Chaos or Justice — The Case for God

There is one book in the Bible an atheist can read and nod along with. Ecclesiastes, which tradition attributes to Solomon, says the things atheists say: nothing lasts, nobody is remembered, the wise man dies just like the fool, and the good and the wicked come to the same end. Solomon says all of it with the same three words attached, thirty times over: under the sun. He means this world, looked at as if nothing existed above it. No heaven, no judgment, no God in the picture. Just what you can see from here.

That is exactly the world an atheist believes in. So this argument does something simple. It takes Solomon’s report seriously and asks: if this world is all there is, what does that cost? Not “is it sad,” but what has to be true, and what has to be false, once you nail the ceiling shut.

Be clear about what this can and cannot do. Pricing the atheist’s world does not prove God exists. This argument says so, out loud, at the point where it would be most tempting to pretend otherwise. What it can do is show the bill honestly, and then ask a harder question: why does the bill feel like a wrong done to us, rather than just a fact about the universe? By the end there will be two options left standing. Chaos, or justice.

One rule runs through the whole thing: agree before you argue. Solomon’s reasoning, inside the world he describes, is sound. You cannot out-think him. The only thing that answers Ecclesiastes is a ceiling that turns out to be open after all, and the way to see that is to admit first that from inside, he is right.

1. The same room

“and behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there is no advantage under the sun.” — καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν περισσεία ὑπὸ τὸν ἥλιον — Ecclesiastes 2:11

(A note on the wording. The Greek Old Testament says “no advantage,” or “no surplus”: nothing left over. The Douay-Rheims says “nothing was lasting.” Both are in the Library. The Greek matters at the very end of this argument, so it is worth having in view now.)

It would be easy to say “under the sun” just means the atheist’s universe, and it would be cheating. Solomon believed in God. He shut God out of the picture on purpose, as an experiment, to see what would be left standing. The atheist does not shut God out. He says there was never anyone there to shut out. But look where the two of them are standing. Same room, same walls, same ceiling. One of them chose to stand in it.

That is why Solomon’s report is worth reading instead of resenting. He walked into the atheist’s world voluntarily, and he had the money and the brains to test every wall of it.

2. The experiment

Tell someone that this world is all there is, and you will almost always hear the same reply: then life is what you make of it. Build something. Love people. Leave the world better than you found it.

That is a theory, and it has been tested. Solomon tested it, on a scale nobody alive could match, and wrote down what he found.

“And I surpassed in riches all that were before me in Jerusalem: my wisdom also remained with me. … And whatsoever my eyes desired, I refused them not: and I withheld not my heart from enjoying every pleasure.” — Ecclesiastes 2:9–10

Notice the last line. He enjoyed it. This is not a miserable rich man blaming his toys. And notice “my wisdom also remained with me.” He was not a fool who did it badly; the wise man dies like the fool anyway (2:15–16). Both excuses are gone before the verdict lands:

“…I saw in all things vanity, and vexation of mind, and that nothing was lasting under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes 2:11

Be careful what this proves. Solomon tested getting and achieving: houses, vineyards, pools, herds, silver, singers, great works. He did not test love or friendship. In fact he praises them: “It is better therefore that two should be together, than one… a threefold cord is not easily broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:9–12). So he did not test everything. What he showed is narrower, and harder to escape: nothing adds up. You cannot pile up enough of anything to make it come out to something. Whether that includes the people you love is the next question.

People keep repeating his experiment, and some of them are people an atheist would listen to. Scott-Vincent Borba co-founded e.l.f. Cosmetics and made a fortune. In 2019 he gave the fortune away and entered seminary; he was ordained a priest in May 2026. He says the turn came at a house party, when he recognised

“how lonely, empty, and unloved he felt, despite having everything in terms of material wealth.”

That is Ecclesiastes 2:11 in modern English. It counts because he actually had everything. He is not a man consoling himself for what he never got.

Tom Monaghan built Domino’s Pizza over thirty-eight years and sold it for about a billion dollars. Then he read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, got to the chapter on pride, and decided his whole life had been built on it. The yacht, the planes, the antique cars, sold them all; he called it “the millionaire’s vow of poverty.” His own words:

“I hated showoffs and I said, ‘But I’m the ultimate showoff!’”

The old monks had a name for that: vainglory, living on other people’s applause. Cassian’s Institutes XI describes it in detail, and Christ names it in the Pharisees, who take their glory “one from another” (John 5:44) in a closed loop where nothing comes in from outside. Borba shows that piling things up fails even when you get all of it. Monaghan shows why.

To be fair: plenty of rich people say they are content, and plenty give their money to secular causes and are fulfilled. This is a pattern, not a law. And notice what these two men are being cited for. That they turned to serving other people and found peace is, on its face, a point for the atheist: people found meaning, and God is nowhere in the story. That half of their story comes back later, when the question is what kind of thing finally satisfied them. Here they are witnesses to one thing only: piling it up did not work.

3. Forgotten

Death by itself has a comforting answer, and most people reach for it. I live on in my children. In my work. In the people I touched. Against plain death, that works.

But it is not an answer. It is a postponement. The people who remember you die too, and so do the people who remember them. Solomon followed the chain to its end, and the Douay gives us the word for where it stops:

“For there shall be no remembrance of the wise no more than of the fool forever, and the times to come shall cover all things together with oblivion: the learned dies in like manner as the unlearned.” — Ecclesiastes 2:16

“…the dead know nothing more, neither have they a reward any more: for the memory of them is forgotten. Their love also, and their hatred, and their envy are all perished.” — Ecclesiastes 9:5–6

Their love also. Not just the man; the loving. The very thing you would point to as the part that mattered goes with him.

You do not need an argument for this. You have stood in an old graveyard and read a stone worn smooth. Somebody paid for that stone precisely so this would not happen, and it happened anyway, in under two hundred years.

There is one exit left: humanity goes on, and the good I do ripples forward. Here the atheist’s world turns out to be harsher than Solomon’s. Solomon only knew that you would be forgotten. Modern physics says the whole chain has an end: the last person dies, the stars go out, and the universe finishes with no record and nobody left to have been helped. The atheist does not have to take that on faith. It is his own science. Solomon’s forgetting was local. The atheist’s is total.

Notice one more thing that forgetting destroys. It erases what you did. It also erases any record you could ever have been judged against. That is the next problem, coming at us from the other side.

4. The ruler

This section is about the atheist’s world, not about atheists. “Without God there is no good” gets heard as “atheists cannot be good,” which is false and insulting. Atheists are good. That was never the question. The question is: when you say something is wrong, what are you measuring it against?

The usual answers are the consequences, how it makes people feel, the agreement we all live by, my own preferences. All of those are real. None of them is binding. They tell you what you will be punished for and what you happen to feel. They do not tell you what you owe. And there is no way to get “owe” from inside a closed world, because a ruler that is part of the system cannot measure the system. Everybody ends up the final judge of good for himself, which is the same problem sola scriptura runs into one subject over: everyone his own authority, and no way to settle a dispute.

Take a case where everyone agrees: rape. Evolution can explain why we condemn it; in a species that survives by cooperating, forced mating is a disaster, so it makes sense that we would evolve to hate it. So the point is not that atheism cannot explain our disgust. It can. The point is that nobody actually believes the wrongness is a fact about our species. Nobody thinks rape is wrong for humans but would be fine for some differently evolved creature. We think it is wrong, full stop, for anyone, anywhere. That is what needs explaining: wrongness as a fact about the act itself, and a closed world has nothing to hang it on.

Beside the shocking case, put a quiet one. We think it is good to sit with a dying stranger who will never know your name and can never pay you back. What makes that true?

Suppose someone accepts all this and says: fine, there is no ruler. That is the honest end of the road, and the point is not that he becomes a monster. The point is that his decency is a habit he inherited, and he is treating it as a debt he owes. Camus went there and did not flinch. Almost nobody else does. That life is not impossible to live. It is just almost never lived.

Some philosophers try a middle path: there is real right and wrong, built into reality the way mathematics is, and no God is needed to explain it. That is a serious position and serious people hold it. But it moves the mystery instead of removing it. You now have moral facts floating free, and no account of why a creature should be bound by them, or to whom anything is owed.

Now look at the things we rank highest. Caring for the disabled, the sick, the people who will never work again and never pay us back. Choosing celibacy. Dying for a belief. Giving to a stranger on another continent who will never know your name. Forgiving an enemy. In evolutionary terms every one of these is a cost: it lowers your chances of surviving and passing anything on. And we do not treat them as odd habits we tolerate. We put them at the top. As A Meditation on Agape puts it, a love that costs nothing saves no one.

Solomon saw the problem:

“…all things equally happen to the just and to the wicked, to the good and to the evil… As the good is, so also is the sinner.” — Ecclesiastes 9:2

If this world is all there is, the man who spends himself on the useless gets nothing for it. So in a closed world, the highest thing a human being can do is also the most irrational. Either we are all permanently broken in the same way, or the closed world is wrong about what the act is worth.

Solomon does not say the moral account is empty. He says it does not get settled here, and then he looks up:

“I saw under the sun in the place of judgment wickedness, and in the place of justice iniquity. And I said in my heart: God shall judge both the just and the wicked, and then shall be the time of everything.” — Ecclesiastes 3:16–17

“And all things that are done, God will bring into judgment.” — Ecclesiastes 12:14

The account is real. It was never going to be settled under the sun.

5. The bill

Here is what it costs to say this world is all there is. Nothing above the ceiling. The experiment run at full scale, and failed. Everything you do, and everyone who remembers it, forgotten. No ruler for good, and no day the account is settled. That is not pessimism. It is just what follows. If this world is all there is, Ecclesiastes 2 is not a bad mood. It is the correct report, filed early.

And nobody lives there. The atheist grieves as if a loss were a wrong and not just an unpleasant event. He calls things meaningful. He talks about moral progress as if there were somewhere to progress to. He spends himself on people who will be forgotten.

I want to be careful here, because this is one step from calling him a hypocrite, and that would be unfair. He has a good reply: I’m not inconsistent. I just don’t think something has to last to matter. Fine. So I do not say he is a hypocrite, and I do not say he would do anything terrible. I say this: the closed world does not pay for the things he already believes, and I do not think anyone could actually live inside it. I couldn’t.

None of this proves God. Everything so far shows a cost, not a mistake. The universe is not obliged to be meaningful, and a bleak conclusion can still be a true one. That has to be said here, at exactly the point where it would be easiest to overreach, because it is true, and because it is what makes the second half of this argument necessary rather than a victory lap.

That is the bill. I cannot get you to God from here, and I will not pretend I can. What I can do is show you why the bill exists at all.

6. Made for something

C.S. Lewis had a famous argument: I long for something nothing in this world satisfies, so what I long for must be outside the world. It is a good argument, and it has a well-known reply: wanting a thing is not evidence the thing exists. So this does not start there.

It starts with what we have already seen. Human beings are reliably not satisfied when they live for themselves, and reliably are satisfied when they live for something else. And the things we honour most are exactly the things that cost us and pay nothing back in this world. That is not a statement about what we wish were true. It is a statement about what kind of creature a human being is. And it is a strange creature for evolution to have produced: one that only runs properly when it is spending itself on the useless.

Lewis again, in The Weight of Glory: our desires are “not too strong, but too weak”; we are “half-hearted creatures… far too easily pleased.” Put that beside Solomon and the experiment looks different. Solomon’s problem was not that he wanted too much. It was that he settled for too little. He had the means to want infinitely, and he spent them on gardens and singers.

The oldest way of saying this is Augustine’s:

“Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless till it rest in Thee.” — Augustine, Confessions I, 1, quoted at CCC 30

“The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God… Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.” — CCC 27

So the despair of Ecclesiastes 2 is not a dead end. It is a homing signal. It tells you what you were made for by showing you what fails to satisfy you. (One small echo, offered only as an echo. Asked what drives him as a priest, Borba said: “I feel that restlessness (of love for the poor).” He was not quoting Augustine and does not claim to be. A man who gave away a fortune simply reached for Augustine’s word.)

This is the best explanation, not a proof. An atheist can say the restlessness is a by-product, a glitch, a social instinct that overshoots. Those are real answers. The claim is only that they explain it less well.

7. Chaos or justice

Suffering is where being forgotten hurts most. The child does not only die and get forgotten. She hurt, and then got forgotten. Picture a child born with a rare disease, who loses an eye and is in pain for the rest of her life. That is the darkest version of vanity there is.

There are two ways to say what happened to her. If this world is all there is, it is just a fact. No meaning, nothing to make right, nothing resolved. She hurt for seventy years, then nothing, and there was never anyone who owed her better. Chaos had its way. If this world is not all there is, her suffering is real, it is terrible, and it is not the end. She is made whole.

Bring up that child and the reply comes instantly: You brought her up. Now explain why your all-good, all-powerful God gave her that eye. That is the atheist’s best argument, and this section does not pretend otherwise. But notice that I am not trying to explain why she suffered. I am asking what her suffering is in each world. The atheist’s world does not answer the problem of suffering. It dissolves it. It says nobody was ever owed anything, so there was nothing to answer. Her pain is not explained. It is ruled never to have had a claim.

So this is a comparison of costs, not a win. I have a hard problem: why did God permit it. He has a hard problem too: nobody was ever owed anything, and that is the end of it.

Then the other half of the ledger. Death is the great equaliser. It comes for everyone, so if death is all there is, everyone gets the exact same end. The man who murdered someone’s daughter, was never caught, and died at ninety in his sleep, ends up exactly where the girl did. So do Hitler and every person he killed. Solomon does not just agree. He calls the levelling itself the evil:

“This is a very great evil among all things that are done under the sun, that the same things happen to all men.” — Ecclesiastes 9:3

“There are just men to whom evils happen, as though they had done the works of the wicked: and there are wicked men, who are as secure as though they had the deeds of the just: but this also I judge most vain.” — Ecclesiastes 8:14

And it is worse than “he got away with it.” If there is no ruler, there is no fact of the matter about whether he got away with anything. He and the girl do not just share an ending. They share a verdict of no verdict, and that is worse than injustice. Injustice at least means there was a standard and it was broken. An innocent who is never made whole, and a guilty man who is never called to account: that is the complete picture of what “no justice” means, and Solomon files both halves under the sun.

There is a serious reply, and people have lived and died by it: Yes. Exactly. That is why justice has to be done here, by us, now, because nobody else is coming. That is not a dodge, and it does not prove anyone is owed anything. But look at what it costs. It admits that justice not done here is never done, that for the murdered there is nothing, ever, and the account closes at zero. And the person who says it will still call the girl’s life a tragedy, a word that means something should have been otherwise. With no ruler and no way to make it right, “should have been otherwise” has nothing left to hold on to.

Neither of us can prove which world we live in. But only one of them lets you say she was wronged.

“For I reckon that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come that shall be revealed in us.” — Romans 8:18

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes: and death shall be no more. Nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more.” — Revelation 21:4

8. The broken ceiling

Solomon cannot be out-argued from inside his world; that was conceded at the start. So the answer was never going to be a better argument. It has to come from outside.

Paul agrees with Solomon before he answers him:

“If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” — 1 Corinthians 15:19

That is Solomon’s verdict, accepted in full by an apostle. He goes further: “if Christ be not risen again, ματαία [vain] is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Vain there is the Greek Old Testament’s word for Ecclesiastes’ vanity. Christianity stakes everything on one claim about history, at exactly the point this argument needs it to. Paul is not asking for the benefit of the doubt. He is telling you the condition under which he is a fool.

He also says why the vanity was there at all:

τῇ γὰρ ματαιότητι ἡ κτίσις ὑπετάγη, οὐχ ἑκοῦσα … ἐφ’ ἑλπίδι “For the creature was made subject to vanity: not willingly… in hope.” — Romans 8:20

The Ecclesiastes word again. The vanity was not the design. It was the wound, and Paul ends the sentence with hope, not diagnosis.

Now go back down the bill. The world is closed: the ceiling is broken from outside, the only place it could be broken from. Everything is forgotten: the dead rise, and there is Someone outside the system who remembers. That is what The Weight of Glory is about, glory as being known and welcomed by God. The answer to being forgotten is not only that you rise. It is that the record was never being kept down here in the first place. No ruler, no settlement: “all things that are done, God will bring into judgment.” The child never made whole: she is made whole, and the account is paid in full. The experiment failed: it failed because Solomon aimed too low, not because he wanted too much.

And the flip, in the Greek, where the words meet:

Ecclesiastes 2:11	1 Corinthians 15:58
οὐκ ἔστιν περισσεία — no surplus	περισσεύοντες — abounding in the work of the Lord
ὑπὸ τὸν ἥλιον — under the sun	ἐν κυρίῳ — in the Lord
τὰ πάντα ματαιότης — all is vanity	ὁ κόπος ὑμῶν οὐκ ἔστιν κενός — your labour is not vain

Two honest notes on that table, carried from the study of Ecclesiastes 2 on this site. “No surplus” is the Greek Old Testament; the Douay has “nothing was lasting.” And Paul is not quoting Ecclesiastes here. The words are ordinary Greek, and the parallel is an exact reversal of the thought rather than a citation; Romans 8:20 is where he actually alludes to it. The reversal is strong enough said plainly.

It answers the despair exactly where it hurt. Death and being forgotten were the engine of every vanity Solomon found. 1 Corinthians 15 is the chapter about the resurrection of the dead. The one thing that made everything vanity is the one thing Christ undid.

So here is what an answer to Ecclesiastes would have to look like: something from outside the closed world, that undoes death, keeps the record, and settles the account. Christianity claims exactly that happened, in history, on a date, to a body. That claim is either true or false, and unlike philosophy, it can be checked. After eight sections of agreeing with Solomon, this argument has earned the right not to bluff at the end. Whether it happened is a different argument, and it will get its own article. That is the next conversation.