Atheism could be a Cognitive Deficiency

I believe atheism is less about logic and more about a cognitive malfunction.

Alvin Plantinga, one of the most influential Christian philosophers of the modern era, developed what he called the Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model of religious belief. In this framework, belief in God can be "properly basic".

In philosophy, a belief is called "properly basic" if it’s rational to hold it without first proving it by argument or evidence.

Think about everyday examples:

• You don’t prove your memory is reliable before you trust it—you just remember.

• You don’t prove the outside world is real before you step outside—you just assume it.

• You don’t prove other people have minds before talking to them—you just believe it.

All of these are properly basic beliefs. They’re not irrational, but they don’t rest on prior arguments. They’re part of the foundation that other reasoning builds on.

Plantinga argues that belief in God can be properly basic in the same way. Just as your mind naturally forms beliefs about the world through memory and perception, it can also naturally form belief in God through what John Calvin called sensus divinitatis—our "sense of the divine." Just as we naturally trust our senses of sight or hearing, we also have a natural capacity to recognize God’s reality.

But since the fall of man brought in brokenness of every kind—not just sickness and disease—it stands to reason that if our bodies can be negatively affected by sin, then our minds could be as well. Plantinga argues that our "God-sense" can suffer this same corruption, leaving it damaged, suppressed, or malfunctioning. Therefore, unbelief—atheism—isn’t a triumph of reason, but the result of a glitch in the mind, like a broken compass that fails to point north.

Some might object here, with something like: "If my faculties are broken, how is that my fault? Doesn’t this make God the one to blame for my unbelief?" Plantinga responds that unbelief is not mere innocent ignorance but the suppression of truth (Romans 1). The noetic effects of sin mean that humans resist and distort what they know of God. In other words, our cognitive malfunction is bound up with moral rebellion, not detached from it. The broken compass analogy still stands—but the failure is not God’s design, it’s humanity’s fall.

When we look at many of the arguments offered by atheists—claims that collapse into self-contradiction, denials of the very possibility of truth and morality, or even the attempt to use reason when our minds (on naturalism) would be built only for survival—Plantinga’s point starts to make sense. If the "God-sense" is distorted, it stands to reason that the conclusions drawn from it will often sound absurd, outrageous, or self-defeating

Atheism isn't really about lacking evidence, it's about a glitch in the mind.

See also: The Case for Properly Basic Belief in God