The Atheist Illusion

For as bats’ eyes are to daylight so is our intellectual eye to those truths which are, in their own nature, the Most obvious of all.” Aristotle

The greatest illusion embraced by the atheist is not that there’s no God but rather that they are free from illusions.  The belief that you are free of all illusions is the most dangerous illusion of all for it opens the floodgates to the acceptance of unreality in a multitude of forms.

It is self-evident that the atheist has not experienced God, but how in the world can they deny that others have not experienced God?   Especially since experiencing God is a personal matter that cannot be judged empirically by outsiders.  You cannot get into another man’s mind or body to know how or what he is, or has experienced.  Yet this is the very thing that an atheist must  assert.  Therefore, their claim to know another’s mind; this is an illusion of knowledge that cannot be known.

We know that human beings experience pain to various degrees and that it is impossible for someone to experience  another man’s pain precisely and to the same degree.  The same thing is true of our own experience of God since people tend to experience God in different ways and to different degrees.  Consequently, the atheist claim that there is no God is totally unreasonable and contrary to the experiences of billions of people. Thus, the only real claim that they can reasonably make is that they have not experienced God.  Yet in their arrogance they go one step further and say that no one has experienced God and they usually add, that if  the believer claims to have experienced God, then they’re delusional.

The only rational claim they can stand on; is that they have not experienced God.  However that might be saying too much for they could have experienced God and not recognized it as a God experience.  This would be a very likely theorem because their preconceived biases could keep them from recognizing a God experience, if they had one.  Not surprisingly, many atheists will say that since they have not experienced God, He cannot exist, or that God in some way, is obligated to reveal Himself to them in such a way that his existence would be undeniable.  They seldom blame themselves for accepting an ideology or worldview that will not allow or hide them from experiencing God.  It could be that they’re like a blind man who denies the existence of color because he cannot see it or has not experienced it and then blames color for its own inability to be seen.

In the end, the old saying that a man with an argument will never convince the man with an experience is true.  The only people who atheists will move to their unbelief are those who have never experienced God and are already in a sense, in the atheist camp.  Atheists will never be able to argue that God does not exist with a man who has experienced him.  That would be like telling a person who was rescued from drowning in the sea by a man in a lifeboat, that the man who saved him really did not exist.

Humans come to know things in many ways.  We learn through our minds, but we also learn through our numerous senses. Specifically, our mind processes the information that we obtain through our  senses.  However if some senses have been crippled or damaged a person may become dead to that sense and no longer be able to experience anything that comes through it.  It could be that some knowledge requires more than one sense.  I believe this is the case with the knowledge of God.  The knowledge of God requires the whole man.  If any part of the man has been damaged or disabled it becomes increasingly hard for that man to experience God in any meaningful way.

As a result talking to some atheists is often like talking to a handicapped man who doesn’t know that he’s handicapped.  They are like children who have grown up in a dysfunctional family and cannot see the dysfunction because it has been normalized by their family.  Some even mock and belittle the idea of family because of their experiences. They simply cannot believe in a real family.  In this they are very much like the atheist who has not experienced God for his goodness and therefore cannot imagine His existence.  They have been handicapped by living in their dysfunction.  I once suggested this to a young atheist at which he let out a primal scream “I’m not broken”.  His scream of denial was evidence of his illusion and also his denial of it.