Something Worse Than Atheism
For as long as there has been sin, there have been atheists, those who deny God. Christians today sometimes think that atheism is a new phenomenon, something that began to exist in the twentieth century. Those who have studied some history might push the date a little farther back, perhaps to the Enlightenment. But atheism is much older than that. We encounter it even in the pages of the Old Testament. The psalmist, for example, speaks of the fool who says in his heart, “There is no God” (Ps. 14:1). Atheism is certainly much more culturally acceptable today than it might have been one thousand years ago. We do, in fact, see a change in the West with the spread of Enlightenment philosophy. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud represented atheism come into its own. In our own day, the new atheists (who are much less philosophically aware than the old atheists) have popularized the philosophy of th