Day 33 – the ambiguity of atheists regarding justice
Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. –C. S. LEWIS
To understand the view of the atheist, consider the following:
You and I decide to spend a rainy day playing a dice game. Every time you roll a higher number than I do, I give you a dollar bill. Every time I roll a higher number, you place a buck in my hands. After 100 rolls, it just so happens that I have had to give you $75, and you have had to give me $25. Incredibly, the dice have landed in your favor three-fourths of the time. Is this unfair? No, it is not, for the simple reason that the whole exercise was one of pure chance. It was luck (good for you and bad for me) and nothing else that tipped the scales in your favor. Even if I was poor and needed the money and you were rich and didn't, I still could not cry, "That's not fair!" The truth is that there is no such thing as fairness and unfairness in a world of 100% chance. There is only a mixture of good luck and bad luck, good fortune and bad fortune.
Atheists look at the universe much like the dice shoot above. They see it as a product of blind evolutionary forces, 100% the result of chance. Everything that happens within it is labeled by them as fortunate or unfortunate, good luck or bad luck. They will not admit anything to be fair or unfair, for no such thing as fairness and unfairness can exist, they say, in a universe of pure chance. Circumstances may be advantageous or not advantageous to the individual, but they cannot be considered to be just or unjust. Atheists believe that justice is a myth, right and wrong a matter of personal taste. Like C. S. Lewis in his atheist days, they present to us a “senseless” world devoid of justice or morality.
Why, then, do atheists not practice what they preach? If they truly believe the universe to be 100% chance, they would never shout, "That's not fair!" But, as we have noted earlier, they do shout it. If they truly believe that justice is a myth, they would consider the cruelty meted out to them to be bad luck and move on. But they don't just accept the bad and move on. If they really believe what they are saying, they would consider the universe to have rolled them a series of low numbers and would write it off as such. But they do not write it off. They should resign themselves to the fact that it is just their bad luck that they are poor, sick, and weak and just their neighbor's good luck that he is rich, healthy, and powerful. But they don't resign themselves to this fact.
Let me remind you of Lenin and Stalin, two of the most passionate revolutionaries in recent history, and of Karl Marx, their philosophical mentor. They all were staunch atheists. We would have expected them to take what the universe dished out. They did just the opposite. While denying that the universe had any justice, they proceeded to render their own with violent passion.
Daily Quotation
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 29-30.
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