How Could the Atoms of Lindsay Clancy Be Put on Trial for Killing Other Atoms?

The judge in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial declared a mistrial. Why? Because one juror believed she was guilty of murder, while the other 11 jurors believed she should not be convicted of murder. A mother who drowned her 3 children in 1954 killed again after being shown leniency. An Illinois mother had become “very invested” in the high-profile Lindsay Clancy murder trial before prosecutors say she killed her 2-year-old son, according to witnesses cited in court documents. A Michigan man killed his wife and their 6 Kids, then set the house on fire in an apparent murder-suicide. Life is cheap because life is insignificant. Massachusetts became the 10th state to allow abortion up to birth. What about one second after birth?

The pagan world could never resolve the philosophical problem of the ultimate foundation of truth. This is why Pilate could seriously ask Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38), given his culture’s operating assumptions about ultimate reality. No one knew, except maybe the Emperor, who was considered a god. The Greeks knew they needed an ultimate standard, a personal ultimate standard to make reality work. To cover their bases, they set up an altar “TO AN UNKNOWN GOD” (Acts 17:23).

Today is no different. Materialists and skeptics tell us that (1) they know truthful things and (2) they can’t verify that anything they claim is true in an ultimate sense. Their initial claim of truth rests on another claim of truth, which rests on another. What they can’t come up with is an ultimate authoritative claim. What they have is a series of leaky buckets.

The Impossibility of the Contrary

If religious skeptics have forsaken biblical presuppositions, why is it they can think rationally, apply the scientific method, and require some semblance of morality? The answer is simple. Unbelievers are philosophically schizophrenic. They don’t often live consistently with the governing principles of their materialistic worldview. For example, “The success of modern science has been due to its ‘borrowed capital,’ because modern science is like the prodigal son. He left his father’s house and is rich, but the substance he expends is his father’s wealth.”

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I want to know which bucket is the last one that holds all the dripping water from the previous leaking buckets. This was the point that Greg Bahnsen made in his debate on apologetic methodology with R.C. Sproul at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1977, when I was a student there. “And as Antony Flew says, what good is it going to do [for] you to take one leaky bucket and add it to another leaky bucket? You’re just going to have a twofold leaky bucket now.” As Flew put it, “If one leaky bucket will not hold water, there is no reason to think that ten can.”[1] Flew was a committed atheist most of his life. In 2007, he wrote There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

This argument about finding an ultimate foundational starting point has a long history, as this story demonstrates.

An often told story has a modern philosopher lecturing on the solar system. An [elderly] lady in the audience [declares]: Earth rests upon a large turtle. “What does this turtle stand on?” the speaker [asks, thinking he’s got her cornered]. “A far larger turtle.” As the scholar persists, his challenger retorts: “You are very clever but it is no use, young man. It’s turtles all the way down.”[2]

There must be an ultimate reference point for everything: matter, humanness, morality, truth, meaning, etc. Consider the following from the 2019 film Replicas starring Keanu Reeves and Alice Eve.

Reeves: Something’s preventing the synthetic from achieving watershed consciousness.

Eve: Maybe there’s more that makes us human … like the soul.

Reeves: We’re the sum total of what has happened to us and how we processed it. That’s what makes us. It’s all neurochemistry.

Eve: Do you really believe that? That’s all I am? Your children? Just pathways of electrical signals and chemistry?

The pagan world tried in vain to find an ultimate place to stand but could not. Their pagan idols, while many (Acts 17:16-23), were mute (1 Cor. 12:2; Ps. 115:5; Isa. 46:7; Jer. 10:5; Hab. 2:18-20), so their philosophers spoke for them, but they were no better at finding what Francis Schaeffer called “true truth.”[3] All they could offer was probability and philosophical guessing. We don’t proclaim a god of probability. The only true starting point is with the God of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Heaven and earth are not the ultimate authority (matter), but the sovereign God.

Modern secular philosophers are worse than Pilate. At least he admitted he did not know what was true. Today’s materialists claim to know what’s true even though they admit that they are children of the atom, or I should say, of atoms. A conglomeration of cosmic dust has the audacity to speak wisdom and certitude. Consider the Roman poem De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”), a first-century BC work by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, who hoped to explain Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience, in which nothing is “fixed.”

When atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have produced anything.[4]

Stephen Greenblatt writes the following in his 2011 book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern: “[Lucretius’] On the Nature of Things struck me as an astonishingly convincing account of the way things are.”[5] Greenblatt adopted the epistemological fundamentals of Lucretius’s worldview.

The stuff of the universe … is an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space, like dust motes [particles] in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction. There is no escape from this process. When you look up at the night sky and, feeling unaccountably moved, marvel at the numberless stars, you are not seeing the handiwork of the gods or a crystalline sphere detached from our transient world. You are seeing the same material world of which you are a part and from whose elements you are made. There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design. All things, including the species to which you belong, evolved over vast stretches of time.”[6]

There is no moral “should” or “ought” in Lucretius’ worldview. This is equally true for Greenblatt, although he would most likely argue otherwise.

How can atoms, no matter how complex, be put on trial for killing other atomic structures, given the physicalist presuppositions that “the world of the mind is increasingly reduced to the goings on of chemistry alone”?[7]

Why It Might Be OK to Eat Your Neighbor

The most damning assessment of a matter-only cosmos devoid of a Creator is that we got to this place in our evolutionary history by acts of violence whereby the strong conquered the weak with no one to support or condemn them. Why It Might Be OK to Eat Your Neighbor repeatedly raises the issue of accounting for the conscience, good and evil, and loving our neighbor. It’s shocking to read what atheists say about a cosmos devoid of meaning and morality.

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[1] Antony G. N. Flew, God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1966), 63.

[2] Charles W. Petit, “Life and Culture: Cosmology,” U.S. News & World Report (August 16/23, 1999), 74.

[3] Francis A. Schaeffer, A Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy: Three Essential Books in One Volume (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1990), 104, 143, 163, 174, 218, 311, 325.

[4] Lucretius, De rerum natura, 2.216–224.

[5] Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2011), 5.

[6] Greenblatt, The Swerve, 6-7.

[7]Joseph Minich, Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2023), 12.

American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources