God didn’t Make Atheists; Atheists Made Atheists

In an Op-Ed piece in the LA Times entitled “Science and religion: God didn't make man; man made gods,” authors J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer argue that our hard-wiring to believe in God and moral absolutes proves that we have created God in our own image:

• Humans have developed the remarkable ability to think about what goes on in other people's minds and create and rehearse complex interactions with an unseen other. In our minds we can de-couple cognition from time, place and circumstance. We consider what someone else might do in our place; we project future scenarios; we replay past events. It's an easy jump to say, conversing with the dead or to conjuring gods and praying to them. Morality, which some see as imposed by gods or religion on savage humans, science sees as yet another adaptive strategy handed down to us by natural selection.


Atheists love to claim that science is on their side. However, science has nothing to say about the origins of this hard-wiring. Even if they succeed in demonstrating that this hard-wiring for a belief in God and moral absolutes has had survival value, this in no way suggests that they evolved. Rather, this finding would just as easily conform to the God-paradigm that we were designed this way.

It’s apparent that the atheists are willing to twist any findings in support for their position. Ironically, it’s these findings that support the Bible’s claim that we are all accountable before God, because He wired us to know these truths (Romans 1:18-21; 2:14-15). It's this truth that will eventually make the atheist flee in terror from the One who created him.

This is another indication that we can’t run from God. The atheist, while assuring themselves that they have avoided Him, will run into Him at every turn, even though they fail to acknowledge His presence.