Sometimes Christians are accused of lacking the courage of their convictions. “If it were a crime to be a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” is one version of that.

Okay, let’s grant that some truth lurks in that question for many professing Christians. But are Christians the only ones guilty? How about atheists? If God’s followers fail to live up to their teachings, how about His deniers? How many atheists have been willing to live out the natural conclusions of their doctrine?

Not that there aren’t exceptions. In a forthcoming book, Darrow Miller gives print space to one (rare) honest atheist:

We were opposed to morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. (Aldous Huxley, Confessions of a Professional Free Thinker)

Maybe another honest atheist is “Dr.” Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist whose clinic included “the remains of old placenta and fetuses” and was described as “reeking of urine and feces from the cats that wandered freely through the building, echoing with the screams of women forced into labor and then abandoned for hours.”

The public is horrified at the story (the worst details of which we have omitted). And horror is the right response. But only if there is a moral, personal God who made man in His image as a creature of moral responsibility. If no such God exists, if man is nothing more than an animal of longer evolutionary development, why should anyone shudder at anything Kermit Gosnell did?

Indeed, Gosnell himself was reported to have been “a little befuddled at his arraignment on January 20. … He didn’t understand … the first-degree [murder] charges for the deaths of seven babies delivered alive and then killed in his clinic.” Isn’t his confusion consistent with an atheistic worldview?

Darrow’s book will point out that

The biblical paradigm affirms that people are made in the image of God, thus life is sacred. It follows that policies and parties grounded in the Judeo-Christian worldview seek to protect human life. Atheistic materialism, on the other hand, sees human beings simply as animals; the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest prevails. Such a paradigm leads inevitably to abortion: an adult has the power (and deserves the right) to end the life of her weaker baby. From this derive policies, parties and laws that support abortion.

– Gary Brumbelow

Print this page