Why I am not an Atheist

In a Nutshell

Atheism is often advanced as the intellectually cautious position, promising fewer commitments and no metaphysical extravagance. It’s just matter, laws, and chance. That restraint can feel like a virtue.

But caution cuts both ways. When we step back and ask which worldview best explains the world we actually observe, atheism turns out not to be modest at all. It repeatedly asks us to accept extraordinary coincidences across independent domains of reality, encompassing physics, consciousness, knowledge, and morality, while ruling out the one kind of unifying explanation that would make these features far less surprising.

A note on method

I am not in this nutshell proposing an argument for absolute certainty, nor an attempt to “prove” God from a single premise. Rather, this is an exercise in explanatory comparison.

The question is not, therefore, whether atheism is possible, but whether it is the most plausible account of the world we find ourselves in. Which hypothesis best explains the total evidence with the fewest unexplained coincidences? It is a question we routinely ask in science, history, and everyday reasoning.

1. A universe balanced on a knife-edge

Modern physics has revealed that the universe is balanced on a razor’s edge. Many fundamental constants, such as the strength of gravity, the expansion rate of the vacuum, the ratios among fundamental forces, must lie within extraordinarily narrow ranges for stars, chemistry, and life to exist at all. Small deviations would not merely produce a different kind of life; they would eliminate complexity entirely.

Perhaps more striking still, the universe is not only life-permitting but intelligible. It behaves according to stable, elegant mathematical structures, precisely the conditions required for minds capable of understanding it.

Atheism typically responds with “brute luck” or appeals to a speculative multiverse. Invoking luck at this scale functions less as an explanation than as a placeholder. Multiverse proposals, meanwhile, tend to shift the problem upward: why should a universe-generator exist that is itself so delicately configured as to produce even one intelligible, life-friendly world?

Theism offers a simpler expectation. If reality is grounded in a rational mind, a law-governed, life-friendly universe is exactly what we should expect to find. Every worldview will face some brute facts, but the claim here is comparative: theism leaves fewer and less arbitrary ones than atheism.

2. The harmony of mind and world

We are conscious. That alone is a deep mystery. But the more striking fact is how well our minds work.

• Our intentions reliably guide our actions.
• Our perceptions generally track reality.
• Our abstract reasoning uncovers deep truths about a physical world billions of light-years away.

Evolution can explain why certain behaviours aid survival. It is much harder, on a purely unguided picture, to see why our cognition should be so broadly truth-tracking, extending far beyond survival needs into higher mathematics, theoretical physics, and objective ethics. Naturalistic accounts exist, of course, but they tend to treat this expansive reliability as an unexpected bonus rather than something to be anticipated.

If atheism is true, the harmony between the “logic” of the stars and the “logic” of our minds is a colossal stroke of luck. If theism is true, it looks intentional.

3. The crisis of reason

Atheism inherits a quiet but serious epistemic problem. If our cognitive faculties are merely the unintended by-products of survival-driven processes, why should we trust them to deliver truth rather than merely useful delusions?

Even if evolution yields some degree of reliability, the more tightly our minds are tuned to reproductive success alone, the more puzzling it becomes that they also seem fitted for grasping deep, abstract truths about logic, mathematics, and metaphysics. If a worldview makes it plausible that our reasoning is unreliable in principle, then confidence in science and philosophy becomes precarious.

Theism offers a more stable foundation. If reality is grounded in a rational Creator, it is reasonable to expect that our faculties are generally fit for truth, even if imperfectly so.

4. Truths that aren’t negotiable

Most of us treat certain truths as objective and binding. Mathematical truths are not social conventions; moral truths are not merely tribal habits.

Many atheistic accounts can explain why we feel bound by morality, as a product of biology or social evolution. What they struggle to explain is why there really are stance-independent moral truths at all, or why a universe composed solely of particles in motion should contain genuine “oughts” rather than merely ingrained preferences.

On theism, moral and mathematical truths reflect the rational and moral structure of the Mind behind the universe. They are not accidents; they are foundational.

5. A world saturated with value

There are countless ways reality could have been devoid of value:

• nothingness,
• sterile laws incapable of complexity,
• life without consciousness,
• minds without the capacity for love or beauty.

Yet we inhabit a world saturated with meaning and moral seriousness. It is deeply flawed and often painful, yes, but unmistakably value-laden. Atheism typically treats this as a fortunate but ultimately inexplicable outcome of blind processes. Theism treats it as the point.

6. Why Christianity?

General theism points to a Mind; Christianity points to a Face.

Christianity makes the striking claim that God’s nature is revealed in history through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. What is immediately noticeable is how counter-intuitive this story is.

• A crucified Messiah was a scandal within Second Temple Judaism.
• A God revealed through weakness and self-giving love was an absurdity in Roman power-culture.

This is not the kind of narrative one invents to gain influence. At the centre of the faith stands a historical claim: the Resurrection. Once theism is taken seriously as a framework, the Resurrection becomes a historical question: what best explains the sudden transformation of the disciples and the birth of a movement grounded in a “victory” achieved through execution?

7. The shape of divine goodness

The Cross gives Christianity its philosophical depth. If God is perfectly good, how would divine love confront a world of guilt and suffering? Not through detached judgment, but through solidarity.

In the Cross, power is redefined as love willing to suffer for the sake of the beloved. It does not deny suffering; it insists that suffering is not final.

Why I am not an atheist: in a nutshell

In a few words, I am not an atheist because atheism asks me to believe that:

1. a finely tuned, intelligible universe exists for no reason;
2. consciousness and truth-seeking minds emerged by a fluke;
3. objective moral and mathematical truths are binding but ultimately groundless;
4. value pervades reality ultimately without foundation.

Theism does not answer every question; no worldview does. But it explains so much more with fewer and less arbitrary brute facts.

This is not a rejection of reason in favour of faith. It is an appeal to reason in its fullest sense: the search for the best explanation of reality as a whole.

And perhaps the most remarkable fact of all is not that we ask these questions, but that we exist in a universe intelligible enough, and meaningful enough, to ask them at all.