Aren’t people just atheists because they don’t want to obey God?

(Click here for a longer, more detailed version of this.)

A man or woman rejects God neither because of intellectual demands nor because of the paucity of evidence. One rejects God because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit one’s need for God.

--Ravi Zacharias

(How atheists think,
according to Jack Chick)

There are three fundamental problems I see with this argument. The first is the use of generalized language. When Christians make this argument, I almost never hear them saying, “some atheists just reject God because they want an excuse to sin.” If they did say that, I don’t think I would have any major problem with this. After all, every position or stance has its share of people who believe in it for irrational reasons. I’m not familiar with any atheists who only reject God because they want to avoid moral accountability, but I don’t doubt that there are a few out there. So if the claim was just that “some atheists” do this, I wouldn’t be able to disagree.

But that’s not the claim. The accusation is universally applied, without any exceptions being offered. The way I parse the wording of that Ravi Zacharias quote, the tacit implication is that every single atheist in the entire history of the world only rejected God out of moral resistance. Rationally speaking, that’s a fairly untenable position to hold, because it would only take a single example to prove that proposition false. Personally, I know myself to be just such an example.