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→Pastor Nick Cady on atheism and human rights violations
To be sure, many modern Westerners take universal benevolence and human rights to be self-evident moral truths. But, as Smith reminds us, these aren’t free-standing moral facts, ready to be discovered like scientific laws. Rather, they are historically contingent beliefs growing out of Judeo-Christian tradition. Someone who “believes in a naturalistic cosmos,” he acknowledges, “is perfectly entitled to believe in and act to promote universal benevolence and human rights, but only as an arbitrary, subjective, personal preference—not as a rational, compelling, universally binding fact and obligation”...<ref>[https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/atheist-overreach/ When Atheism Is Intellectually Weak] by Rebecca McLaughlin</ref>}}
To be sure, many modern Westerners take universal benevolence and human rights to be self-evident moral truths. But, as Smith reminds us, these aren’t free-standing moral facts, ready to be discovered like scientific laws. Rather, they are historically contingent beliefs growing out of Judeo-Christian tradition. Someone who “believes in a naturalistic cosmos,” he acknowledges, “is perfectly entitled to believe in and act to promote universal benevolence and human rights, but only as an arbitrary, subjective, personal preference—not as a rational, compelling, universally binding fact and obligation”...<ref>[https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/atheist-overreach/ When Atheism Is Intellectually Weak] by Rebecca McLaughlin</ref>}}
== Atheism and its failure to ground human rights ==
Andrew Wilson in his essay entitled ''Can Atheism Ground Human Rights?'' indicated:
{{Cquote|Can atheism provide the grounds for believing in universal benevolence and human rights? Well: no, says Christian Smith in his excellent Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can't Deliver. In a nuanced, fair, scholarly and readable argument, Smith makes no attempt to establish whether naturalist atheism is true or false, but simply to establish that if it is true, there is no warrant for believing in a number of things that (most) atheists affirm. Thus:
:A naturalistic universe is one that consists of energy and matter and other natural entities, such as vacuums, operating in a closed system in time and space, in which no transcendent, supernatural, divine being or superhuman power exists as creator, sustainer, guide or judge. Such a universe has come to exist by chance - not by design or providence but by purposeless natural forces and processes. There is no inherent, ultimate meaning or purpose. Any meaning or purpose that exists for humans in a naturalistic universe is constructed by and for humans themselves. When the natural forces of entropy eventually extinguish the human race - if some natural or humanmade disaster does not do so sooner - there will be no memory or meaning, just as none existed before human consciousness evolved.
If that is the nature of reality, then what grounds are there for believing in universal benevolence and human rights? There do not seem to be any:
:To begin with, let us first observe that a naturalistic universe does not seem to offer any moral guidance at all ... Organisms do tend to “want” to survive. But on evolutionary grounds per se we cannot say that it was morally good or bad that the dinosaurs lived or died, for instance. It just happened.<ref>[https://thinktheology.co.uk/blog/article/can_atheism_ground_human_rights ''Can Atheism Ground Human Rights?''] by Andrew Wilson, Thinktheology.com</ref>}}
== Pastor Nick Cady on atheism and human rights violations ==
== Pastor Nick Cady on atheism and human rights violations ==