When it comes to things like defending the faith, the aphorism that one catches more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a barrel of vinegar is very much on people’s minds, especially in America. Puritans were so dour and miserable that they drove people away from Christianity, etc. So, given that, why be such a downer and talk about the problems of atheism, such as meaning, irrationality, etc? Won’t that just turn people off?

One brief word before I dive into it: it should go without saying that one should not be purely negative, that one should spend most of one’s time on the positives. This post is about why talk about the negatives at all?

One very practical thing to get out of the way before we get to the real reason is that “nice” Christianity has already been played out. That sort of positivity is really an attempt to manipulate people and probably does more harm than good. Patience is a virtue, but imprudent patience is not. Nothing but patience just looks like weakness.

OK, that stuff out of the way, the big reason to talk about the problems with atheism is that a lot of people make what might be described as an inverse Pascal’s wager. Call it the Cheese Pizza Wager. If everyone agrees on cheese pizza but people do not agree on toppings, even if the toppings may be better, just go with plain cheese because it’s safer.

Given how many people will do that, it’s important to point out that we’re not in a pizza situation; the options aren’t cheese pizza vs. barbecue chicken pizza, it’s barbecue chicken pizza vs. poison pizza.

Atheism is not like Christianity but with sleeping in on Sundays. Atheism has real and serious problems such as reason not working, life having no meaning, morality being completely arbitrary, concepts such as a human being not being philosophically tenable on any level (the you-can’t-dip-your-toe-in-the-same-river-twice problem), to say nothing of the more practical issues it has with the breakdown of culture and the tendency to produce totalitarian dictatorships as people’s need for God is replaced by the state. And there’s plenty more. (Atheists will, of course, repudiate all of these things, which isn’t a problem for them since they don’t hold rationality to work and therefore don’t object in the slightest to contradicting themselves left and right while the incoherently scream that they’re being completely rational and calm.)

It’s good for people to realize that there is no consensus and that they can’t safely leave off the difficult task of understanding the world that they live in.