Is atheism only a contributor to mental illness, or a form of it?

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article the other day. It's entitled, "Don't Believe in God? Lie to your children." The alternative, the sub-head states bluntly, is to simply "tell them that they are going to die and turn to dust."

The article goes on to cite a study in a 2018 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology which seems to support the notion that declining interest in religion is one major reason why depression and mental health problems generally are on the increase. The author, a psychotherapist named Erica Komisar, writes

As a therapist, I’m often asked to explain why depression and anxiety are so common among children and adolescents. One of the most important explanations—and perhaps the most neglected—is declining interest in religion. This cultural shift already has proved disastrous for millions of vulnerable young people.

Her observation makes intuitive sense. Let's face it: to believe that one's existence is ultimately meaningless is kind of, you know, a downer. And try as one might, if there is no God and life is pointless, attempts to generate artificial meaning in self-sacrificial service to the equally meaningless and purely temporary existence of other walking accidents can only partly fill the void.

That doesn't mean, of course, that people don't try. G.K. Chesterton was right: when we stop believing in God, we don't believe in nothing. We believe in anything. It's amazing what some atheists believe in. Crystals. Alien abductions. Horoscopes. Marxism. Intersectionality. Richard Dawkins.

I think every thoughtful adolescent goes through an existentialist phase. Existentialism generates a kind of bubble of pseudo-meaning. Living "authentically" feels good and sort of fulfilling even that authenticity itself is finally pointless. There is, after all, the option that scientist Rick Sanchez keeps suggesting to his grandson Morty Smith in the adult cartoon series Rick and Morty every time their extradimensional adventures confront them with an appalling truth: "Just don't think about it." Existentialism a certain sense of personal power if one only doesn't dwell on the notion that even the most authentic self is finally transient and meaningless.

During my brief flirtation with half-baked existentialism, I was a huge fan of Kurt Vonnegut, who in my opinion was no less a major literary figure and an intelligent, thoughtful man even though he has so few real answers to the very real questions he poignantly raised in his novels (parenthetically, he had a great deal to say that speaks to the ultimate bankruptcy of intersectionality, political correctness, and the various efforts of the contemporary Left to pretend that since all people are equal in worth they also must be equal and even identical in every other way, as well). One of his novels, Cat's Cradle, dealt with a religion called Bonkononism, which is based on the concept of foma, or harmless lies. Its holy book begins, "Don't be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma! All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies." The basic idea of Bonkononism- its John 3:16, as it were- is its admonition to "Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."

In other words, it suggests that we lie, not to our children, but to ourselves, about the meaninglessness of the universe. Thus, it suggests, we may manage to live a life that is not so much worthwhile, finally, as painless. Bonkononism is a religion which understands itself as and intends to be precisely what Lenin called all religion: "the opiate of the people."

And in Vonnegut's view, we all need an opiate and should avail ourselves of whatever we can find that will relieve the unbearable pain of living lives that are totally meaningless in an equally meaningless universe. Religion is an opiate, but a harmless one, for the same reason that doctors don't worry about addicting a terminal cancer patient at the point of death. If the pain can be dulled, at least that's something. Life is a terminal illness, and if nothing else matters, then, by all means, dull the pain with lies.

And it hurts to live in a universe with no God and no meaning. It hurts because there is no point to it, and because there is no point to it, there is no point to anything in it- including us. Atheists often treat their unbelief as courageous and even heroic. They see themselves as bravely facing up to reality without availing themselves of the narcotic of religion. But then, an interesting thing often happens.

H.P. Lovecraft was an atheist. He was the founder of a type of literature known as cosmic horror. It's horror based on the most horrible thought of all, a thought that is all the more horrible if we believe it to be true: that the universe is unfathomably huge, and cold, and impersonal, and empty.

Sort of empty. But maybe not entirely. Planet Earth, humanity, history, nations, family, love, friendship- and, needless to say, our own tiny, insignificant selves and our meaningless lives- these are all as grains of sand on the floor of a vast and infinite ocean. Madness is a recurrent theme in Lovecraft and the writers of his school- and madness is the inevitable result of looking beyond our microscopic selves and our fleeting lives and kind to the universe as it actually is. "The most merciful thing in the world," Lovecraft suggests in the opening lines of The Call of Cthulhu, "is the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents."  We would be driven mad if we could actually realize merely what infinitely little we know. But beyond what we know is what we do not know, what we cannot know, and what would be beyond our comprehension if we perceived it; what would drive us insane from its sheer otherness, its incomprehensibility...

But Lovecraft doesn't stop there. Having placed us in an alien and unknowable universe, and made our lives tiny and insignificant and meaningless, he then proceeds to introduce structure and meaning, even if it is alien and incomprehensible to us. It seems to be absurd for an atheist to express his ideas by creating a pantheon, but that's exactly what Lovecraft does. Azathoth may be a blind, idiot creator, piping tunelessly at the center of existence, but he is nevertheless a creator. Nodens and the Elder Gods are required to hold the Great Old Ones and the forces of chaos in check, at least until "the stars are right," and they return to claim our universe- a universe they possessed before us- as their own.

Lovecraft didn't actually believe in the Great Old Ones, or the Elder Gods, or the other cosmic beings in his atheist's pantheon. Yet to convey his vision, his notion of an incomprehensible universe, he had to create realms in which the laws of nature as we understand them do not apply, and incomprehensible beings infinitely greater than ourselves. He had to invent gods, if only as metaphors. To express the meaningless of existence- the howling, empty, chaotic pointlessness of it all- he had to invest it with meaning and give it a kind of order and structure. So deeply impressed upon the human mind is the idea of universal purpose and structure and meaning that it's very difficult even to deny it without embracing it. And after all, what is science itself but an effort- and a surprisingly successful one- to find order and structure in an allegedly random universe, and to understand what, in such a universe, ought to be by its very nature incomprehensible and chaotic?

Of course, if it actually were random and chaotic, we wouldn't be here, and even if we somehow were, science wouldn't be.

Modern pop atheism has redefined religion. Previous generations understood Confucianism or Buddhism and other systems of belief that didn't necessarily embrace the idea of an afterlife or of personal deities but which served as more or less comprehensive ways of explaining the universe and one's place in it and governing oneself accordingly to be religions and saw no problem with that. The notion that Marxism is, in essence, a religion in which the place of a personal god is filled by objective and inexorable laws of nature fills the role of religion in the lives of its adherents and in fact to all intents and purposes is a religion is as familiar as it is apt. To make belief in an afterlife and/or the supernatural part of the definition of religion serves a convenient tactical purpose in isolating belief systems based on what cannot be quantified or empirically proven and treating them as irrational, or depriving them of a place in the public square readily given to other systems of belief that serve the same function in people's lives. But Chesterton's observation nevertheless seems to be true: when a person stops believing in God, that person doesn't believe in nothing. Rather, one is apt to believe in anything. A school of psychology, perhaps. Flying saucers. Crystals. A political idea. Or science. Well, not science, exactly. Empiricism. And when all is said and done, at least by the traditional definition, what is empiricism, really, if not a religion- an intellectual system for explaining and making sense of the universe and our place in it, even if it doesn't finally do more than a half-baked job of it, given how little of it we can actually observe and quantify?

There is an irony in science becoming a seat of dogma since by definition science is always provisional and open to new insights and discoveries. But we as a society have tended at least during the seventy years I've been alive more and more to look to science to give us the kind of answer we used to look for in religion. As ironic as it is, there is nobody more dogmatic than an empiricist, and one of the results of the quite reasonable awe in which we hold the discoveries of modern science is that empiricism has become so dominant as a way of approaching life that it has taken the place of religion in the traditional sense as the place to which we look for truth despite its obvious limitations.

"Seeing," it is said, "is believing." "Show me," we say. "I'll believe it when I see it." Yet there is a problem here, a problem in the face of which empiricism fails. The amount of knowledge which humanity has accumulated throughout the millennia or for that matter in my lifetime alone is astounding. But the more we learn about the universe, the more aware we become of how much we do not know. And not just how much we do not know yet. The self-assurance of the empiricist aside, the more we learn, the more acutely we become aware of how much will probably forever be beyond the bounds of our knowledge. The more we discover about the brain, for example, or the human genome, the more complex they turn out to be. Answers we think ourselves on the verge of finding elude us. More questions arise in place of those answers. Ironically, as our knowledge increases, the limits of empiricism become more and more manifest.

Empiricism has undermined religion. Healthy empiricism, restricted to being a way of understanding what little can be observed without reflexively dismissing what can't, wouldn't have. Because something cannot be verified doesn't mean that it isn't true; it just means that it can't be verified as being true. But instead, empiricism has become a religion and a dogmatic one at that. It does permit the game religious liberals play, of course, and say that something which cannot be quantified can nevertheless be "true" in the sense that it speaks authentically to our experience of being or some other such drivel. In other words, you can be both an empiricist and also a sort of Christian or Jew or Muslim if one stipulates that Christianity and Judaism and Islam and all the other great religions are comprised, like Bonkononism, of foma, of harmless and even helpful lies.

But I cannot endorse Dr. Komisar's suggestion that we tell benign lies to our children, or even to ourselves. She is right about one thing, though, and it's the same thing that Vonnegut and Lovecraft got right: of all possible horrors, the most insanity-inducing is the thought that one is living an utterly meaningless life filled with utterly meaningless suffering and sorrow amid an utterly meaningless universe, and that all that lies at the end of it all is oblivion. That thought is unbearable, and every instinct in us cries out that it is a lie.

So, I think, does reason itself.  The Apostle Paul is right: God has left Himself a clear and unmistakable witness in creation, and only the willfully blind can fail to see it. To say, as neo-atheists often say, that they see no evidence of their being a God is to confess to wearing a blindfold one has chosen to place over one's own eyes.

I would suggest that despite havoc the increasing prevalence of atheism the nihilism which follows it as the night doth follow the day has wreaked on the happiness and mental health of ourselves and of our children, there is a better reason to believe in God. We should believe that there is a God because, all the posturing of pop atheism to the contrary, it's the only logical conclusion we can reach.

However much science may blather about nothingness being inherently unstable or other such bilge, Carl Sagan, of all people, asked a question which cuts to the heart of the matter. That his answer was wrong doesn't make the question any less valid.

"Something has lasted forever," he said. "Either the universe or a God Who created it. Which is it?"

Sagan invoked Occam's Razor, or the Principle of Logical Economy: "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity." Or to put it simply, the simplest explanation for something which accounts for all the known facts is likely to be the correct one. "Either God, Who created the universe, has always existed, or the universe itself has always existed. To invoke Occam's Razor, why not save a step and simply say that the universe has always existed?" Dr. Sagan, at least, didn't resort to self-evident nonsense like saying that "nothingness is inherently unstable."

The trouble is that while the eternity of the universe is indeed a simpler explanation, it doesn't account for the facts. As an illustration of evolution, Dr. Sagan told the story of an ancient Japanese sea battle in a strait inhabited by a particular species of crab. Some of the crabs had shells that looked like the face of a Samurai warrior. These fishermen would throw back, believing them to be inhabited by the souls of the warriors who were killed in that battle or who committed suicide by drowning when their side was defeated.

As time went on, all of the surviving crabs in the strait had shells that looked like the face of a Samurai warrior. Having such a shell was an evolutionary advantage; it prevented a crab from being harvested and eaten. But there is a question Dr. Sagan didn't ask: why should any of the crabs have had shells that looked like the face of a Samurai in the first place?

Why should aspirin cure headaches? Why should penicillin cure infections? Why should fluvoxamine prevent the reabsorption of serotonin in the synapses of the brain, and relieve depression? Is it even rational to believe that the literally billions of random, unlikely accidents that would be necessary to produce a single dandelion by mere chance could be replicated for every living species on the planet, or- to cut to the chase- that matter itself should just happen to happen?

Where, in the observable world, do we encounter an exception to the law of entropy? Complex things break down, simplify, and decay with time; they do not typically become more complex if chance is the only factor. Matter cannot be created or destroyed by non-nuclear means- at least by us, or by forces we have observed. But even if it is granted that matter is eternal, how could it accidentally arrange itself into the manifold complex forms necessary to form a universe?

Isn't an origin outside the observative world not subject to its laws a better explanation for the existence of the universe even if it does require Dr. Sagan's "extra step?"

The answer science- which is fatally wounded as an instrument with which to search for ultimate truth precisely by its irrational inability to consider or concede any causality which it cannot observe or measure, however useful it may be in other areas- gives to that question is the Law of Large Numbers. The universe is unimaginably vast, it says, and unimaginably old. The argument amounts to the notion that a large enough room containing enough chimpanzees pounding away randomly at the keyboards of word processors, given enough time one would- quite by accident- produce a perfect copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare.

But the universe- and even a frog- is incomparably more complex than the process of producing a complete text of Shakespeare's works. Sure, the Law of Large Numbers explains a great deal about how the universe might theoretically have come about, even though (increasingly common boasts about our being close to replicating it aside, which turn out on examination to be more hype than reality), we still can't replicate the origin of life.

It's not just that atheism produces nihilism, and nihilism produces despair, and despair produces depression and all manner of psychological malaise, and that atheism is subversive of our happiness, our mental health, and the happiness and mental health of our children. From the very outset of the human race, we have intuitively sensed that the universe does have purpose and structure and meaning. The wonders of modern science continue to amaze us with new discoveries of those wonders, undermining- whether science admits it or not- the notion that the universe evolved contrary to the way we see it working all around us from chaos to structure and function and all by an unfathomable number of incredibly unlikely accidents, and by mere chance.

Perhaps it's not just that atheism and nihilism make us crazy. Perhaps its that they, themselves, inherently are crazy, and that however hard we may willfully resist that conclusion, we instinctively sense it.

Perhaps we see the footprint of God, as it were, in our own intellect, our own creativity, and our own moral sense, and our instinctive impulse to make sense of what the notion of an accidental universe cannot help to lead us to expect to be senseless.

Perhaps there is a God-shaped hole in our minds, as well as in the hearts of which  St. Augustine wrote, "You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You."

Perhaps it's that, as the vast majority of human beings throughout history have sensed, atheism is inherently and self-evidently irrational, and not only a rejection of common sense but a denial of everything our senses tell us about ourselves and the universe in which we live.

Maybe the best thing we can do for the mental health of our children is to stop lying to ourselves and admit what our deepest instincts tell us.