10 Tough Questions Atheists Often Encounter

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

This is the title of a blog entry I found some time ago somewhere on the Web.? It is important to me because the whole point of The Infinite Staircase is to present a secular theory of reality that can provide a foundation for a values-driven life.? This is a role traditionally assigned to religion, and to take it on does indeed entail a number of tough questions to answer, ones that religions typically handle quite well. ??Here they are:

1. Origin of the Universe: How do atheists explain the origin of the universe without invoking a creator or first cause?
2. Existence of Consciousness: What is the atheist explanation for the existence of consciousness and subjective experiences?
3. Objective Morality: Without a belief in a divine source, how do atheists justify the existence of objective moral values and duties?
4. Fine-Tuning of the Universe: How do atheists explain the apparent fine-tuning of the universe that allows for life to exist?
5. Historical Evidence of Jesus: What is the atheist response to historical accounts and evidence of the life, teachings, and resurrection of Jesus?
6. Problem of Evil and Good: How do atheists reconcile the existence of both evil and good in the world without a belief in a higher moral order?
7. Meaning and Purpose of Life: In the absence of a transcendent purpose, how do atheists find meaning and purpose in life?
8. Consistency of Rationality: How can atheists account for the reliability of human reason and rationality in a universe devoid of purpose or meaning?
9. Miracles and Supernatural Events: How do atheists explain reported miracles and supernatural events that seem to defy natural explanations?
10. Origin of Objective Truth: Without a belief in a transcendent source of truth, how do atheists account for the existence and nature of objective truth claims?

Before we get into them, however, there are a couple of points I want to make.? The first is that I bridle at the binary distinction between theists and atheists.? There is a lot of spiritual experience that flows between the two, and to polarize the field into “Ins” and “Outs” is to sacrifice understanding on an altar of righteousness.? It just doesn’t help.?

The second is that a lot of the dialog between religious and atheist points of view is burdened with a kind of one-upmanship on both sides that is neither pleasant nor useful.? That is not my goal here.? The questions above, in my view, are totally legitimate, and pursuing answers to them is a worthy effort, regardless of one’s chosen life-narrative.? I want to use them to pressure-test an intentionally secular narrative in a spirit of genuine curiosity.? How do atheists answer these questions??

In that spirit, let’s turn to the first one—how can one explain the origin of the universe without invoking a creator or first cause?

The secular narrative here is a famous one—The Big Bang!? It claims that the universe, as we can observe it today, came into being around 13.8 billion years ago in a singular event.? Here’s how I describe it in The Infinite Staircase:

That is, in a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second, the universe of space and matter expanded by a factor of a billion billion billion—give or take! From that jump-start (they call it cosmic inflation), it has been expanding ever since. This universe, as best we can tell, consists of billions and billions of galaxies, each of which, like our very own Milky Way, contains billions and billions of stars, one of which happens to be our sun, around which orbits our Earth, a planet hosting a life form that, during its exceedingly brief existence, has somehow been able to figure all this out.

Now, I ask you, have you ever heard of any creation myth from any culture that is more astoundingly miraculous than that? Of course, being a secular culture, we don’t call it a miracle—we call it a singularity—but, I mean, really.

Of course, this still begs the question, who or what caused the Big Bang?? But I think the more salient point is to acknowledge that explaining something that happened 13.8 billion years ago is simply above our pay grade.? After all, as a species we might claim around ten thousand years of experience developing our language-enabled explanations.? That is less than one-millionth of the amount of time the observable universe has been around.? And the notion that there are billions of stars in our galaxy is mind-boggling enough without having to add that there are billions of other galaxies with their billions of stars as well.?

Narratives of cause and effect are simply not designed to cope with such numbers.? Of course, we can make stuff up, and we do, and that can serve any number of purposes, but we are imagining something that we really have no legitimate claim to understand.? What the astrophysicists have done, by contrast, is to extract their narrative from data from the last century or so, which shows that the universe is expanding.? They have extrapolated that expansion back into its past, leading to a point of convergence, although where that point could possibly have been no one can say since there was no space or matter at that time.? ?The math actually works remarkably well, but words are simply at a loss to explain

So, the answer to our first question is that atheists explain the origin of the universe as a singularity, meaning a single unaccountable event that we must simply accept as fact, for which the closest word in common parlance, in my view, is miracle.

That’s what I think.? What do you think?

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