I was recently planning a trip to visit a colleague who lives in Perth in Scotland. Being a typical man and therefore proud of my navigational skills, my ability to fend for myself, and my intricate knowledge of the British motorway network, I reached manfully for my phone and typed ‘Perth’ into Google Maps.
Despite the fact that I live just outside Swindon in the south-west of England, that my phone has navigated me to Scotland many times, and that one would have assumed a computer would pick the nearer destination than one many thousands of miles away, Google Maps decided I must mean Perth, Australia.
It’s not easy to confuse Perth, Scotland with Perth, Australia. One is hot, has great beaches, and exotic wildlife; the other is wet, windy, and is more famous for its midges than for its marsupials. Thus I’ve yet to encounter a tourist stumbling out of arrivals at Perth Airport in Scotland wearing sandals and shorts and muttering “what the heck?”
But somehow, Google Maps confused the two and threw up an error: “No route possible”.1 My eleven-year-old son, who was looking over my shoulder at this point, asked: “Dad, why would Google think you meant Perth in Australia—if you wanted to get there, you wouldn’t start from here”.
If you wanted to get there, you wouldn’t start from here.
Those words of wisdom reminded me of another experience I’d had on my phone the very same day. I’d been checking the comments on a video I’d posted on social media and come across something an atheist had written. The video had been addressing the question of whether life can have meaning and purpose without God and I had argued that it could not. The commentator had protested and replied: “I have a whole set of values I live by”. He’d then shared a graphic that laid out some of those values, including ‘love’, ‘peace’, ‘kindness’, and ‘justice’.
But just as in my Google Maps experience, we can say: “That’s a great destination! Who wouldn’t want to arrive at love, peace, kindness, and justice? But here’s my question: can you get to those things from your starting point?”
The problem is that, at least if you want to be a consistent atheist (and let’s be fair, all of us as humans can be terribly inconsistent) then you’re committed to a number of things. In short: that there is no God, no supernatural, no soul, that humans are just another animal, that we’re merely the stuff we’re made of, and that the basic bottom-level reality of the universe is just the laws of physics.
Now you’re welcome to start from there. But trying to start from there and navigate your way to love, peace, kindness, and justice does look a bit like trying to drive to Perth, Australia from the south-west of England. At some point, you’re going to end up at the bottom of the ocean wondering if you should rethink your life choices.
In case you think I’m being unfair or misrepresenting atheism, here is what popular atheist philosopher, Alex Rosenberg, has to say about ‘love’:
Let’s start with love and the design problem it solves for males. A male won’t get sexual access to a female unless the male can convince her that he’ll be around to share some of his resources with her and the kids he is going to produce. Since females have been selected for not being fooled by mere expressions of fidelity, they demand stronger assurances before they will allow males to have their way with them … What will reliably guarantee unenforceable promises about the future when it would be irrational for any male to keep them? One thing that would do it is a sign of irrational commitment to the female and to her interests that could not be faked … love is irrational and unfakable, by males at any rate. In nature’s search through design space for a strategy that will ensure males’ sexual access, the emotion of love looks like it will just do the trick.2
All I can say is that life must be an absolute barrel of laughs in the Rosenberg household, especially around Valentine’s Day or wedding anniversaries. But I respect what Alex is trying to do here. He’s committed to his atheism, he’s smart enough to know that ‘love’ must therefore be explicable purely in terms of the nuts-and-bolts of biology, and so he ended up with that joyous little paragraph.
It gets similarly tricky with the other things on my commentator’s list. Justice? Again, on atheism it’s hard to see how you can do more than recognise that we each have preferences for how we’d like others to behave and if we’re lucky, we get to gang up with others (call it ‘society’ or ‘civilisation’ if you’re feeling flashy) and enforce those preferences on others. Kindness? Well, again, nature doesn’t seem particularly bothered about that one—not for nothing is it called ‘survival of the fittest’ not ‘survival of the nicest’. And peace? Well, good luck with that one.
Don’t mishear me on this. I think that love, peace, kindness, and justice are wonderful—that they are things to aspire to, virtues to aim at developing in us and in society. But we need to answer the question: what’s the basis of these things? What’s the starting point, the foundation on which we can build them? Because just as you can’t drive to Australia from England, bicycle to the moon from the Earth, or build a house without foundations, you can’t pick your values at random. Your starting point matters.
The historian Tom Holland puts it well when he writes:
People in the West, even those who may imagine that they have emancipated themselves from Christian belief, in fact, are shot through with Christian assumptions about almost everything. All of us in the West are a goldfish, and the water that we swim in is Christianity, by which I don’t necessarily mean the confessional form of the faith, but, rather, considered as an entire civilisation.3
That’s true in so far as it goes. Only it doesn’t go quite far enough, as the reason Christianity has survived (and thrived) for two thousand years, despite the best efforts of tyrants or sceptics to destroy it, isn’t because it’s a great foundation for a nice set of values. That’s to put things entirely on their head. Christianity didn’t spread, didn’t turn the values of the ancient world upside down, didn’t change hearts and minds because people liked its ethics. Rather it spread because people were convinced it was true, that Jesus really was God, really did die, and really had risen from the dead. And then, emboldened and empowered by Jesus, they transformed how they lived. The values we hold so dear are the fruit of Christianity, not its root. Indeed, as former atheist Louise Perry put it:
One of the reasons that I ended up becoming a Christian is because I realised if it were supernaturally true, you would expect it to be sociologically true.4
At the heart of the Christian faith stands not a set of values but a person, Jesus Christ. And if his claims hold water, if not just his teaching but his entire life stands up, then that doesn’t just give us a foundation for the values we yearn for, but it has some personal implications too. For Jesus didn’t just come to sort society out; he came to sort us out, and as he promised: “I have come that you might have life and have it to the full”.
Disappointingly, no targeted ads accompanied this error message. No adverts for bear-friendly toilet paper suitable for campsites, no Beginner’s Guide to Catholicism suitable for the Pope in your life. Maybe Google does understand the obvious after all.
Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2011) pp. 137-138.
Andrew Brown, ‘Tom Holland Interview: “We Swim in Christian Waters”’, The Church Times, 27 September 2019, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2019/27-september/features/features/tom-holland-interview-we-swim-in-christian-waters.
Louise has used versions of this line in a wide array of articles and podcasts. This particular version of it is cited by Emily Pollok, ‘Louise Perry’, Evangelicals Now, 14 December 2025, https://www.e-n.org.uk/people/2025-12-louise-perry/.