Atheists and secularists like to think of themselves as open-minded and intellectually curious. In fact, one of their favorite epithets to use against those who take faith seriously (second only to "intolerant") is "close-minded" or "small-minded." But the evidence shows that it is the atheist and the secularist who refuse to engage the intellectual challenges raised by their position--not the Christian, Muslim, or Jew.

In order to deny the existence of something greater than themselves, atheists must find an explanation for their own existence. To date, they have been unable to do so, yet refuse to continue the search. They claim (depending on how far back one wishes them to go) that all is explicable through "evolution" or the "big bang theory"--yet never will they grapple with the logical (and logistical) problem of explaining the development of something out of nothing. The three great faiths of the world (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) may not have an answer that satisfies the atheists, but at least they provide an answer: "In the beginning, God." All three faiths agree on this. Yet, the atheists dismisses it out of hand, without bothering to posit an alternative.

And, of course, to be intellectually honest, they would have to admit that they simply cannot provide an alternative, because they have none. No theory yet developed has proferred a better theory of origins than simply this: we began; He (God/Yahweh/Allah) did not. Their insistence on the terminal materiality of the universe cannot admit the possibility of the transcendent. Their self-obsessed cosmology simply has no room in it for the endless eternal. And so, they have no option but to dismiss every aspect of spirtuality as a fairy-tale invented by the small-minded to explain the inexplicable.

But they are not even this honest. Because few if any atheists or secularists are truly without any allegiance to a spiritual reality. Even they speak of the "soul"--though by it they do not mean any eternal existing spirit of man or God, but only a place of agonized yearning and magnificent happiness in the heart and mind--another deep vexation to them. For there is no explaining the workings of the mind without resort to some kind of supernatural, unknowable, immaterial....something.

Moreover, even if one does not believe in the existence of something called "God," it is intellectually dishonest to deny the pervasive influence the very concept has had on man and his world throughout history. To deny the historicity of the Bible in the first place is to have to grapple with the archeological evidences that have, over time, proved the document faithful, over and over and over. To deny the impact of the development of ethics and morals in the ancient world is to attempt to live without Western law and without any regard for its very history. And, yet, we are constantly indundated by the insistence of the irreligious that morality has no place in law.

Even more disturbing than the basic denial of reality in the rejection of the concept of God is the manner in which the secular muses of the West now flatly lie about the origins of ideas, cultures, universities, medicine, charity, government, family, and even science. In their zeal to scrub clean all of history from the poisonous mold of faith, they find themselves forced to deny the religious impulses of people who are plainly and easily proven to have been motivated by pure faith and the desire to explore and explain the world they believed came to them only from God.

The history of science is teeming with believers whose deep faith has been whitewashed out of the history books. Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, William Kelvin, Max Planck--all pursued their studies from a zeal to know the world God made. Philosophers like Descartes, Locke, Hegel, and Kant are presented without reference to their strong beliefs in a monotheistic system.

The signs of the importance of faith are everywhere. Religion has left its fingerprints all over the material world, and the secularists desperately rush from here to there, trying to wipe them off before someone sees them. Scratch a charity, you will find a church. Dig into the foundations of a hospital, you will find a denomination. Explore the documents of our own American colonists and be amazed at the incredible depth of a faith that placed its entire trust in the goodness and faithfulness of God, as they faced hardships utterly unknown, even in the mean streets of the Europe from which they came. The American colonists, the majority of the Founders, nearly every American president--the unbelievers seek to discredit the motivating faith of them all.

But let us not be too hard on our unbelieving brethren (for we still believe they are created and loved and longed for by God, even if they themselves refuse to). It is a truly difficult thing to continuously deny the endless evidences for creation and continuing care that are everywhere staring them in the face. Every day, they must find a way to pretend that there is no miracle in the conception of a human life, no life in an unborn human, and no eternity in the eyes of a newborn. Every morning, they must suppress the impulse to thank God for new mornings and new mercies. Every day, they must tell themselves that the sun is nothing more than a ball of fire, unplaced by the hand of the Almighty. And, every night, they must retire in the hopelessness of believing that their own sudden overnight departure from this world can only result in their utter obliteration from this earth, on which they will be quickly forgotten.

It is so difficult to maintain a worldview so hopeless, so empty, so flatly illogical. And there we have the greatest lie of all. That, somehow, to believe in an invisible eternal is less intellectually rigorous or less valid than to believe that there is none. Yet, the "people of The Book" are perfectly willing to show them that book, to open it together, to reason it out in light of the structure of faith. Not so the secularist. Indeed, the unbelievers all too often seek to close the book, to dismiss the belief as simply ridiculous and without merit. Yet they have no explanation, no answer for the hundreds of millions of people throughout history who have reached the same conclusion that there is, indeed, a God--on every continent, from every race, culture, era of human history, both genders, all economic backgrounds, from every walk of life, at every age, and with every personality trait, worldview, disability, talent, gift, flaw, and status of every kind there is (or, as the Bible puts it "every tongue, tribe, people, and nation.")

More disturbingly, they have no response to the millions of people who have believed in this notion so profoundly, so deeply, and with such commitment that they gave their lives--short and long--to the service of that faith. The missionaries, pastors, preachers, teachers, workers, and common everyday people whose lives have been and are dedicated to an unseen God and an unknown future following him have not only spent huge fractions of their time on this earth in the pursuit of activity that earned them little and cost them much--vast numbers have lost their lives in the effort to save what they believed to be the eternal souls of people they did not even know.

Many times, the answer of the unbeliever is that there can be no God, because there is such disagreement as to His particulars. Yet this is a red herring. I am not asking here the question of the particulars. I am addressing only the pure atheism that claims there is no God at all. And it is utterly illogical to claim that, because there is much disagreement on many related questions, the agreement at the core must be dismissed.

On what other issue, in what other venue, do intellectuals consider themselves fair to dismiss empirical evidence, refuse to answer a hypothesis or present one of their own, and present evidence that is factually false? Only here, in the most important arena of all. Only where the consequences are eternal do the unbelievers allow themselves to play so fast-and-loose with the facts and the evidence.

To believe what they believe, the unbelievers must contend at the root of their argument that the vast majority of people that have ever lived on this planet are superstitious fools and that they, and only they, have the answer to the mysteries of the universe. Despite the claims of secularists, it is not the people of the Book who claim a self-generated answer, but the secularists themselves. For the Jew, the Muslim, and the Christian, God is understood through His rules, not ours. He is reachable by His method--not an inward search for the truth of human materiality, but an outward search for the Truth that comes to us only from God.

To further exacerbate the difficulty of the unbeliever, to be intellectually honest, he would have to grapple with the empirical evidence for the effectiveness and impact of faith. He would have to explain to those who have had experiences beyond his explanation--answers to prayer, miraculous healings, moments of prophecy, inexplicable infusions of financial increase at the moment and in the exact amount of need--and with the copious claims for such things found throughout history in the personal journals and self-reports of all those people mentioned above. Again, on every continent, in every recorded human era, across cultures, and even among people who had never heard a word about the God who came to them in a vision and prepared them for the missionaries to come.

The answer of the atheist is to simply deny that it happened. But denying something is not the same as proving it wrong. Ignoring experiential evidence is not a scientific way of dealing with the difficulty of data. To the man whose cancer disappears between the final surgical prep and the opening of his chest cavity, the woman who finds the unexpected check in the mail that just covers the bill for the gas about to be disconnected, the missionary who sees an entire village converted, the literal millions who have their own stories of God-comes-right-on-time--to them, the atheist has no response but to simply disbelieve their claims. Yet, were any other event to be so reliably repeated so often, so consistently, over such a long period of time, there would be no scientific question; it would simply be accepted as factual experience.

There is more, much more. The evidence for faith is overwhelming. The claim of unbelief is answerable in a thousand different ways. I challenge those who deny the God who made them to examine the evidence--honestly, with an open mind, and without fear--as so many have done who then became believers. Take this holy season and look for its meaning and purpose (that's what "holiday" means, you know. Sorry, secularists, but it's true--"holiday" means "holy day," so feel free to wish me a happy one.)

Don't spend another year missing the point of your existence.