Institutional Atheism: Pretty Bad Track Record

Tim Keller briefly makes an interesting point in his book, in response to prominent atheists’ arguments that religion is the source of all that’s bad in the world. And that is to take a look at their alternative in history. What were the most significant, explicitly atheist regimes? The Communists, under Stalin, Mao, and others. Nazism wasn’t explicitly atheist, but Hitler probably was, and in any case was guided by principles modern atheists espouse, like scientific rationalism, including now discredited ideas of eugenics. Each regime killed millions of people. Not exactly the best track record.

Contemporary atheists have a response to these, saying that the problem wasn’t fundamentally that they were atheists, but that they were militant atheists, or that they were tyrannical; almost that they became religions in themselves. But that seems disingenuous to me. Although it is insightful. Humans are so hard-wired to be religious that if you remove religion, atheism will become an ersatz religion in its place, not just personally but societally.

In any case, it’s true that religious extremism has been and still is the cause of much violence and suffering in the world. But even if religion is the problem, on a purely empirical basis, it’s hard to argue that atheism is the answer.