By John Clayton

Of all the lessons that I present concerning the existence of God and of all the material that I try to make available to people to learn about God’s existence, the present lesson, “Why I Left Atheism,” is the lesson in the series that I frankly do not like to present. I guess none of us like to look back in our lives to a time when we made poor judgments and foolish mistakes–when we took rather really idiotic positions–and admit this, especially to people we are not well acquainted with. I present this lesson, however, because it is my fervent hope and prayer that perhaps by exposing my mistakes and by pointing out the things that were a part of my early life, some who might be following the same paths (to a greater or lesser extent) might not make those same mistakes. Someone once said that nobody is totally useless; if we cannot do anything else, we can at least serve as a bad example. That is sort of my situation. I am hoping that by presenting these materials and telling you something about my early life, some of you may be able to recognize the lack of wisdom and perhaps the poor judgment that is involved in rejecting God and living a life that demonstrates such a rejection.

Most of the time when I speak to religious groups or to people who believe in God, someone will ask me somewhat incredulously, “Well, were you really an atheist? Did you really not believe in God?” I want to start by asserting that the answer to that question is a very affirmative “Yes.” At one time in my life, I was totally and firmly convicted that there was no such thing as God and that anybody who believed in God was silly, superstitious, ignorant, and had simply not looked at the evidence. I felt that believers in God were uneducated and were just following traditions, superstitions, and things that really made no sense to a person who was aware of what was going on around them. Of course, that kind of life and conviction led me to do and say things and to be something that was really very unpleasant. I lived a life that was immoral and which reflected a lack of belief in God. I lived in a way that was very self-centered and that satisfied my own pleasures and desires regardless of whether or not other people were hurt in the process of what I was doing. In the process of doing this, I did a lot of things that affected me through my whole life. It is because of this that I present these materials hoping that perhaps some of you will not make the mistakes and suffer the consequences that I have suffered. I cannot clearly remember all of the events that took place or the proper sequence of events because I was not taking notes. I never expected that I would be trying to recall these things, much less tell someone else about them. Still, I can recall in a general way much of what happened, and I am very sure of the concepts. The concepts are what will be most useful to you.

I guess the reason that I was an atheist is the same reason that many of you are believers in God if you are. That was because I had been indoctrinated in that particular persuasion. My background, the variables that were exposed to me as a child, led me very strongly in that direction. Just as many of you believe in God because your parents believe in God and because they instilled this belief in you, I also questioned, challenged, and rejected God because that was the kind of indoctrination that I received as a child. I can remember my mother saying to me as a child something like, “Do you really believe there is an old man, floating around in the sky, blasting things into existence here upon the earth? Do you really believe that crummy looking structure on the corner could be something beautiful called ‘the church?’ Do you really believe that there is a hole in the ground that I am going to be thrown into and burned eternally if I do not live just the way some preacher thinks I ought to?” Of course, I could not conceive of these things as a child and did not know enough to realize they are not what the Bible teaches. Consequently, I came to believe that anybody who believed in God was just silly, superstitious, ignorant, and unlearned. You may wonder how it would be possible for a person coming out of this type of background and kind of learning situation to become a strong believer in God today, devoting his life to trying to help people to understand that there is a God in heaven and that the Bible is His literal and verbally inspired Word. It is the purpose of this booklet to try and point out at least some of the things that entered into my acceptance of God, Jesus Christ, and the Bible as God’s Word.

My high school career was one in which I grew quite rapidly academically. I enjoyed science and decided that I wanted to be a scientist of some kind. I entered Indiana University majoring in the field of physical science. It was actually at this point that one of the great changes that occurred in my life took place. I enrolled in a course in astronomy at the feet of one of the great astronomers of our day. In that particular course, we were studying the problem of origins–the creation of matter from nothing. As we discussed this particular subject, we went into all those theories that are in that particular material. We talked about the big-bang theory, the quasistatal theory, the continuous generation theory, the planetessimal theory, etc.

Click here for the full article.

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By Craig Blomberg, Ph.D.

At the “Earnestly Contending” Apologietics conference at New Life Church in Smithfield, RI, this weekend, Professor Dr. Gary Habermas of Liberty University, an internationally known expert on the resurrection of Jesus, reported on a forthcoming work of Richard Bauckham, prolific New Testament scholar for many years at the University of St. Andrews.  In it, Habermas explained, Bauckham builds on research by evangelical writer Larry Hurtado and atheist historian Gerd Ludemann, both of whom have argued that belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus must have emerged within two or three years of the death of Jesus (whether or not one believes it actually happened).

The argument goes like this.  1 Corinthians 15:3-6 contains, in credal form, a list of the eyewitnesses to the resurrection of Jesus.  By including reference to Jesus’ crucifixion and burial, Paul makes it clear he is talking about bodily resurrection.  But verses 1-2 describe that this is information that Paul passed on just as he had received it, using verbs that were technical terms for the transmission of oral tradition.  When would Paul have first learned this information?  Almost certainly as one of the very fundamentals of the Christian faith taught him when he first became a follower of the Risen Jesus–perhaps by Ananias who instructed him while he was still temporarily blind, in Damascus, after the Risen Christ appeared to him en route.

But when one compiles the most probable dates of the relevant events, based on Paul’s own information in Galatians 1-2, if Jesus was crucified in A.D. 30, the most likely date, then Paul’s conversion must have come no more than two years later, in 32.  (See any standard conservative New Testament introduction for how the dates are computed).  But for Paul to have been given an already established creed including resurrection witnesses, known not just in Jerusalem but also in Damascus, some time must have already elapsed for this foundational information to have been crystallized in this form and become widely known in the various locations believers lived and become widely agreed on as the kind of information to be passed on to each new convert.

Ludemann, the atheist, says this means within one to two years from Jesus’ death, it was widely agreed on that Christ had been bodily resurrected.  Bauckham, according to Habermas, apparently moves that date back to within about one-half year’s time, in order for the necessary time to elapse for this to become widely standardized by the time of Paul’s conversion.

One may still choose to follow Ludemann’s antisupernaturalism (we know resurrections can’t happen) and thus opt for some version of the mass hallucination hypothesis.  But the most common skeptical alternative in recent years, that the resurrection stories are just late myths in which beliefs about Jesus’ cause living on became embodied in mythological garb, simply doesn’t have the decades (or sometimes centuries) needed for it to have developed the way all other ancient myths did.  At some point, one has to say that it takes more faith to believe in the alternatives to the historic, Christian conviction at this point than to believe orthodox tradition!

Posted at primetimejesus.com.

Question: What does the Bible say about dealing with difficult people?

Answer: Our response to difficult people should center around the examples provided by Jesus, for He surely dealt with many difficult people during His time here on earth. His interactions with these people was never with an attitude of superiority or dominance, but rather one of subservience.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus was quite specific: “But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Luke 6:27-31

We also see a related statement by Jesus in Matthew 19:30: “But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.” This is a very difficult assignment, and it is certainly not something we can do on our own or in our own power. Yet it is not impossible if we seek the Lord’s help, because power from the Holy Spirit will enable us to do things we could never do on our own. In so doing, however, it is important to recall the admonition given by the apostle Paul in Romans 12:3: “For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.”

When we succeed in dealing with difficult people with a Christ-like attitude, it is never a cause for pride or self-aggrandizement; it is an occasion to praise the God who makes all things possible through Christ, who strengthens and empowers us.” Philippians 4:13

Some advice similar to that of the Luke passages, and just as difficult, is given by Paul to the Christians in Philippi, when he tells them to “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.” Philippians 2:3-4. Furthermore, Proverbs 12:16 tells us that “A fool shows his annoyance at once, but a prudent man overlooks an insult.” Chapter 13 of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians contains a description of true Christian love—it is to be patient and kind (v. 4).

Putting all this together, the way to deal with difficult people is to love them, pray for them, expect to give rather than to receive, maintain a humble spirit, and relate to them in patience and kindness. But more important is the need to pray for the Spirit’s power to change our own hearts and minds toward the difficult person and enable us to see them as needing the same love, grace and mercy that God extended toward us. Jesus even forgave the men who were going to kill him, as related in Luke 23:34-39. The way to deal with difficult people, then, is to imitate Christ’s humility and love. That kind of response is both edifying to us and pleasing to the Lord.

Posted at gotquestions.org

By John Fernandez

As many of you know, this site disappeared two months ago without warning. The problem, as it turned out, was with the small company that hosted the site and provided technical support to me as moderator. That company dissolved seemingly overnight and with that dissolution came the demise of several websites, including this one. 

After two months of unsuccessful attempts to locate the files and re-launch the site on a different server, I had begun to give up hope. Then, the site suddenly reappeared sometime last week. 

I am now in the process of making arrangements to avoid similar disappearances in the future, and I look forward to getting back on track with a schedule of posting at least one insightful article per day. 

It’s good to be back!   

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960)

By Charles B. Thaxton, Ph.D. 

The classical design argument looked at order in the world and concluded that God must have caused it. Archdeacon William Paley in the nineteenth century refined the argument. He also gave it perhaps its most eloquent and persuasive formulation. Paley looked at the order of human artifacts and compared it to the order in living beings. If human intelligence was responsible for artifacts, reasoned Paley, then some intelligent power greater than man must have accounted for living beings.

The major problem with this design argument was its claim to reason from order in the world to a supernatural designer. For Paley did not provide any uniform experience of the supernatural, which alone could make good his claim. As valid as this objection was, however, only philosophers seemed concerned about it. It was an argument by Charles Darwin that raised doubt for most people concerning true design in the world. According to Darwin natural selection produced apparent design which the faithful mistook for true design. So the matter has stood in the scientific community and the world at large for a century.

Scientific discoveries made in this century, however, threaten to change the outlook fundamentally in regards to design. However, few outside the relevant disciplines seem aware of it. I am referring to developments in relativity theory and quantum mechanics, neurophysiology, information theory, and molecular biology, particularly the elucidation of the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). I shall focus my remarks on DNA and its relation to design and the origin of life.

Due to advances in molecular biology, the process of reproduction, or self-replication, has become better understood. At the core of this process is the DNA molecule. Though not itself alive, DNA is usually regarded as the sine qua non of life. DNA is considered the identifying mark of a living system. We judge something as living if it contains DNA.

Molecular biology has shown us how extremely intricate living things are, especially the genetic code and the genetic process. Interestingly enough, the genetic code can be best understood as an analogue to human language. It functions exactly like a code — indeed, it is a code: it is a molecular communication system within the cell.

A sequence of chemical ‘letters’ stores and transmits the communication in the cell. Communication is possible whatever symbols used as an alphabet. The 26 letters we use in English, the 32 Cyrillic letters used in the Russian language, or the 4-letter genetic alphabet — all serve in communication.

In recent years, scientists have applied information theory to biology, and in particular to the genetic code. Information theory is the science of message transmission developed by Claude Shannon and other engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the late 1940s. It provides a mathematical means of measuring information. Information theory applies to any symbol system, regardless of the elements of that system. The so-called Shannon information laws apply equally well to human language, Morse code, and the genetic code.

The conclusion drawn from the application of information theory to biology is there exists a structural identity between the DNA code and a written language. H.P. Yockey notes in the Journal of Theoretical Biology:

It is important to understand that we are not reasoning by analogy. The sequence hypothesis [that the exact order of symbols records the information] applies directly to the protein and the genetic text as well as to written language and therefore the treatment is mathematically identical.

This development is highly significant for the modern origin of life discussion. Molecular biology has now uncovered an analogy between DNA and written human languages. It is more than an analogy, in fact: in terms of structure, the two are “mathematically identical.” In the case of written messages, we have uniform experience that they have an intelligent cause.

What is uniform experience? It simply means that people everywhere observe a certain type of event always in association with a certain type of cause. When we find evidence that a similar event happened in the past, it is reasonable to infer it had a similar cause. As I shall argue, based on uniform experience there is good reason to accept an intelligent cause for the origin of life as well.

Click here for the full article with active footnotes.

By Jeff Zweerink, Ph.D.

I received an email asking this question: “Do you know of any physical evidence or proof that indicates other universes exist?” With the growing popularity of multiverse explanations, one might expect to see a relatively large body of evidence supporting the idea. In reality only a handful of observations directly impact multiverse models and those measurements tend to argue against the existence of “other universes.”

Virtually all the physical evidence addressing the multiverse arises from studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. I discussed how astronomers used this radiation to extract cosmological parameters in a previous TNRTB.

All inflationary models that produce a Level II multiverse (and a spatially infinite Level I multiverse) lead to an open geometry for our observable universe (look here for definitions). This means that ?_k, the curvature of the universe, should measure positive. However, the best measurement of this ?_k quantity is negative, although the error bars include some positive value. The measured values reported by Eiichiro Komatsu and colleagues are -0.0170 < ?_k < 0.0068 (see table 2). If ?_k ends up measuring less than zero, no inflation-generated Level II multiverse exists.

Based on the small measured power in the low-order multipoles of the CMB spectrum, some have argued that the universe is comparable in size to the observable universe. While these models require a more complex topology for the universe than normally assumed, if future CMB measurements confirm their predictions, they would rule out any form of a Level I multiverse.

Two recent measurements seem to validate the idea that a large Level I multiverse (at least one thousand times the size of the observable universe) exists. As with the evidence described above, both measurements involved analysis of the CMB radiation. One paper argues that the observable universe is moving in a particular direction. This would require a pre-inflationary gravitational tug from a region of space that moved far beyond the observational horizon during the inflationary epoch. The other paper indicates the CMB exhibits an asymmetry that is best explained in the context of a vast region of space beyond the observable horizon.

As you can see, only a sparse amount of physical evidence weighs in on the existence of any Level I or Level II multiverse. Additionally, the available evidence only weakly argues for or against the multiverse. Fortunately, more sensitive missions are planned, which will provide greater clarity that, in turn, stand to validate or invalidate cosmic creation models. Exciting times lay ahead in multiverse research.

If you would like to see a question about the multiverse addressed in this forum, send it to multiverse@reasons.org.

By Discovery Institute

At the January meeting of the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE), University of Texas Austin professor David Hills asserted that there are no legitimate scientific weaknesses in neo-Darwinian evolution. He stated that scientific weaknesses in evolution have “no scientific basis” and compared teaching these weaknesses to teaching “alchemy” or “astrology.” 

Dr. Hillis’s assertions were false, and his comparisons were specious. Hundreds of Ph.D. scientists have expressed scientific skepticism of neo-Darwinian evolution.1 Additionally, the TSBOE was presented with hundreds of scientific articles that discuss scientific weaknesses in key aspects of neo-Darwinian evolution. Additionally, much like his co-participant Ronald Wetherington, Hillis has bluffed about the facts of this debate, and his own arguments are controverted by the scientific record. Hillis’s testimony included multiple inaccurate statements. Hillis’s mistakes and misrepresentations included:

1. Overselling the practical importance of evolution to agriculture and medicine.
2. Failing to acknowledge scientific challenges to Darwin’s “tree of life” hypothesis and completely misrepresenting disagreements between molecule-based phylogenetic trees.
3. Falsely claiming that there are high levels of congruence between anatomical and molecular phylogenies (leading experts acknowledge widespread disagreement between these two approaches).
4. Overstating the length and understating the extent of the Cambrian explosion (again, leading experts disagree with Hillis’s claims).
5. Invoking artificial selection as an explanation for biological information, even though it doesn’t accurately reflect the processes of unguided natural selection in the wild.
6. Wrongly claiming that newly-discovered function for so-called “junk DNA” does not demonstrate a weakness of evolution, despite the fact that evolutionists themselves previously cited “junk DNA” as key evidence for evolution.
7. Inaccurately portraying irreducible complexity as if it has been refuted by the scientific community (in reality, a variety of scientific papers show there is a vibrant scientific debate over irreducible complexity).
8. Downplaying natural selection acting on mutations as the primary adaptive mechanism in orthodox evolutionary theory.

Dr. Hillis said he “wants the truth to be told.” That is commendable. Unfortunately, many of Dr. Hillis’s statements before the TSBOE were clearly false or misrepresentations of the truth. In that vein, what follows is a rebuttal to selected segments of Hillis’s testimony before the TSBOE.

A. Hillis Overstated the Practical Importance of Evolution

Dr. Hillis’s testimony was brimming with praise for the alleged utility and power of modern evolutionary biology. He claimed that there are “a large number of modern agricultural practices that are now based upon evolutionary methods.” But even some leading evolutionary biologists have conceded otherwise. University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne admitted in the leading scientific journal Nature:

[I]f truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.2

To further show the alleged utility of evolution, Hillis discussed how mutations in one particular protein of the influenza virus allow it to escape detection by our immune system, stating “phylogenetic analysis … is a critical tool for developing flu vaccines every year,” and asserting that “knowledge of evolution helps millions of human lives be saved every year.” While there is no doubt that influenza “evolution” is a real phenomenon, we must ask the crucial questions: What degree of evolution is this? And can this sort of “evolution” be legitimately extrapolated to explain large-scale evolutionary changes? In other words, if we were teaching students about this type of “evolution,” should we teach them that it implies large scale macroevolutionary change that could explain the origin of complex biological features, such as new body plans?

Click here for the full article with active footnotes.

By Matt Slick 

Christianity is a religion based upon the teachings and miracles of Jesus. Jesus is the Christ. The word “christ” means anointed one.  Christ is not Jesus’ last name.  Jesus is the anointed one from God the Father who came to this world, fulfilled the Old Testament laws and prophecies, died on the cross, and rose from the dead physically. He performed many miracles which were recorded in the Gospels by the eyewitnesses.  He is divine in nature as well as human.  Thus, He has two natures and is worthy of worship and prayer.

Christianity teaches that there is only one God in all existence, that God made the universe, the Earth, and created Adam and Eve. God created man in His image. This does not mean that God has a body of flesh and bones.  Image means the likeness of God’s character, rationality, etc.  Because we are made in the image of God, every person is worthy of respect and honor.  Furthermore, this means that we did not evolve through random processes from a single celled organism into rational, emotional beings.

God created Adam and Eve and put them in the Garden of Eden and gave them the freedom to choose between right and wrong. They chose to sin. Sin is doing that which is contrary to the nature and will of God.  For example, God cannot lie; therefore, lying is sin.  The sin of disobeying God that Adam and Eve committed resulted in them being expelled from the Garden of Eden as well as suffering the effect of death.

As a result of their sin, their children and all of us inherited a sinful nature.  In other words, our offspring are not perfect in nature — we don’t have to teach children to be selfish.  They know it naturally.  That which is sinful cannot produce that which is not sinful.

Christianity teaches that God is a Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not three Gods), that Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity, that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead physically, that all people are under the righteous judgment of God because all people have sinned against God.  It teaches that Jesus is the only way to be saved from the coming judgment of God and that salvation is received by faith in the work of Christ on the cross and not by anything that we can do to please God.

Where all other religions in the world teach that we must do some sort of good in cooperation with God in order to achieve the right to be in God’s presence, Christianity is the only religion that teaches salvation by grace.  This means that we are not made right before God by our efforts, sincerity, or works.  Instead, we are made right before God by faith in what Christ did on the cross.

Christianity further teaches that once a person is “born again” (becomes saved) that the Holy Spirit lives in that person and the person is changed:  “Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come,” (2 Corinthians 5:17).  This means that God actually lives in the person and the Christian then experiences a true and living relationship with God.

Therefore, “What is Christianity?” is best answered by saying that it is a relationship with the true and living God through the person of Jesus Christ by whom we are forgiven of our sins and escape the righteous judgment of God.

Recommended books:

Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis
Know Why You Believe, by Paul Little

By Will Green

According to a common view, belief in God is kind of like belief in a giant teapot circling the sun. Just like we would assume that the teapot doesn’t exist if there’s no evidence for a teapot flying around the sun, so if there is no evidence for a god then we should assume that a god does not exist.

But there’s one more thing left to talk about when we think about the teapot. Say there’s no teapot around the sun, then what *is* there? I’d assume empty space.

So the a-teapotist (as in a-theist) believes that there’s empty space around the sun, and the teapotist assumes that there is a teapot.

If we carry the analogy to atheism, then an atheist believes that there’s just the natural universe, rather than the natural universe plus a god, when people revert to atheism as the default position.

But there’s something wrong with the above analysis. Atheism can’t be the view that ‘there is only the natural universe’, because a lot of atheists maintain that there could be billions, trillions, even *infinite* numbers of other universes. These universes, some very different, some similar to our own, could explain the characteristics of our universe (see the multiverse theory). In other words, you can believe in many universes and definitely be an atheist.

So atheism has to include the possibility that there is *more* than just the natural universe. OK, then so what is atheism, exactly? Is it the view that there is just the universe and, possibly, a multiverse? In a sense yes, but there must be a better, more concise way of putting it…

Is atheism the view that a mind didn’t create our universe?

Not necessarily, because we could be brains in a vat experiencing a virtual world, or computer programs like in the movie The Thirteenth Floor, and so technically our ‘universe’ is the product of a mind, and yet there is nothing that we would call a ‘god’.

To be sure, the creators of such artificial realities would seem like ‘gods’ to us, but they aren’t gods in any greater sense than we would be if we created our own artificial realities.

OK, so what is atheism? It has to include the possibility of a multiverse, and that the universe is the product of a mind, but not a ‘god’ mind (whatever that is).

What we are left with is that atheism is the view that no mind is behind *all* universes, behind every conceivable universe; behind every physical thing.

Another way of phrasing this is that atheism is the view that at the foundations of reality, at the most basic level, there is inanimate matter rather than ‘conscious stuff’. A theist says that at the most basic level there is ‘conscious stuff’ (like our inner awareness, whatever that is) rather than matter.

So that’s what atheism can be rephrased to without losing any of its meaning: the view that the foundations of existence are inanimate matter rather than conscious stuff.

So to go back to our original example, the teapotist says that there’s a teapot around the sun, and the a-teapotist says that there’s not. So what does the a-teapotist believe is there? They believe that there’s just empty space of course!

So the theist says that there’s a mysterious ‘god’, and the atheist says that there’s not. So what does the atheist say is there? They believe that the foundations of existence are inanimate matter rather than conscious stuff. Otherwise a god exists in some sense (even if pantheistically).

I agree that the default position should be ‘no god exists’ in the absence of evidence for a god. That seems to be sound… but I don’t see why the default position should be ‘the foundations of existence are inanimate matter rather than conscious stuff’. Why should the foundations of reality be automatically assumed to be inanimate matter? Because that’s all we can see? But we see ourselves and others as conscious beings… and we’re pretty sure consciousness is quite different to matter. So to assume that there must be inanimate matter at the foundation of existence ‘by default’ seems a bit unwarranted.

So paradoxically, atheism both is and isn’t the default position. The idea that there’s no god is a default position, but the view that there’s inanimate matter rather than consciousness at the foundation of reality seems unwarranted as a ‘default position’.

It’s likely that any argument to the ‘existence is built upon matter’ view could be doubted because of the experience of consciousness, which seems different to matter. Likewise, consciousness can’t settle the question in favour of the ‘existence is built upon mind’ view, because it may just be that the universe was destined to create ‘animate’/conscious matter.

What’s worse for atheism is that in some ways it’s hard to see the view of consciousness at the foundation of reality as anything less than the view that there is a god. Why? Because such a consciousness would probably have many god-like characteristics…

In the end, maybe there’s no requirement that anyone be an atheist or a theist if there’s no evidence for a god. It doesn’t seem like we have an obligation to believe that the foundation of reality should be characterised a certain way, if what I’ve written has made sense.

So when viewed in an alternative way, that atheism is positively saying that there’s inanimate stuff at the foundation of reality, it seems that neither atheism nor theism is the default position. We must simply assume that either there’s inanimate stuff or consciousness at the foundations of reality based on what feels right to us. That could be what the religious instinct is all about: the feeling that there must be consciousness at the most basic level rather than ‘empty’ matter. And it’s not clear that this view is basically silly. Actually, it seems like a pretty reasonable (50/50) guess at the nature of reality.