Check out this story:
http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/01/anger-at-god-common-even-among-atheists/
Does it surprise you that atheists get mad at God? In fact, atheists and agnostics report being mad at God at greater rates than believers. How can you be mad at something, or someone, you don’t believe exists.
Well, it doesn’t surprise me. I believe that atheists and agnostics believe in God, or maybe more accurately ‘a higher power’, they just won’t, or can’t, admit it to themselves. In the fall I read the book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller. Keller’s contention, and mine, is that atheists and agnostics, in fact all humans, live their lives as if there is good and bad, right and wrong, as if there is purpose and meaning to life. We are all living our lives as if there is a God. Consider the following quote from Keller’s book.
“We all live as if it is better to seek peace instead of war, to tell the truth instead of lying, to care and nurture rather than destroy. We believe that these choices are not pointless, that it matters which way we choose to live. Yet if the Cosmic Bench is truly empty, then “who sez” that one choice is better than the others?……Once we realize this situation there are two options. One is that we can simply refuse to think out the implications of all this. We can hold on to our intellectual belief in an empty Bench and yet live as if our choices are meaningful and as if there is a difference between love and cruelty. Why would we do that? A cynic might say that this is a way of “having one’s cake and eating it, too.” That is, you get the benefit of having a God without the cost of following him. But there is no integrity in that. The other option is to recognize that you do know there is a God. You could accept the fact that you live as if beauty and love have meaning, as if there is meaning in life, as if human beings have inherent dignity—all because you know God exists. It is dishonest to live as if he is there and yet fail to acknowledge the one who has given you all these gifts.”
Evolutionary psychologists would say that this belief in meaning and right and wrong are evolved traits. But for what benefit?
Pleochroism 