“Meager and deterministic theories that see the universe as sheer matter, ruled by physics and chemistry alone, leave no room for human consciousness and creativity.” — George Gilder, Life After Google (2018).

Now it’s atheists who are becoming snowflakes as they face a list of “microaggressions.”

Three researchers recently created a psychological survey to help therapists gauge how often atheist clients may suffer from microaggressions.

The Microaggressions Against Non-Religious Individuals Scale (MANIRS) was created by researchers Louis Pagano, Azim Shariff, and Zhen Cheng, and published for the first time last week in a journal run by the American Psychological Association.

According to the MANIRS scale, there are 31 microaggressions that are unique to atheists, many of which involve incidents during which an atheist is accidently assumed to be religious, or when an atheist overhears stereotypes.

Examples of microaggressions the MANIRS assesses include: “Others have assumed that I am religious,” “Others have acted surprised that I do not believe in God,” and “Others have included a blessing or prayer in a public social gathering.”

Atheists generally believe in evolution. Evolution is based on real aggression. It’s been described as “nature, red in tooth and claw.” Simply point, according to evolutionists, we’ve gotten where we are in the evolutionary timeline via aggression. Kill or be killed was the operating mechanism. Survival of the fittest.

It seems that if these atheists can’t handle these so-called microaggressions, then they have no business surviving. They would not have done well in the wild. Sticks and stones would have broken their bones but words would never have hurt their evolutionary ancestors.

In fact, what’s protecting them is a moral order based on non-atheistic beliefs. Christians believe that even an atheist has the right to life.

Here’s one of the microaggressions I found interesting:

“Others have assumed that I have no morals because of my lack of religion.”

It’s not that atheists don’t do moral things and act in a moral way; it’s that they can’t account for morality given the basic tenets of atheism. There is no morality in a universe that is ruled by physics and chemistry alone.

Chemistry knows nothing of morality.

Evolution, as the evolutionists explain it, would never have happened if there had been morality when the first signs of life emerged from the primordial soup. To survive, they needed nourishment. They would have consumed other organisms weaker than themselves. “What would be the objective … or moral standard, in a world where mind, soul, and personhood were completely reducible to materialistic entities—whether finally spelled out in the language of matter or physical energy?”1 As far as I’ve been able to find, no one has explained this materialistic dilemma. How can matter give rise to morality, a morality that evolved matter-only-entities are obligated to obey?

Certain questions naturally arise:

To whom or to what could we be obligated in a fully naturalistic world? Do we owe it to the natural order to behave in a certain way? Does it have the will or the power to hold us accountable if we choose to live selfishly, to deceive and to cheat, and moreover, if we have the savvy to have the resources to avoid getting caught?2

On what unimpeachable and ultimate standard that has eternal consequences should we keep the unfit alive? What is the source of that unimpeachable and ultimate standard? It must be physically based because, according to atheists and their matter-only worldview, we are matter-only entities. There’s no morality written in or on our DNA, and even if there was, there is no one or no thing that demands we follow it resulting in eternal consequences if we don’t. The issue is not “is there morality” but “what is the source of morality and is anyone obligated to abide by it?”

Notice the argument doesn’t say that atheists don’t prove things, or that they don’t use logic, science, or laws of morality. In fact, they do. The argument is that their worldview cannot account for what they are doing. Their worldview is not consistent with what they are doing; in their worldview there are no laws; there are no abstract entities, universals, or prescriptions. There’s just a material universe, naturalistically explained (as) the way things happen to be. That’s not law-like or universal; and therefore, their worldview doesn’t account for logic, science, or morality. But, atheists, of course, use science and morality. In this argument, atheists give continual evidence to the fact that in their heart of hearts they are not atheists. In their heart of hearts, they know the God I’m talking about. This God made them, reveals Himself continually to them through the natural order, through their conscience, and through their very use of reason. They know this God, and they suppress the truth about him. One of the ways that we know that they suppress the truth about Him is because they do continue to use the laws of logic, science, and morality though their worldview doesn’t account for them.3

A few years ago, a group of atheists ran an ad campaign with this banner: “Relax: hell does not exist, or heaven either, enjoy your life.” Who defines what gives someone joy and on what basis? The Declaration of Independence mentions “the pursuit of happiness.” One person’s happiness could be another person’s dread. How do we know? The Declaration of Independence gives us a hint by stating that we are endowed by a “Creator with certain inalienable rights.” There are moral boundaries to life, liberty, and happiness. We are not at liberty to do what we want to do because it makes us happy.

1. Thomas V. Morris, “Foreword” in David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), x [↩]
2. Baggett and Walls, Good God, 220. [↩]
3. Dr. Greg L. Bahnsen, closing argument in “The Great Debate” with Gordon Stein (1985). You can listen to Dr. Bahnsen’s closing argument here. [↩]