I will start this article by a quote from Claudia Pavonis which says, “How is it that a man borne from nature, can use his intelligence to somehow come to the conclusion that the nature he is borne from, is unintelligent? This is the very definition of an oxymoron.” and a quote from Isaac Newton which says, "In the absence of all other evidence, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence." As these quotes suggest, the evidence for God, Creation and Intelligent Design is so obvious that denying it will reduce one's worldview to absurdity; my main goal in this article is to quickly demonstrate that God must exist in order for a naturalist/atheist to conclude that He doesn't; therefore, atheism/naturalism is a self-refuting worldview or position to argue from. In other words, atheism is a worldview that self-destructs, very much like Islam does, as I showed in my previous article. Atheists like to make it look like that they are somehow on a neutral ground and encourage theists to get on their airplane in order to argue for the existence of God, and many theists fall for this trap; as a result, no matter how they argue, they will end up in the unbelievers' destination. But the real neutral ground is where both parties of the debate acknowledge the existence of God, otherwise, no one can make knowledge claims or prove anything as I will demonstrate in my article.
It's quite obvious that in order to reason or reach a certain conclusion about something, first we need to have the ability to reason; this ability is usually referred to as 'intelligence' or 'intelligibility'. If nature is all there is, and there is no intelligent design behind it, then logically speaking, our thoughts must be bound to the laws of nature, and we can't possess libertarian free will, let alone intelligence or the ability to reason. As a result, our thoughts and convictions are just as valuable as the chemical reactions that we see elsewhere in the nature! Put it another way, if there is no God, then all that exists is time and chance acting on matter; if this is true, then the difference between my thoughts and an atheist's thoughts corresponds to shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically; this means that you do not hold to atheism because it's true, or the neutral position to argue from, but rather from a series of chemical reactions in your brain that you cannot control or change; it's just natural for you to fizz that way and for me to fizz this way. As the famous saying says, life would become a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and signifying nothing. This is why the majority of people believe that there's a God and there's more to life than meets the eye, and their reaction to atheism is, "But, without God everything becomes meaningless?" Maybe they can't articulate themselves well enough to demonstrate why without God everything becomes meaningless, but they intuitively get it. This really isn't that difficult to understand; in fact refusing to understand this would require a great amount of effort, both intellectually and emotionally which I don't think would be healthy at all. Most atheists that I have talked to are either willing to acknowledge the truth of what I'm saying, or are unwilling to even have a debate about their epistemology or foundation of knowledge and truth or have gone too far in suppressing the truth that are willing to even deny the existence of truth and absolute knowledge and claim relativism, yet go on and make knowledge claims, and seem to be unable to recognise the clear contradiction that lies at the very foundation of their worldview; interestingly enough, their reaction is very similar to Muslims' reaction, after you demonstrate to them why their position is self-refuting and how their worldview self-destructs, they will either get angry and walk out on you, or will keep trying to change the subject. And of course it's understandable; people usually feel threatened by a sound argument that seems to have the potential to change their mind about something they don't want to change their mind about, so they choose to ignore it and refuse to think or talk about it; this is the very definition of cognitive dissonance.
Now atheists might turn around and say, “This is a strawman definition of Atheism. Atheism is not a worldview. It's just a lack of belief in God, gods or the supernatural, because there's no evidence for them, and your argument for the existence of God is from ignorance; you're saying I don't know, therefore God. It's just another god-of-the-gaps argument formed differently. You're also trying to shift the burden of proof. How typical...” This would be a huge strawman, and a very dishonest response or reaction to what I'm trying to demonstrate, but I will still try to address it. First of all, it doesn't matter how you define atheism; an atheist is living his life according to a “belief” that there is no God; it's how they view the world, which makes it a worldview. They might say that their worldview allows for God to exist and they're open to the evidence, but that's not true because they interpret the evidence based on their atheistic presuppositions which is always going to lead them back to atheism. Also, I'm not arguing from ignorance at all; I'm arguing for the impossibility of the contrary, to demonstrate that atheism is a worldview that self-destructs. In order for an atheist to refute what I'm saying, they need to demonstrate how their current worldview can account for intelligence or intelligibility; they can't do that and they know it. In fact, they're the ones arguing from ignorance by assuming and presupposing things that can never be justified according to their worldview; if you squeeze them hard enough and try to reduce their logic, you will see that their epistemology or their foundation for knowledge is based on a bunch of question-begging assumptions that can never be justified according to how they view the world. Finally, this is not shifting the burden of proof in any shape or form; burden of proof presupposes truth, and a way of knowing the truth or proving it, which requires intelligibility at the very least; something that cannot exist in an atheistic worldview. Now if you're an atheist and you understand this argument, then you have no choice but to abandon your current worldview and start looking into deistic or theistic worldviews with the belief that God or some form of the supernatural is not only real, but is a necessary precondition for intelligibility, otherwise even your ability to reason would be suspect, and you have no reason to trust your cognitive faculties in order to seek the truth.
Another common way that atheists try to get around this type of apologetics which is usually identified as presuppositional apologetics, in case you'd like to learn more about it, is that they will say something like this: "Okay, fine. I can't account for logic, intelligibility or rationality, but neither can YOU! I can't know the truth, but neither can YOU!" This is the tu-quoque fallacy; in other words, by doing so they're cutting their own feet, and basically admitting that debating is pointless because there's no such a thing as truth(which itself is a truth claim) or that if there is a truth, we can't know it(which is yet another truth claim) and they're most likely not going to see the contradictory claims that they're making unless you point them out. Other than the fact that by doing so, they're committing a logical fallacy, and refuting themselves over and over again, they have to be intellectually dishonest to say that an all-knowing Creator cannot reveal the truth to us such that we can know the truth and that appealing to an omniscient God doesn't rescue us from viciously circular reasoning that uses question-begging assumptions based on blind faith, as its bedrock and foundation for seeking knowledge and truth.
To recap, it's very easy to get the atheists to admit that according to their worldview, morality is subjective; in fact, most of them, if not all of them, already admit that. With a little bit of more effort, we can help them see that according to their worldview everything is subjective and a matter of opinion and no one can prove anything. Psalm 14:1 says, "The fool has said in his heart: 'There is no God.'" and Proverbs 18:2 says, "Fools find no pleasure in understanding but only delight in airing their own opinions." and finally Proverbs 26:4-5 tell us how to answer the fool, which is basically what I'm trying to do here; instead of allowing the conversation to continue based on our opinions, I try to demonstrate the folly of denying God. There's really nothing left to add here. I'd like to finish my article with this great video made by David Wood, from acts17 apologetics. His argument is for atheists who try to justify their reasoning by appealing to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, random mutation and natural selection. It goes something like this: “Many atheists believe that argumentation can prove that God doesn't exist. But if Naturalism is true, human reasoning ability is unreliable on a fundamental level and can't prove anything, let alone theological or metaphysical claims. Hence, Naturalism is self-refuting, for it undermines any confidence we might have in our ability to defend it. If we are to trust our reasoning ability, it must be grounded in something other than random mutation and natural selection. Theism offers such a foundation.”
