Atheism Is Not the Default Position
Contemporary atheism presents itself as the rational baseline the position you arrive at when you strip away superstition and think clearly. The Islamic tradition, and increasingly some Western philosophers, argue the opposite: atheism is the position that requires the most strenuous intellectual effort to maintain.
"Atheism is not based on a commitment to reason; in many ways, it is its adversary. The Qur'an does not accept atheism to be the default position." Hamza Andreas Tzortzis
The Quran does not address atheism as a serious intellectual position. Its term is kufr literally, to cover up. The implication is that belief in a Creator is innate (fitrah) and disbelief is an act of suppression, not discovery. This is not mere theological assertion; it aligns with what philosophers call the self-defeating nature of philosophical naturalism. If all phenomena are products of blind, non-rational physical processes, then our very capacity for rational thought is itself a product of those processes and we have no grounds for trusting it. The argument eats itself.
Logical positivism, which tried to restrict meaningful statements to those verifiable by physical experience, collapsed for precisely this reason: its own criterion could not be verified by physical experience. Post-1960s philosophy largely abandoned it, but the attitude lingers in popular atheist discourse. As David Bentley Hart observes, much of what passes for debate between "science" and "religion" today is really an argument between two materialist worldviews, neither of which engages with what classical theism actually claims about God.
Under naturalism, human value, purpose, and meaning become intellectual mirages. If we are nothing more than rearranged molecules, the claim that human life is sacred is, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr noted, "nothing but a hollow sentimental expression." The Islamic position is that value is objective precisely because it is grounded in God's knowledge and wisdom, not in human consensus or evolutionary accident. The modern atheist often turns out, on closer inspection, to be either a closet agnostic uncertain of their own position, or a misotheist someone who hates God rather than genuinely disbelieves.
Takeaway: Atheism is not the clearing away of illusions but an active suppression of what the human soul naturally recognizes and its own philosophical foundations are more fragile than it admits.
See also: The Contingency Argument Points Beyond the Universe | Faith Is Not Opposed to Reason | Modernity Replaced God With the Human Subject