Why King David Said Atheism Is Foolish

The simple truism, "Nothing comes from nothing", creates an enormous roadblock to consistent atheism. 

Because the statement "nothing comes from nothing" is true, then you only have two options to explain where the universe came from. Either the universe is eternal, or it was made. Then you have two more options: self-made, or made by a Higher Being.

The universe isn't eternal, and we know this because the universe changes. Eternal things, by the lexical meaning of the word "eternal", do not change. They cannot change. Eternal doesn't mean "really old." It means timeless. An eternal thing, and every eternal part of it, is always, with no beginning and no ending. If a sode-can is in your hand right now, being eternal means it has always been there with no beginning, and will always be there with no end.

But it is obvious that the universe does change.  It changes every day, every hour, every nano-second. Every movement of every unseen molecule is a manifestation of change.  So, we cannot say that the universe is eternal. It is temporal.

Now, there are people, and religions, which claim the changes we observe are mere illusions, masking an underlying eternality. But they offer no proof of that claim. How could they? The pdeople who make this claim certainly function in the world as if change was really happening (they pay their taxes, take medicine when they are sick, they run away from angry bees, that sort of thing). At that point, the proposition that the universe is secretly eternal seems mighty falsified. 

A mystic or a quantum theorist might claim that there have been an enormous number of universes, or that the universe reboots every zillion-zillion years. But then we're still left with that "nothing comes from nothing" problem. What is the origin of Universe #0? There can't be an infinite regress, because nothing comes from nothing. Universe #0 wasn't eternal, since the universe isn't eternal. Universe #0 didn't just pop into existence from nothing, because nothing comes from nothing). 

If you run into someone who says, "Something can too come from nothing", you know you've reached a point where it's just nonsense and gas coming forth.

So: Did the universe create itself? The universe could not have created itself, since (a) the act of creating requires intelligence. The universe shows no signs of being sentient (not even the humans, sometimes). And also (b), from a logic standpoint, the universe could not create itself, since, if you are there to create yourself, you don't need to create yourself. You already exist. Self-creation is a logical impossibility.

These points illustrate why King David called atheists "fools."  Contrary to first reaction, David wasn't trying to be insulting. When we tick off the possibilities of the universe's origin, atheism makes no sense. The universe didn't create itself, and it isn't eternal, so it had to have been made. 


But it's important to remember that most people aren't atheists because of logic. We can use logic to expose atheism's flaws, but if we try to rip it all to bits, we will still be talking to someone with biases. They might be someone who is religiously rebelling against God's authority. They perhaps are bitter against God due to past or present suffering. They might be angry at some mean religious person. Or it could be they never talked to a believer in God who made much sense.