Why are atheists angry at God?  Joe Carter, web editor of First Things, cites studies recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that those who don’t believe in God tend to be the people most angry with Him.  (Click here for the entire article.)

Of course, we cannot take aggregate data and apply it to specific individuals.  It may be true that atheists on average are more angry with God than believers, that that doesn’t mean atheist X is.  However, I’ve found the anger from many of the atheists with whom I’ve interacted to be quite palpable, beyond what you would expect if one were engaged in an honest pursuit of the truth.  In fact, some individual atheists admit as much.

Atheist Thomas Nagel, Professor at NYU, admits that he has a cosmic authority problem with God.  He thinks the same is true of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.  When you read their books or hear their debates, it’s hard to disagree with Nagel.  Hitchens in particular calls himself an “anti-theist” and God a cosmic dictator in a “celestial North Korea.” That’s why I said in our two debates that Christopher’s attitude seems to be, “There is no God and I hate Him.” (Maybe I’m misreading Hitchens, but I don’t think so. In addition to the evidence from Christopher’s own statements, his brother Peter, who wrote “The Rage Against God,” comes to the same basic conclusion writing of Christopher’s “passion against God.”).

One has to ask, why all the anger?  To say that atheists are just angry with believers wouldn’t explain it because the study found anger with God, not his followers.  If God doesn’t exist, why be angry with Him?  The apostle Paul had an answer that he recorded in Romans 1:18-32.  But I wonder what you think.