Non-believers often complain that if God exists, He ought to make His existence more obvious. While I don’t deny this complaint can come from a sincere place, it seems to me that the people who make it are typically guilty of a twofold error.

First, they don’t actually want God to exist, and so they’ve never searched for Him with any real enthusiasm or urgency. And second, they’ve rarely taken the time to think through the intellectual and moral costs that are incurred when we conclude that God does not exist.

While the believer can admit that divine hiddenness is mysterious, the non-believer must face the fact that his unbelief is at once terrifying and absurd. To see why, let’s consider five worrying implications of atheism.

First, atheism means we can’t trust our own reason. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga has famously argued that if atheism is true, then naturalism is self-defeating. This is a problem for atheists because they are almost always committed to both evolution and naturalism (ie the belief that everything that exists is part of the natural world).

Plantinga’s argument is simple. If we evolved with no direction from a higher power, then our mental perceptions, memory and ability to draw inferences are all inherently unreliable, because these cognitive faculties are hardwired for survival rather than truth. Hence if evolution and naturalism are true, then we can’t trust our own reason when it tells us that we should be atheists.

Second, atheism means we’re quite possibly living in a simulation. One of the deepest challenges for a purely naturalistic world-view is explaining the origin of consciousness. If reality consists only of mindless physical processes, then somehow those processes must give rise not only to life, but to self-awareness – to beings capable of abstract thought, reflection and reason. At the very least, this requires the claim that, under certain conditions, non-conscious matter can produce conscious minds.

That alone is a fanciful claim, but it becomes particularly problematic when we consider the simulation hypothesis popularised by figures like Elon Musk. According to one influential interpretation, consciousness depends not on any particular material substratum – such as a biological brain – but merely on the right kind of information-processing structure. If that is true, then it follows that a sufficiently advanced computer system could generate conscious agents simply by running the right processes.

But if conscious experience can be produced in this way, then it means that a technologically advanced civilisation could run vast numbers of simulations filled with conscious beings who mistakenly believe themselves to inhabit a real, physical world.

Of course, the atheist might respond that no real human being would ever decide to create such simulations. But this response rests on a hopeful hunch rather than hard evidence. If only a tiny minority of real human beings were to run trillions of simulations, then statistically you and I are almost certainly living in one such simulation.

The third reason is that atheism means we don’t have free will. Since atheism entails philosophical materialism, one of the more disturbing ramifications of a godless worldview is its denial of free will. While determinism has become fashionable in some quarters of the internet, the truth is that it is perhaps the single most wicked idea in the history of human thought.

Determinism eviscerates even our most foundational ethical categories. It says that no human being is, ever has been, or ever will be a moral actor. It says that the 9/11 terrorists are no more deserving of our anger and condemnation than a computer screen that fails to load promptly.

Determinism destroys all virtue, nobility and ethics. It holds that the rapist is no worse than the woman he violates, that the Nazis are no more blameworthy than the Jews they murdered, and that not a single one of the billions of oppressed souls in history suffered anything that could be accurately described as immoral.

A fourth reason is that atheism means morality is a social construct. As CS Lewis argued at length in Mere Christianity, atheism lacks any basis for objective morality. We know that species such as chimpanzees, cats and orcas will sometimes torture their prey and kill other animals for sport. On what grounds could an atheist condemn a group of human beings who decided to do the same?

Consider a scenario where humanity is about to be wiped out by a meteor. The only survivors are an intrepid group of explorers who escape to Mars on a rocket. Upon their arrival, this new colony decides that inflicting pain on children is morally permissible provided the adults derive pleasure from it. As a result, the only adult human beings left in existence are ones who believe that it is okay to torture children for fun.

The problem for the atheist is that he lacks the conceptual tools for criticising this fledgling Martian colony. Moreover, if human beings are nothing more than highly evolved monkeys, then it makes zero sense to treat everyone with equal respect. What objective standard can the atheist offer for saying the billionaire, the child with Down syndrome, the Harvard professor, the Olympic athlete and the terminally ill patient all share the same rights and dignity?

At its heart, atheism offers no durable basis for human dignity; it is incapable of explaining why it is always and everywhere wrong to torture and kill the few for the perceived benefit of the many.

Fifth, and finally, atheism repeatedly forces us to suspend rational thinking. The unbeliever would have us believe that if you simply wait long enough, then non-existence gives rise to existence, non-life becomes life, and the inanimate sludge that marked the beginning of the universe eventually turns into planets, oceans, trees, butterflies, the Sistine Chapel and self-conscious persons. Meanwhile, our universe’s exquisite fine-tuning for the emergence of life and its breathtaking natural beauty are dismissed by the atheist as the products of pure chance.

At this point, the atheist’s story of reality is sounding less like hard-nosed scientific theory and more like a fairy tale. The central narrative device in that tale is Darwinian evolution, which the non-believer must cling to as if his life depended on it. Suddenly the theory of natural selection has to be able to explain every facet of the human experience, whether it be our religious instincts, our moral intuitions, our appreciation for beauty, our admiration for self-sacrifice or our immense capacity for physical and psychological pain, not to mention something as strange as homosexuality, which clearly violates every principle of Darwinism.

As if that weren’t enough, a sceptical world-view simultaneously has to maintain that the vast majority of human beings (both past and present) are straight-up deluded in their belief in God. Here the atheist is confronted with a positively mountainous burden of proof, for he must insist that of all the billions of putative answered prayers, spiritual encounters and miraculous healings that have occurred throughout history, not a single one of these was valid. If even just one of these experiences was real, then atheism cannot be true.

Taken together, these considerations suggest that atheism comes with an enormously high intellectual price tag. Although wishing God would reveal Himself more clearly is an understandable desire, this desire ought not lead us into a world-view that is as unliveable as it is unreasonable.

‍