"To the choirmaster. Of David.
1 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;
there is none who does good.
2 The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man,
to see if there are any who understand,
who seek after God.
3 They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
there is none who does good,
not even one.
4 Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers
who eat up my people as they eat bread
and do not call upon the Lord?
5 There they are in great terror,
for God is with the generation of the righteous.
6 You would shame the plans of the poor,
but the Lord is his refuge.
7 Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion!
When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people,
let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad."
Psalm 14
A man needs to be extremely clever to make and maintain the assertion that there is no God. Indeed, the man is a fool who thinks he can dismiss the thought of God and dispose of Him with a wave of the hand. He has not even begun to think seriously. What he does not realise is that in denying the existence of God he is ultimately committing himself to the view that everything happens by chance, that the universe is just 'a fortuitous concourse of atoms'. But this is to commit oneself to absurdity. For it means that all man's thinking processes are also fortuitous. And if this be so, then the conclusion that the atheist comes to, that there is no God, is just as likely to be wrong as right. You can- not depend on chance. It makes nonsense of rational thought altogether! Not only so, however: the atheist has to ignore the 'evidences' of God all around him. As Romans 1:19 puts it, 'All that may be known of God by men lies plain before their eyes; indeed God Himself has disclosed it to them' (NEB). Moreover, he has to still the voice of con- science within him, which is God's monitor in the soul. Even in our denial of Him, we do not cease to be destined for Him, so that the desire to escape Him and the longing for His peace are always in conflict in us, a conflict that is never wholly absent from the heart of man, even when he most vociferously denies God's existence, as witness the innumerable 'dissociated symptoms' of alienation, meaninglessness and anxiety evident in every form of culture - music, literature and the arts. Above all, the atheist must 'dis- pose' of and 'explain' Jesus Christ, and His claim to be God. For either He was what He claimed to be, or He was mad or bad. To say there is no God is to commit oneself to saying that He was deluded or a deceiver. As ever, the issue is never an intellectual one, but always moral and spiritual, and the question that it always comes down to is: 'What think ye of Christ?'