The Invasion of the Nothingness
We were in Dubai recently with a few colleagues to negotiate terms for some technology licenses. Dubai is a fascinating city of apparent inclusion, paradoxically built on the religious foundations of Islam and its perhaps-not-so-inclusive-reputation. During that sojourn of several days, Peter’s email inbox was invaded by the nothingness. Specifically, he was the recipient of an unsolicited email from Sam Harris, titled, “Letters to a Christian.” (The full text of Sam Harris’s unsolicited email is included in the footnote.)
Neither of us had ever heard of Sam Harris. Perhaps we should have. But it’s not surprising, because we don’t spend much time in the pursuit of the nothing of which he, it turns out, is a leading purveyor. However, even though we don’t occupy or explore the nothingness, Peter’s own space had been invaded by the nothing in the form of Harris’s unsolicited email. So we decided to do a cursory search before that correspondence was deleted.
The search revealed that Harris does have some intellectual and professional credentials, as a neurosurgeon, but he is more notably described as one of an unholy alliance — the Four Horsemen — a group of loud religion iconoclasts that includes Richard Dawkins. When first reading Harris’s email, Peter found that Harris’s reasoning reminded him very much of Dawkins; he now understood why. So rather than merely delete and ignore it, we decided that Veritas Chronicles should form its own response to Harris’s email and the militant atheism he promotes.
C.S. Lewis posited that, "What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could .... invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside of God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. The reason why it can never succeed is this: God made us, invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, page 50.)
The same hopeless attempt persists in the modern era, just as empty now, the same null set, the same nothingness, that existed in Lewis’s day, and for all the millennia preceding ours; it is the invasion of the nothingness.
One of our greatest delights, as each of us travels the world pursuing our respective duties, is to talk with people about their faith perspectives, and to respectfully observe them in their places of worship. We don’t need to be preoccupied with their definition of divinity. Rather, we choose to hold sacred for them that which they hold sacred for themselves. We are more interested in their life- and faith-experiences: how they found or are searching for their own sense of self and confident relationship with Deity. We are not their judges, and claim no opinion about their faith choices, even if that includes agnosticism, or atheism.
Unfortunately, anti-Christ, anti-God, anti-faith promoters such as Harris and Dawkins have the opposite view. Their militant atheism sets out to undermine all forms of faith. In their world view, everyone else is wrong, they are right, and all faith-dupes must be dissuaded from their delusions. It’s not their atheism that causes us concern, it is the militant, insistent nature of their faith in the absolute truth of atheism and the nothing. They deliberately conflate faith and religion with human ambition. They use the worst examples of human behavior and ascribe the motivation for such behavior as religious fervor. Whereas, the reality is, as the ancient apostle James described, “From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? (KJV James 1:4).”
Harris and Dawkins ignore the many whose opinions echo that of William James, who concluded: “We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals.” (The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, William James, Harvard University, 1902.)
How can we say the Harris / Dawkins doctrine is literally, a nothing? Don’t they believe in something? Yes, and no. They believe in their own reasoning; they believe in the absence of God or a Supreme Being, but in Harris’s own words, our fate is to just accept that we are “fallible human beings” (see his full letter in the footnote) with no hope for redemption, no afterlife, no reason for existence, no explanation or rationale for the profusion of life and the miracle of creation. What a miserable outlook.
Since the apostle Peter invited believers to always be ready to offer a reason for the hope that is within them (see 1 Peter 3:15), our reasons for rejecting the nothing and promoting the merits of faith (in the case of each of the authors, faith in God and Christ) are detailed below. Each reader may do with this reasoning faith as they see fit.
The Superiority of Faith Over Atheism in Cultivating Human Purpose and Cosmic Understanding
The debate between faith and atheism is not just about intellectual inquiry but the fundamental framework through which we engage with the world. While atheists such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins advocate for a worldview centered on "nothingness" void of divine purpose, their arguments rest on unsubstantiated premises that reject the metaphysical without providing anything meaningful in its place. Faith, on the other hand, offers a richer, more profound understanding of existence, rooted in humility, the acknowledgment of human limitations, and the acceptance of a higher power that transcends human understanding.
The sciences of our day, when applied and interpreted honestly, describe a miraculous process, a journey of discovery of how things work; but we must also acknowledge that science, scientists and inventors have never actually invented anything; they are simply, wonderfully, uncovering a principle or a material fact which already exists. Some are humble enough to recognise that fact, some are not.
For now, the sciences and mankind’s general knowledge are somewhat analogous to the definition of pi we learned in grade school with a value of 22/7 or 3.14. That was a useful enough definition to allow us to use pi (π) with radius and diameter values to get correct answers on tests for circumference, area of a circle and the volume of a sphere or cylinder, and with a few more digits added it’s good enough for most practical work-a-day, engineering or scientific applications. But 3.14 is not the true definitive value of pi. At five decimal places the result is 3.14159, but the 9 is rounded; an iPhone’s calculator can show fifteen decimal places: 3.142857142857143, where the final 3 is the rounded number; a little exercise on an Excel spreadsheet shows that the software is designed to give up one digit earlier i.e. after the thirteenth decimal place it rounds to 4 and then drops to manufactured zeros, 3.14285714285714000000∞. The actual sequence runs on and on, to where? Perhaps to infinity. Certainly, the end of the string is presently unknown, calculated out to more than a trillion digits, and the end point, infinitesimally small, remains beyond all of today’s supercomputers. Therefore the true or complete numerical definition of pi is also unknown and presently remains unknowable. Sure, that curiosity may be easily dismissed as mathematical artifact, irrelevant to the practical world, but the analogy is perfectly relevant: whomever cannot see or perceive the infinite (all of us) cannot pretend to be able to discern or define or represent the Infinite, without permission or assignment from the infinite God of Creation who is and does encompass the very idea of infinity. He is without beginning of days or end of years (see Hebrews 7:3; John 1:1), and His works, words, thoughts and mind cannot be comprehended by the finite mind of man (KJV Isaiah 55:8-9: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.) God’s infinity is evident even in something so seemingly simple as a circle or the true value of one measure.
Likewise, humanity in general, and we at our own personal level, are destined to keep walking in faltering circles of rise and fall, progress and decline, circling on the road to nowhere to the extent we reject or ignore the light of Christ, the revelations of Biblical prophets, and God’s plan of salvation.
Today’s science is both thrillingly mysterious, yet simultaneously practical in many ways. It’s good enough to dimly perceive a slice of space, sufficient to surmise that the universe — as presently measured — is about 13.8 billion years old with a radius of about 45-47 billion light years (that’s not the end of the universe’s scope or story when the instruments are better of course). In addition, we’ve built rockets, space probes and satellites, designed a bunch of handy health and lifestyle innovations, while also creating some troublesome paradoxes, like the cost-efficient energy of nuclear power minus the ability to properly manage or eliminate its deadly waste or counter its death-dealing payload. We have compounded new pharmaceuticals and food substances that provide relief from one ailment or deliver some kind of short term comfort but introduce a raft of side effects and unintended consequences. Communications technologies have come to the fore which allow us to stay in touch easily but which also make meaningless distractions more rampant, personal interactions increasingly shallow, and provide means for powerful interests to destroy privacy and confidentiality.
We can degrade but not create or give definition to life, nature, space or human purpose, as there is nothing that mankind will ever discover not already known by (created by!) God. Collectively and individually, we are like the proverbial clever person, smart enough to get ourselves into trouble but not smart enough to get ourselves out. So much of mankind’s creative and engineering effort is devoted to methods of violence and mass destruction, trivial lifestyle conveniences, and struggling with systemic health issues largely stemming from or enabling our self-defeating behaviours. Isn’t it cosmically ironic that a third of the world is malnourished by lack of food while another third with access to excess is becoming obese, malnourished, diabetic or suffering a host of other health consequences directly related to over-consumption of unhealthy foods and beverages? Pervasive self-defeating behaviours are evident not just in health, science and engineering. We live in a financial system that is constructed on a fabric of illusion, a fulsome example of the great and spacious building without a foundation that must eventually collapse. The world and worldliness are working hard to eliminate God and Godliness resulting in a downward spiral from which there is no recovery without Godly intervention. Each attempted solution creates a set of unintended consequences (or in some cases consequences as intended by evil and conspiring persons), that leave the planet and its inhabitants in damage control; yet the purposes and the grace of God are constant despite the best of humanity and the worst of devilish influences. As Paul declared, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12).
Human Limitations and the Necessity of Faith
Human beings are inherently limited in their capacity to understand the cosmos, life, and death. As Isaiah asserts, no individual can generate their own breath or light (Isaiah 10:15), let alone control the course of life and death. Scientific advancement, though remarkable, remains inadequate to address fundamental questions about existence, meaning, and the afterlife. The assertion that science can replace faith, as promoted by Harris and Dawkins, is misguided. Science is merely a tool that illuminates the material world, but it does not possess the scope to define purpose, morality, or the metaphysical. Faith, by contrast, provides a framework through which humans can approach the mysteries of life with humility and hope. Faith provides a constructive framework for here and hereafter. Science provides awesome detail about the nature of “how” but can add nothing whatsoever about the “why” of existence.
The False Certainty of Atheism
The so-called "Four Horsemen" of atheism propagate a form of intellectual arrogance, positioning themselves as the ultimate authorities on truth while dismissing millennia of religious tradition and experience. Harris’s critique of faith, particularly his characterization of it as "wishful thinking," is itself based on a selective and superficial interpretation of thoughtful worship and belief. Faith is not, as Harris suggests, blind adherence to doctrine without evidence. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of the limitations of human knowledge, a humble recognition that there are realms of existence beyond what we can currently comprehend. This humility contrasts starkly with the hubristic claims of militant atheism, which often purport to possess complete understanding of the universe without accounting for the unseen and the divine. With all the advances of science, we still can’t number the stars, can see only a very few of their orbiting planets and satellites, know relatively little about the composition and structure of the objects in our solar system, still have to guess about this planet’s core and know even less about what is out there, can acknowledge dimly but can’t find, define, observe or measure most of the matter and energy within the presently perceived scope of the universe, don’t know the breadth of space nor the nature of life on this planet, can slightly alter but are not able to replicate the memory power and creative genius embedded in the life particles we call DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), can’t make the maths and physics theories of the very big (space) and the very small (subatomic particles) correlate with each other, can’t forecast accurately let alone deliberately shape weather or climate patterns, and so on. But Christ was able to feed the thousands and calm the tempest, and asserted that the cosmic accounting system of the God in whom we trust is so refined that not even a sparrow’s wing or the hairs of our heads are unaccounted or lost.
The Inadequacy of the Atheistic Worldview
Atheism, as championed by Harris and Dawkins, offers a barren worldview. By rejecting God, atheists inadvertently reject the very essence of human purpose and value. Without a divine Creator, human life is reduced to a meaningless accident of biological processes. This reductionist view strips humanity of inherent dignity and leaves no room for moral absolutes or transcendent meaning. In contrast, faith endows life with purpose, grounding it in a Creator who imbues every individual with intrinsic worth and a role within the greater cosmic plan. Faith, as expressed through various religious traditions, provides not only a sense of purpose but also a moral framework that guides individuals toward love, charity, and humility. As we noted, William James, in his study of religious experience, concludes that the highest expressions of human virtue — bravery, devotion, patience — have historically been driven by religious ideals. Atheism, which denies the existence of anything beyond the material, offers no such inspiration for the human spirit.
Faith as a Foundation for Society
A society that grounds itself in faith tends to foster a more robust moral and ethical foundation. Paul’s assertion in Ephesians (4:13-14) that faith leads to stability contrasts with the chaotic moral relativism often associated with atheism. Atheism’s reliance on human reasoning alone, unmoored from divine guidance, leads to a society that is “tossed to and fro” by the ever-shifting winds of human opinion. Without a higher power to orient societal values, humanity risks descending into nihilism, where nothing is sacred, and everything is permissible. In fact, that is what we have been devolving to in the last 100 years - increased social chaos - directly linked to the drastically declining reverence for God and the sacred.
In contrast, a society built on faith is grounded in a belief in higher truths, transcendent meaning, and the sacredness of life. Faith does not just govern personal behavior; it shapes cultures, societies, and civilizations, by instilling a sense of responsibility to others, to future generations, and to God.
Faith’s Enduring Relevance in the Modern World
Despite advances in technology and science, faith remains not only relevant but essential. As Harris and Dawkins attempt to construct a purely rational, materialistic worldview, they fail to recognize that even the most ardent atheist lives by faith in one form or another. Every individual exercises belief — whether in scientific principles, human goodness, or personal autonomy. The question is not whether one has faith, but in what one places that faith. For the believer, faith is placed in God — a source of unchanging, eternal truth. For the atheist, faith is placed in human intellect and the material world, both of which are subject to decay and error.
Today’s technologists can’t explain, replicate or even shift some of the monumental vestiges of planet earth’s human history, artifacts created and manipulated in earlier eras, by whom, how? Those who assume our most ancient forebears progressively emerged from salty amoeba and then climbed into and then down from the trees, lived life without spoken or written language, had no sophisticated technology and possessed only limited intelligence or knowledge, and then invented God as they invented language, merely prove their own ignorance or intellectual preferences. The advance of the sciences and methodical intellectual inquiries are wondrous tools that provide many conveniences and shed growing light on creative processes but possess no independent capacity whatsoever to offer answers about why we are here, where we are going, why things came to be and what powers govern this world and its destiny. Which instrument can now or will in the future be able to discern and measure the light of Christ or the gifts of the Spirit or the power of love, or the infinitely creative, organising and sustaining power of faith, or the Godly nature of good, or the true source of evil? And even if they could measure such things, who could govern them?
At the beginning of the twentieth century, astronomers couldn’t discern more than our Milky Way galaxy. It appeared that this was the universe, and that seems laughable to us for whom Edwin Hubble et al, and later, the Hubble telescope and other forms of space exploration have opened new vistas. In the early nineteenth century, the perceived universe was even smaller, but of course that didn’t and doesn’t mean the other billions of galaxies, each with its own billions of stars and planets weren’t there all the time. Nor does it mean that present day instruments are anywhere near finding the edges of the expanse of space and creation. It’s a curious thing that as far as present instruments can tell the radius from the earth to the discernible edge of the universe is more or less uniform. It is as if we’re in the centre of a sphere, which is a nicely rounded illustration of the necessarily myopic human view, even though that narrow view encompasses a glimpse of 90+ billion light years of creative works.
Not for a moment are we suggesting that the intergalactic and microscopic search shouldn’t continue; again, quite the opposite. In a God centered worldview, science and faith are brilliant companions, for science highlights God’s amazing handiwork and allows us to understand just a modicum more of His infinite mind and sustaining power. We do declare that mankind’s thirst for knowledge and our own personal intellectual adventures ought to lead us to a sense of gratitude and humble recognition of the creative capacity and loving kindness of our Creator.
Conclusion: Faith Offers What Atheism Cannot
Ultimately, the choice between faith and atheism is a choice between hope and despair, between meaning and meaninglessness.
Faith offers something atheism cannot: hope, meaning, and a transcendent sense of purpose. It embraces the mystery of existence while providing moral clarity and a sense of direction. Atheism, despite its claims to intellectual superiority, leaves individuals in a vacuum, without hope of an afterlife or the moral foundation that comes from belief in a higher power. It is not enough to reject faith in favor of reason; the human heart craves something more — the assurance that there is meaning beyond this life, and that each individual has a distinct purpose and is part of a divine plan. Moreover, notwithstanding the perceived “weakness” of human craving, the reality is that abandoning the fuel our spirits and our society were designed to run on is to abandon humanity to an endless, empty search. In the absence of faith in God, the nothingness will engulf the world. If the nothingness is invited to overtake, the bankrupt chaos predicted by the second law of thermodynamics becomes inevitable. God forbid.
We choose to echo the resolution of Joshua, “As for me and my house … we will serve the Lord (Joshua 24:15).”
The basic tenets of the faith underpinning the Veritas Chronicles mission of Publishing Good Stories of Good are described in the attachment: In God We Trust. §
[1] The full text of the Sam Harris unsolicited email …
“X—
Thanks for writing. Please forgive me if I’m not immediately bowled over by the idea that you were once a “militant atheist” just like me, and that now, under the influence of Jordan Peterson & Friends, you’ve discovered Jesus Christ to be the sole savior of humanity. It might surprise you to learn that it’s the first claim which gives me pause. In situations like this, I generally discover that the former “atheist,” militant or otherwise, has been dawdling on the brink of faith for years, wrestling with his doubts, and yearning, above all, to join a community of believers. Some roads to Damascus are far more crowded than you might imagine.
But it seems that you and I agree that there really is a problem with religious fundamentalism. I’m glad to know, for instance, that you are just as worried about Islamic extremism as I am. On your account, we simply disagree about faith itself and about the special validity of Christianity—or rather, Catholicism, which is the form you recommend. I think it should strike you as interesting, at least—if not entirely damning of your whole enterprise—that you don’t even agree with all Christians, nor they with you, about what leads to salvation. Perhaps that’s a point to which we will return.
I should acknowledge at the outset that we use the term “faith” in a variety of ways. However, most religious people (as well as most atheists) use it to indicate the acceptance of specific religious doctrines without sufficient reason—that prayer can heal the sick, that the historical Jesus was resurrected and will be returning to Earth, that believers will be reunited with their (believing) loved ones after death, etc. Hebrews 11:1 really does give the game away— “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” According the Bible, therefore, faith is some combination of wishful thinking (“the assurance of things hoped for”) and belief without evidence (“the conviction of things not seen”). I am not alone in thinking that this frame of mind is antithetical to reason and that faith-based religion remains in perpetual conflict with science. However, I want to make it clear that I’m not criticizing faith as a positive attitude in the face of uncertainty, of the sort indicated by phrases like, “have faith in yourself.” There’s nothing wrong with that kind of faith.
So, as you expect, I think that the religious “moderation” you champion in your letter amounts to an elaborate exercise in self-deception. I recognize, of course, that there are differences between moderation and fundamentalism. But I don’t consider the boundary that you draw between them to be clear, much less principled. And I hold a very different view of many of the topics you raised—Pascal, for instance. I think Nietzsche had it right when he wrote, “The most pitiful example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed in the corruption of his reason through original sin when it had in fact been corrupted only by his Christianity.”
So let me address my longstanding frustration with religious moderates, to which you alluded. It is true that their “sophisticated” theology has generally taught me to appreciate the candor of religious fanatics. Whenever someone like me or Richard Dawkins criticizes Christians for believing in the imminent return of Christ, or Muslims for believing in martyrdom, moderates like yourself claim that we have caricatured Christianity and Islam, taken extremists to be the sole representatives of these great faiths, or otherwise overlooked a shimmering ocean of nuance. We are invariably told that a mature understanding of the historical and literary contexts of scripture renders faith perfectly compatible with reason and contemporary ethics, and that our attack upon religion is, therefore, “simplistic,” “dogmatic,” or even “fundamentalist.” Needless to say, such casuistry generally comes moistened by great sighs of condescension.
But there are several problems with any such defense of moderate religion. First, most moderates assume that religious “extremism” is uncommon and, therefore, inconsequential. But 40 percent of Americans believe that we are living in the End Times (63 percent of Evangelical Christians, 76 percent of Black Protestants, 31 percent of Mainline Protestants, and 27 percent of Catholics). This idea is extreme in almost every sense: It is extremely silly, extremely corrosive of our politics, extremely worthy of scorn, but it is not extreme in the sense of being rare.
The problem, as I see it, is that religious moderates don’t tend to know what it is like to be truly convinced that death is an illusion and that an eternity of happiness awaits the faithful beyond the grave. They have, as you say, “integrated doubt” into their faith. Another way of putting this is that they just have less faith—and for good reason. The result, however, is that your fellow moderates tend to doubt that anybody is ever motivated to sacrifice his life, or the lives of others, on the basis of religion. Moderate doubt—which I agree is an improvement over fundamentalist certainty in most respects—often blinds a person to the reality of full-tilt religious lunacy. Such blindness is now especially unhelpful, given the hideous collision between modern doubt and Islamic certainty that we are witnessing across the globe.
Second, many religious moderates imagine, as you do, that there is some clear line of separation between their faith and extremism. But there isn't. Scripture itself remains a perpetual engine of extremism: because, while He may be many things, the God of the Bible and the Qur'an is not a moderate. Read scripture as closely as you like, you will not find reasons for religious moderation. On the contrary, you will find reasons to live like a maniac from the 14th century—to fear the fires of hell, to despise nonbelievers, to persecute homosexuals, and to hunt witches (good luck). Of course, you can cherry-pick scripture and find inspiration to love your neighbor and turn the other cheek, but the truth is, the pickings are slim, and the more fully one grants credence to these books, the more fully one will be committed to the view that infidels, heretics, and apostates are fit only to be crushed in God’s loving machinery of justice.
And how does one “integrate doubt” into one’s faith? By acknowledging just how doubtful many of the claims of scripture are, and thereafter reading it selectively and allowing its assertions about reality to be continually supplanted by fresh insights—scientific (“The world isn’t 6000 years old?”), mathematical (“pi doesn’t actually equal 3?”), and moral (“I shouldn’t beat my slaves? Wait, I can’t even keep slaves?”). Religious moderation is the result of taking scripture less seriously. So why not take these books less seriously still? Why not admit that they are just books, written by fallible human beings like ourselves? ...”
