable."5

T. A. Huxley was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" and was Darwin's most able mouthpiece. "The motivating force that drove Huxley was his feeling of animosity towards the clergy who, at that time, had far greater status than the scientist."6 His hostility toward religion and the clergy ran deep. The hell fire and brimstone preachers of the day came under his frequent attack as did the pompous rhetoric of authority figures in the church. We can sympathize with his criticism, but faulty or corrupt messengers do not render the message false. The message—the Bible—must stand or fall on its own merits.

Huxley claimed great respect for the Bible, but in order to attack the Christian religion of his day, he found it necessary to attack the veracity of Scripture. Darwin's theory proved the perfect vehicle to discredit the entire notion of miracles and supernaturalism which of course included creation itself and the miracles of Jesus. Since there is no need for supernaturalism (God), all things having come about through naturalistic mechanisms, the Bible is more myth than fact. If Jesus and the NT (New Testament) writers lied about miracles, why should one believe what else they teach?

The press of the day liked the challenge to the religious establishment and gave it great play. The debate was lively and the public were avid readers and followed it closely. Most of the great scientists of the time (Michael Faraday, James Maxwell, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, who were the true giants of science) did not accept Darwin's theory nor Huxley's defense of it. But the press fell in love with the theory, gave it credence and in time opposing views found it difficult to receive coverage.

Even Huxley didn't agree with all of Darwin's assumptions, warning him repeatedly that a theory consistent with the evidence would have to allow for some big jumps, something the gradualism of Darwin's evolutionary theory didn't allow. Darwin even posed the question to himself, asking Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all the nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined? 7

Once again, evidence and logic seem to have gotten in the way of his theory. But never mind, as Huxley used to ask the doubters in Darwin's time: What is your alternative? To answer the religious question of the human soul, Huxley invented a theory of consciousness which he proposed man shared with the animals. The theory was soon discredited but his vigorous attack on Christianity continued until his death.

Like Darwin, Huxley was plagued by life-long malady. "I suffered from occasional paroxysms of internal pain, and from that time my constant friend, hypochondriacal dyspepsia, commenced his half-century of constancy [sic] upon my fleshly tabernacle."8 His dyspepsia (indigestion) his biographers suggest may have been occasioned from his constant fear of death from "vapors" from a cadaver he had been exposed to as well as his fear of insanity since his father died in an insane asylum and two of his brother were crazy.

One peculiarity, Huxley spent his last years attacking the New Testament and one NT story in particular, the episode of the Gadarene swine (Mt 8:28-34; Mk 5:1-20). It's the story of a demoniac from whom Jesus exorcised a "legion" of demons into a nearby herd of pigs, which promptly ran off a cliff into a lake where they drowned. Huxley thought Jesus showed cruelty to animals and he further discredited the whole story by smugly noting that Jews, who ate kosher, would not be herding swine in any case. Huxley was no better theologian than he was a scientist as the Gaderene district southeast of the Sea of Galilee was a Gentile area where swine were a dietary staple.

In spite of his war against Christianity, his long suffering wife Henrietta, like Darwin's Emma, would not convert to agnosticism but remained a faithful Christian to the end. On his tomb Henrietta had inscribed these three lines:

Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep; For still He giveth His beloved sleep. And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Darwin and Huxley repudiated God, Jesus and the notion of a human soul, but they never deviated from the mainstream of Victorian morality. They actually believed, like modern liberals today, that educated people would continue to accept monogamy, mercy, and charity even without Christian faith and hope. Once God has been eliminated, however, his laws of morality soon follow. Huxley's famous grandson, Aldous Huxley, was a pathetic example of the abandonment of all standards. Instead of a believer in nothing as was his grandfather, he became a believer in everything including Hindu mysticism. A pioneer experimenter in hallucinogenic drugs, his last request as he lay dying was for a massive dose of LSD to ease his soul from his body.

John Koster notes: "There was a man, however, who realized the real social and philosophical impact of what Darwin and Huxley had "proved" in biology and physiology. He understood, more clearly than the two Victorians, that if God and Jesus and the immortal soul had been 'ruled out of order' in the court of ideas, all morality had been repealed at the same moment."9

That man was Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), the German philosopher who famously declared, "God is dead." He spoke of a coming new "superman," who like himself, was freed from God and religion and needed only to satisfy his own selfish desires. To this day he is highly regarded by the anti-God humanistic left for having given voice to the "new morality." He declared man, not God, the center of all things.

In his very popular and famous book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, he speaks of his Superman concept: You have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once ye were apes, and even yet man is still more of an ape than any of the apes....

The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!
I conjure you, my brethren, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners they are, whether they know it or not....

Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy: but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!10 To Nietzsche the earth—materialism—is everything. He could be honored as the spiritual godfather to the modern radical environmental movement. He mocked conventional morality and succeeded in laying the foundation for modern hedonism. His influence in literature is enormous. He was adored by the American skeptic and writer H. L. Mencken who like many intellectuals in both Europe and America regard him as the greatest of all philosophers.

His attitude toward women, however, should appall feminists who otherwise embrace his new morality. He regarded women as playthings: "Man shall be trained for war, and the woman for the recreation of the warrior." He also advised, "Thou goest to women? Do not forget your whip!"

Nietzsche doted on the music of Richard Wagner and apparently sought an even closer attachment, but Wagner was a promiscuous heterosexual and didn't want Nietzsche as a lover. The idea that he was either secretly or latently homosexual has a lot to recommend it. He was reared by women, his father having died when he was very young. He grew up with no male influence yet curiously developed a general hatred for women.

He was a syphilitic, having either inherited the malady, or more likely as biographers suggest, he contracted it either with prostitutes during his student days or from a several day episode traveling with soldiers in a railroad boxcar. Whatever it source, syphilis marked his life with its symptoms of occasional paralysis, and mood swings from depression to euphoria.

Nietzsche lost his faith in God as a youth and as an adult waged war against the Christian and Jewish religions. He was an anti-Semitic and wrote, "Christianity sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, or privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence." He regarded the values of Christianity and Judaism as chandala (mongrel) values.

In his book, The Antichrist, he writes, "We would no more choose the first Christians to associate with than Polish Jews—not that one even required any objection to them: they both do not smell good."11 If his snobbery and hedonism were his prime faults, he wouldn't rank a mention among the famous names I discuss. His great legacy is his well received assault on God and the Judeo/Christian or biblical morality that draws it authority from God. He didn't believe in good or evil yet elevated the will of man to the highest good. To this end he wrote and labored.

In one of his last letters he signed himself "The Crucified," perhaps he meant that he, the Antichrist, was suffering for his message. John Koster describes his pathetic end which is eerily similar to that of other famous sufferers of the atheist syndrome. For his last twelve years, he wandered around the upstairs rooms of his mother's house, completely psychotic and unable to speak coherently, while his sister, now widowed, struggled to build his reputation. Nietzsche's big break as an author came only after his insanity: People bought books by "the mad philosopher" out of curiosity.

...The prophet of the superman was in fact a syphilitic, a homosexual, and incompetent as lover, friend, and author. Nietzsche told people to "be hard" and "live dangerously." Throughout life he sponged off women, and was drug-dependent for his syphilitic and depressive maladies. He was, in the current vernacular, a wimp.12 Nietzsche introduced a radical humanism or naturalism that denied God and supernaturalism. Moreover, since Nietzscheism can justify no objective meaning for man's life in society it is the last stage of religious decay short of nihilism. The legacy of this man is the materialistic post-Christian culture of today's Europe.

Sigmund Freud

The last of the four gods of scientific atheism we have time to consider is the father of modern psychotherapy. Sigmund Freud (1848-1939) admired Darwin, Huxley and Nietzsche and advanced and added to their anti-God philosophy by his theories of human motivation and how the human brain works. Huxley cut open people and found no soul and decided that men were but machines and the soul-less physical brain alone explained any apparent uniqueness in man. Freud pried open the mind and found no soul but "found a theater and three dressing rooms for the id, ego, and superego." Since the master said it was so, it must be.

For Freud unrecognized sexual desires control most or all human actions. His biography suggests that he transferred his own rather strange sexual hang-ups to the whole of human kind. But before he came to his sexual theories, he attempted to achieve fame by promoting the value and delights of cocaine. He didn't discover it of course (it was brought to his Austria from the natives in the New World), but he was its publicist. He claimed it as good for just about everything and even sent some to his fiancé to put color in her cheeks. He also denied that it was physically or psychologically addictive.

Soon the negative and addictive properties of cocaine became known throughout the German-speaking world and medical opinion turned against it. Freud's first attempt at a world reputation ended in disgrace and in death or addiction for the poor souls who followed his advice. He then turned his focus to female hysteria (fainting spells)—a common malady among women in the Victorian era. The problem wasn't indigenous to being female, it had to do with the corsets, like body casts, that were required for eighteen-inch waistbands. The fashionable women of the day just couldn't get enough oxygen to remain conscious, especially when they became excited. It also weakened stomach and abdominal muscles making childbirth difficult. In the dirty hospitals the death rate for mothers was 10-25 percent. The peasants who didn't partake in the fashions avoided the problem. Female hysteria or fainting disappeared when styles changed.

For Freud the problem with women was sexual obsession together with a fear of sex. Fainting was just a symptom. Women in the 1800s had a good reason to fear sex given the high death rate for having a baby. Also, many women who had sexual fears charged their fathers or step-fathers with rape or attempted rape. Freud dismissed their complaints as untrue and postulated that they secretly wanted their fathers or uncles to have sex with them. He portrayed women not as victims, but as villains projecting their wish-fulfillment fantasies upon hapless men. Women were responsible for their own hysteria due to their fantasies and unquenchable desire for sex. An idea that Freud's society welcomed.

Freud also had men figured out. Boys growing up want to have sex with their mother and kill their fathers. At least that was the case with little Freud who tells of his incestuous attraction to his sensuous and young mother and his rivalry with his hated Jewish father. As he matured he came to hate his father's Jewishness and the Jewish religion. He wrote a book, Moses and Monotheism, attempting to destroy Moses and hack away at the Ten Commandments—and perhaps his own Jewish roots. His last major contribution was an anti-Semitic attack just as Hitler was launching his Third Reich.

He became obsessively afraid of dying and consulted occult parlor games to see how much time he might have left to live. As it turned out, he lived a quite long life of eighty-three years. The last sixteen were miserable as he battled the effects of jaw cancer. As a lifelong smoker he puffed twenty fat cigars a day. After painful surgeries he was fitted with a prosthesis to replace part of his face. He lived with constant depression.

When Hitler began to threaten Europe he left his four elderly sisters in Vienna to face the fate of Jewish Europeans and fled to England. He soon lost his vitality and asked his doctor for a lethal dose of morphine to put an end to his cancer-ravaged life.

Summary

The famous men we've discussed, Darwin, Huxley, Nietzsche and Freud, were instrumental toward ushering in the dead-end materialism that dominates much of Western culture. They and their followers twisted "science" into an attack on God and the Judeo-Chris-tian religion. Numbered among their disciples are the bloodiest murderers in world history. Adolf Hitler embraced a neo-Darwinism and gave the world genocide. Marx and Stalin based their theories or reigns of terror upon their version of scientific atheism.

There are many more names that belong in the rogues gallery of atheists, but these four must rank as the gods of atheism. The damage and carnage their anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-morality theories and philosophies have wrought is beyond our calculation. God, however, has been watching. For we will all stand before God's judgment seat. It is written: "'As surely as I live,' says the Lord, 'every knee will bow before me; every tongue will confess to God'" So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God (Romans 14:10-12).

Endnotes:

1. Koster, John P, The Atheist Syndrome, Wogelmuth & Hyatt, 1989, p 5.
2. Ibid., p 25.
3. Wells, Jonathan, Icons of Evolution—Science or Myth? Regnery, 2000, p 159.
4. Taylor, Ian, In the Minds of Men—Darwin and the New World Order, TFE Publishing, 1991, p 365.
5. Ibid., p 366.
6. Ibid., p 358.
7. Johnson, Phillip E., Darwin on Trial, IVP, 1991, p 46.
8. Koster, p 66.
9. Ibid., pp 81-82
10. Ibid., p 82
11. Ibid., p 97
12. Ibid., p 100
13. Ibid., p 104

Kenneth Westby is a director emeritus of the BSA and founder and director of the Association for Christian Development (ACD) and the Virtual Church. The ACD Web site can be found at www.godward.org.

TSS

January / February 2005 The Sabbath Sentinel