One thing that is clear to me, and agreed in emails with Michael Fitzgerald, is that psychological disorders that cause loss of empathy (autism spectrum disorders) are capable of causing atheism. This would be especially true if the ability to surrender personal control is drastically reduced for autistic people. Indeed, I am willing to go so far as to doubt whether orthodox Christian viewpoints can understand these disorders at all. At the very least, they do noting to provide contrary evidence, let alone to suggest what should be done about the problem.

–”Atheists do not state that religion could be true, but they don’t believe in it because it hasn’t been shown to them to be true, but rather they state that religion cannot be true, without adequate reason to justify such a charge.”

This is flat out wrong. Atheism is simply a lack of belief in a deity. Claiming that all atheists believe there couldn’t be a god is just flat out wrong.

–”It is little different from the ancients who could not grasp what this universe was and so they invented myths and crafted gods to give them the answers they wanted”

Explain to me why your god doesn’t qualify. It was created by “ancients” who couldn’t grasp the universe, just like the others.

–”Without evidence many of them dismiss the possibility of metaphysics and assert only the material or empirically verifiable to be forms of evidence.”

Great. So we can’t disprove the metaphysical. How does this in any way justify a theistic stance?

–”Human beings were never intended to be without faith, and it is unnatural for us to be so. The ultimate questions of human existence always call for an answer, however, there is nothing out there that can truly satisfy those questions except Jesus Christ.”

You are being awfully presumptuous. Followers of many other religions would happily refute you on this claim.

If you are going to make assertions, provide some evidence, please.

David Hume and Jean-Paul Sartre would have been worth mentioning in the list above.

Atheism is an attempt to create truth by those who cannot accept the limitations of their own knowledge. Atheists do not state that religion could be true, but they don’t believe in it because it hasn’t been shown to them to be true, but rather they state that religion cannot be true, without adequate reason to justify such a charge. It is little different from the ancients who could not grasp what this universe was and so they invented myths and crafted gods to give them the answers they wanted; so also does the atheist decide what the truth is in that the claims of religion are all doubtful, when she ultimately doesn’t really know if it is or isn’t.

Without evidence many of them dismiss the possibility of metaphysics and assert only the material or empirically verifiable to be forms of evidence. However, Plato’s old ideas still hold a grain of truth here, because ultimately no is able to prove through reason alone that the material world or anything perceived through the senses truly exists but only that it seems to exist; and since this cannot be proven through reason alone but it is of a lower reality, as Plato suggested, reason would suggest all such evidence pulled from it to be ultimately uncertain (since faith cannot show it to be real if it absent) and therefore no one could disprove the claims of religion on that ground.

Atheism is an unjustified presumption.

Human beings were never intended to be without faith, and it is unnatural for us to be so. The ultimate questions of human existence always call for an answer, however, there is nothing out there that can truly satisfy those questions except Jesus Christ.

God Bless,