THE LIGHT THAT WILL NOT GO OUT
There is a strange irony in reading The Portable Atheist, Christopher Hitchens’ curated anthology of disbelief. Page after page argues that the universe is empty of God, that faith is a human projection, that Scripture is an ancient reflection of tribal fear.
Yet the very intensity of the argument reveals that the human mind cannot escape the question of origins, morality, meaning, and purpose; the cosmos is too vast, too intricate, too symmetrical in its laws to silence the whisper of transcendence. Hitchens attempts to build a world without God, but like a spacecraft trying to outrun gravity, the very effort shows the inescapable pull of the One who made us (Psalm 19:1).
The universe itself behaves like a devotional text—an ordered system governed by constants so precise that even slight variations would collapse stars, atoms, and life itself. The rational mind instinctively traces patterns back to a Mind, order back to a Designer, moral motion back to a Lawgiver.
Remove God, and you must still explain why human conscience accuses and comforts (Romans 2:15), why beauty stirs longing, and why love refuses to fit inside the cold calculations of matter. Atheism can bring brilliant critique, but it cannot provide the warmth of meaning. It explains the machine but not the music.
And this is where the gospel shines with a brilliance no anthology of doubt can extinguish: God does not merely exist; He speaks, He seeks, He stoops.
In Christ, the Infinite entered the finite; the Author stepped into His own story; the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14).
The God that Hitchens thought too distant, too harsh, too improbable is the God who washed feet, wept at graves, welcomed doubters, and stretched His hands across a wooden cross to pull a broken world back to Himself. No philosophical argument can match the personal beauty of Jesus Christ—the One who is simultaneously the explanation for the universe and the healer of the human heart (Colossians 1:16-17).
So let The Portable Atheist do what it does best—raise questions. Let it challenge the mind, stir the dust, push against complacency. But then let those questions lead you to the only One who answers with both truth and tenderness.
Faith does not fear the shadows because Christ is the Light (John 8:12); it does not fear the void because Christ fills all things (Ephesians 1:23); it does not fear doubt because Christ walks beside the doubter until the dawn breaks. In Him the cosmos finds coherence, the conscience finds cleansing, and the soul finds its center.
The atheist may carry a portable anthology of unbelief—but the believer carries something better: the living presence of Jesus Christ, the One who holds atoms together and hearts together, the One who stands when every argument collapses, the One who remains when every star burns out, the One who says, “I am with you always” (Matthew 28:20).
BDD
