Modern critics of religion often dismiss belief in God as a relic; a psychological comfort mechanism left over from an age of ignorance. We needed gods, they say, to explain the thunder, the harvest, the plague, and the stars. Now we have science. Now we understand systems, probability, and natural law. We no longer need gods because we no longer need explanations we can’t verify. This idea, on its face, seems almost obvious to large swaths of the human population.
But what if we have the story backward?
What if God isn’t the product of myth, but its final refiner? What if belief in a Creator is not a placeholder for ignorance, but the historical conclusion of the human search for moral, metaphysical, and civilizational coherence? What if the strongest evidence for God is not in miracles, scripture, or philosophical syllogisms, but in the record of history itself – in the long, bloody, chaotic march of civilization, in which every culture sought order, meaning, and truth, and found they could only hold together by converging toward a singular idea: a creative, moral, eternal God?
This is not an argument from mysticism. It is an argument from convergence.
The earliest human societies were tribal, animistic, and polytheistic. Each tribe had its own gods, spirits of nature, of the hunt, of the dead, of fertility, of war, and of many other things. These gods were local, limited, and often conflicting. When tribes went to war, their gods went with them, and when one tribe conquered another, the victorious gods had to absorb or dominate the vanquished. The pantheon expanded, but then strained. With every conquest came theological negotiations: gods merged, changed names, swapped functions, and gained (or lost) power. The more civilizations grew, the more the gods multiplied, until they began to consolidate.
This process of religious convergence was not philosophical so much as it was pragmatic.
To rule over multiple peoples, an empire needed a common religious language. To maintain internal order, it needed divine consistency. It wasn’t enough to let every city worship its own gods when the empire depended on unified law and loyalty. Over time, the gods began to converge. The strongest deities absorbed the roles of weaker ones. Sky gods became creator gods, war gods gained dominion over fate, and fertility gods merged with harvest gods. Marduk in Babylon, Ra in Egypt, and eventually Ahura Mazda in Persia: each represented a step toward singularity.
And then came Israel.
While other civilizations merged their gods to rule people, Israel declared that there was only one God to begin with, and that He was eternal, moral, and uncreated. He was not made from man, but man from Him. This was a disruption to the previous battles of myth among myths.
This God made moral demands not just of kings, but of tribes and individuals. He was not the god of one people, but the God over all peoples. He required memory, obedience, and conscience.
Israel’s monotheism gave the ancient world something it had never seen before: a universal moral law not built on force or consensus, but on divine authority. It replaced the logic of power with the logic of justice. And it proved enduring.
Civilizations rose and fell. Gods came and went. But the idea of the One God grew.
It passed through persecution, exile, and conquest. It survived Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. It did so not by the sword, but by necessity: empires needed order, order required law, law required authority, and authority, to be moral and universal, could not rest on men. Ultimate authority had to rest on something higher than man, and ideally something permanent, from outside the cycle of power.
That “something” was not invented. It was refined, inherited, and eventually acknowledged as Creator.
Even when the Enlightenment tried to cast off religious authority, it could not fully discard this God. The very concept of inalienable rights, liberty, and conscience, were not secular discoveries. They were theological commitments, stripped of their source but not their structure. The Declaration of Independence does not say that men are granted rights by the state. It says we are “endowed by our Creator” with them. The West’s moral foundation is not the rejection of God, but the reapplication of Him through reason.
Today, we live in an age where belief in God is seen as optional, even archaic. But the consequences of disbelief are no longer theoretical. We are watching, in real time, the unraveling of civilizational coherence. We see law unmoored from moral authority, culture divorced from purpose, and identity elevated above truth. We see people still demanding justice, but with no universal standard to define it. We see rights demanded, but with no grounding for why anyone has them.
And what’s more, we see the quashing of universal rights, to be replaced by calls for rights specific to identity groups. Universal rights apply to and protect everyone, whereas rights specific to identity groups pit those groups against one another, turning the world into a true zero-sum game where self interest is pursued through political means rather than through economic means.
If we are forced to pursue our self interest through economic means, then we are rewarded solely based on the value of the goods or services we provide for others. When we pursue our self interest through political means, we petition the government to take what others have produced, for our benefit.
I’ve said often that the less there is a God, the more we need one, and this statement is absolutely true as a world without God is also a world without a unifying morality. Individuals can have morals in such a system, but societies devolve into a morality of the lowest common denominator, which is not functionally different from a society with no morality at all.
The less there is a God, the more we need one. That paradox defines the moral collapse of modern Europe. As Christianity has been driven from public life, the continent has not progressed into a more enlightened or peaceful society. It has instead descended into confusion, cowardice, and decay. Where once there was a shared moral framework rooted in the image of God, there is now a vacuum filled by relativism, fear, and bureaucratic appeasement. Individuals may retain a sense of right and wrong, but societies, without God, inevitably drift toward the lowest common denominator, and when evil enters that vacuum, secular governments lack the courage, clarity, or conviction to confront it.
Germany offers a striking example. During the 2015 refugee crisis, it welcomed over a million migrants from cultures with radically different views on women, sexuality, and violence. The consequences were immediate. On New Year’s Eve 2015, more than 1, 200 women were sexually assaulted across multiple German cities, including Cologne, Hamburg, and others, by large groups of North African and Middle Eastern men in coordinated attacks. The media refused to report the truth for days. Police were ordered to downplay what happened. The public was lied to, all because telling the truth had become less important than preserving a narrative. That same year, 19-year-old Maria Ladenburger, the daughter of an EU official, was raped and murdered by an Afghan migrant already known to police. In 2017, 15-year-old Mia Valentin was stabbed to death by her Afghan ex-boyfriend after he lied about his age to gain asylum as a “child.” Instead of rethinking immigration policy or confronting the cultural values driving these crimes, the state cracked down on speech. Those who raised concerns were branded “far-right,” while women were told to change their behavior. The result was moral paralysis disguised as compassion.
In the United Kingdom, entire cities turned a blind eye as Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs systematically raped, tortured, and trafficked thousands of underage girls, most of them white and working-class, over the course of decades. In places like Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, and Oxford, police, city officials, and social workers knew what was happening but refused to act. Why? Because they feared being called racist or Islamophobic. Without a transcendent moral obligation to protect the innocent, institutions defaulted to cowardly political calculations. The girls were sacrificed on the altar of tolerance. And to this day, many of the perpetrators walk free, while whistleblowers are vilified.
France, meanwhile, faces near-constant acts of Islamist terrorism. In 2015, 130 people were murdered in the Bataclan massacre and associated ISIS attacks across Paris. In 2016, 86 were killed in Nice when a jihadist drove a truck through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day. Beheadings, synagogue attacks, and school stabbings have become grimly routine. Yet instead of acknowledging that this is a clash of civilizations, the French government focuses its energy on punishing its own citizens for “Islamophobic” speech. Entire neighborhoods, the banlieues, are governed by informal sharia, where police fear to enter, unveiled women are harassed, and Jews flee. This is not integration. It is territorial loss. But post-Christian France, lacking the moral conviction to defend its own identity, submits under the guise of pluralism.
Sweden, long a model of progressive order, now has one of the highest per capita rape rates in Europe. Entire neighborhoods are controlled by gangs. Bombings, grenade attacks, and shootings occur with disturbing frequency. These trends correlate directly with mass migration from cultures that do not share Western norms of law, gender equality, or secular governance. And yet, the Swedish response has been denial. Rather than admit that secular humanitarianism has failed, leaders redefine rape statistics and blame “Swedish culture” itself. In reality, Sweden’s secularism taught people to believe in nothing, while many of the newcomers believe in something, and now, they believe they are winning.
What unites all these cases is a terrifying moral confusion. In Christian societies, the rape of a child, the trafficking of girls, or the murder of civilians in religious violence would be universally condemned. But in post-Christian societies, the will to condemn evil has eroded. The state no longer believes in absolute right or wrong, only in social optics and institutional survival. Truth is sacrificed to ideology. Cowardice is dressed as compassion. And tolerance becomes indistinguishable from surrender.
Europe was built on a Christian moral foundation. It once held as self-evident that human beings are made in the image of God, that truth matters, that children should be protected, that life is sacred, and that men bear moral responsibility. That framework unified nations across languages and borders, but today, that moral glue is gone. The state has replaced God, but offers no redemption, the media has replaced the church, but offers no truth, morality is now whatever the bureaucracy permits, and evil is only acknowledged when it becomes politically safe to do so. Often, the word ‘evil’ is misused against those trying to protect the public from barbarism.
So yes, the less there is a God, the more we need one, as a world without God cannot name, resist, or survive evil.
I just pitted two religions against each other, so it should become clear that the nature of God is also critically important. It is not simply a question of whether a society believes in God, but what kind of God it believes in. The character attributed to God shapes the moral architecture of a civilization. This is where the Christian conception of God, as a personal, relational, loving Creator who grants free will, stands in stark contrast to the Islamic view of Allah as a distant, sovereign will whose decrees are to be obeyed without question. One produces liberty, moral development, and a society built on voluntary cooperation. The other produces submission, fear, and an authoritarian moral code enforced from the top down.
Islam is also a religion of conquest where terrorism, murder, rape, theft, and other acts of barbarism are glorified when done in the act of spreading the religion. That claim, by the way, does not come from me, but from the Koran.
That’s not to say that all Islamic people glorify such things, but it is to say that the more faithful a Muslim becomes toward their religion, the more apt they are to glorify such things, and to commit them. This is precisely why such things, done in the name of Allah, are so very common across Western Europe today.
In Christianity, God is love, not metaphorically, but literally. He creates out of love, invites relationship out of love, and gives man free will out of love, even at the cost of rebellion. Morality is grounded in this divine love: a voluntary alignment with God’s nature, which is just, patient, and self-giving. This view naturally supports the principles of freedom of conscience, equality under the law, and human dignity, even for those who dissent. It also explains why the West was uniquely able to secularize without entirely collapsing. Even when the Church lost cultural primacy, the moral assumptions baked into the system, about freedom, rights, and individual worth, remained intact for generations.
Christianity is also unusual in that it does not prescribe a civil legal code, allowing it to coexist with secular governance rather than conflict with it.
In contrast, the Islamic view of God does not center on love, but on power. Allah is primarily understood as the master and man as the servant. Free will is diminished, as the will of Allah is absolute and inscrutable. Justice in Islam is not grounded in the nature of God as good, but in His right to command whatever He chooses. If Allah declares something moral, it is moral, even if it violates what would otherwise be natural law. As a result, Islamic societies often resist secularization, their moral framework not based on reason or universal principles, but on obedience to divine command. Dissent is not merely error – it is blasphemy.
Islam also includes a complete set of civil laws, which any nation other than a strict Islamic theocracy automatically conflicts.
There are of course many Muslims who see Shariah as a personal set of laws, and Jihad as a personal struggle to live by them, but that is not what the Koran says. The Koran says that Shariah is Allah’s law for all of mankind, and that Jihad is the struggle to bring all of mankind into strict conformity with it.
For any secular society to remain free, it must rest on a foundation that values voluntary morality, not coerced conformity. Only the Christian view of God, as a being who seeks love freely given, not submission under threat, provides that foundation. The Islamic conception, by contrast, more easily merges with state power to enforce religious conformity, suppress dissent, and deny individual rights. Thus, even in a world where faith has weakened, the legacy of Christianity continues to be the best guarantor of secular liberty, not because it rules, but because of the kind of God it proclaims.
In our effort to live without God, we have not created freedom. We have created moral weightlessness, and what is worse is that by inviting incompatible versions of God, Europe has created moral and civilizational chaos that can only lead to civilizational collapse.
And yet the need remains. Every ideology that has tried to replace God has created a substitute: the Party, the Nation, the Revolution, Progress. These are not secular conclusions. They are displaced theologies. They offer commandments, saints, heresies, and sacrifices, but not forgiveness, not mercy, not justice, and not a Creator.
There is no scientific basis for civil rights. Either they are unalienable and endowed by our Creator, or they are made up by the state to be taken away whenever the state finds it convenient.
Social Justice requires that ‘justice’ be sought for groups rather than individuals, such that whether someone is found guilty of murder is not based just on whether they committed murder, but also on where their ‘group’ is perceived to fit within a social hierarchy. This is not justice, but its opposite.
That we always invent something to take God’s place whenever He is removed, and that we often invert morality when we go without God, is not evidence against Him. It is the final proof that we need Him to survive.
God is not a myth that failed. He is the only God who survived all others. He is what remains when all the lesser gods have died, when all the tribal spirits have been absorbed, and when all the idols have crumbled. He is not the invention of civilization. He is its foundation. And the arc of human history does not disprove Him.
It reveals Him.
We didn’t create God. We discovered the only God who could hold the world together, not just spiritually, but civilizationally.
And now, more than ever, we must remember Him.
Hell, biblically, is the absence of God, and what is a civilization that forgets Him, if not a form of Hell? A place where truth becomes relative, justice becomes vengeance, and power becomes the only authority – that is not a place where I would want to live.
We thought we could exile God and remain free, but history shows the opposite: when God departs, tyranny rushes in to take His place.
The lesson is not just spiritual, it is historical.
The absence of God is not a neutral state. It is the beginning of something far worse. Every society that has tried to live without Him has drifted toward moral confusion, institutional corruption, and political tyranny. We thought we could exile God and remain free, but history tells a different story. When God departs, something else always rises to take His place. It may call itself progress, or justice, or equity, but it does not forgive. It does not redeem. It does not love.
We always invent substitutes: the Party, the Revolution, the State. These are not products of reason. They are displaced forms of worship. They demand sacrifices. They pronounce heresies. But they offer no salvation.
That we always replace God when we reject Him is not evidence against His existence. It is proof of how deeply we need Him. Our hearts are made to seek something higher. If we do not fill that space with truth, it will be filled with power.
The less we believe, the more we need to. God is not the last myth standing. He is the foundation beneath every lasting truth. He remains when all others have failed. He is not the invention of civilization. He is its cornerstone.
And now, more than ever, we must remember Him. Because Hell, biblically, is the absence of God. And what is a civilization that forgets Him, if not a kind of Hell? It is a place where truth becomes subjective, justice becomes vengeance, and power is the only remaining authority.
That is not a place I want to live. And if we want to avoid it, we must return to the only truth that ever held the world together. We must return to God.
