The inaccuracies and absurdities of modern atheist dogma are beginning to raise questions in those looking at Christianity as not only a source of hope and joy, but as a worldview that is consistent with science and based on truth.

The militant communist atheists I grew up with (my family and all their friends) sixty-five plus years ago considered free will to be a critical component of the human mind. The idea that people were to some degree free to choose their actions was crucial to the very fabric of radical social action. The denial of free will by outside agencies, like the Church, the oppressive ruling class, poverty, or lack of education, was identified as the obvious enemy of progress.

Modern atheist ideologues, on the other hand, now hold that free will does not exist. I have long been puzzled by this assertion, not only by its counterintuitive nature, but also why this idea would be a bedrock of current atheist doctrine.

According to Sam Harris, the illusion of free will is closely related to another idea popular in the atheist camp, namely, that consciousness is also an illusion. This makes some internal logical sense, since if we have no real consciousness, we cannot make conscious choices.

Modern atheists see us (and all other creatures) ultimately as automatons acting in accordance with the physical and chemical influences that impinge upon us. The dogma holds that everything that happens is a result of the action of physical laws and random, purposeless events. The concept of choice is simply an illusion. Determinism is the overriding theme of causation.

In reality, strict determinism has been on the skids scientifically for quite some time. It ignores the science of quantum uncertainty as well as the laws of chaos and complexity, and just about everything we are learning about the stochastic nature of the behavior of particles, atoms, and biochemical pathways.

There is no denial of this reality in atheist dogma, and the role of chance and accident is considered to be at least equally important as the laws of physics in determining what happens and when. This is especially true for the current paradigm of evolutionary biology known as Neo-Darwinism.

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