The Futility of Religious Debate with Unbelievers

I remember a conversation I once had with a fellow student who lived in my university dormitory. We were talking about a conversation he had had with another student late one night. My friend, a Christian, was trying to defend the fundamental principle of theism, while his conversant, an atheist was trying to defeat it. Back and forth they argued for hours. My friend said that on several occasions in their debate he had laid out such a logically impeccable train of arguments that they were very close to concluding that the existence of God, while not exactly provable, was far more likely than His non-existence. Every time that my friend and his conversant began to close in on a strong argument in favor of theistic faith, however, his conversant would quickly lead the conversation off away again on some tangential concept, as though trying to derail it before he was forced to admit the strength of my friend’s arguments. After several hours of fruitless discussion, in the wee hours of the morning, they had reached exhaustion and the debate sort of fizzled out. My friend turned to his atheist companion and asked very simply, “Isn’t the real reason you reject the idea of God is simply that you want to make choices without any authority figure telling you what is right and wrong?” Surprisingly the atheist responded, “Yeah, that’s about it.”

My friend concluded that the majority of atheists and, I would add, even spiritualists who reject an authoritarian and personal God in favor of a more pantheistic concept do so not because of any real philosophical issue they have with theism, but more because they are proud and willful and choose a belief or non-belief that allows them to justify making choices without reference to any concept of universal right or wrong. They are alright with defining their own idea of right or wrong, or with subscribing to some general concept of natural law, provided that it is not morally binding and does not proceed from a “Father in Heaven” or “Creator God”. That way, they only have to answer to themselves. The reason they still appeal to some concept of natural good and evil is that it permits them to justify anger over the choices of others that hurt or annoy them, without reference to some universal standard that would bind their enemy to moral accountability, but would similarly bind them as well.