The famous atheist Richard Dawkins once claimed, "[The universe] has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." The late Stephen Jay Gould described human life as "a momentary cosmic accident." According to these atheistic scientists we are just complex organisms programmed by selfish genes to act purely out of self-interest.

But when Philip Yancey went to visit Newtown, Connecticut shortly after the tragic school shooting that left 26 dead, he said, "The New Atheists' assumptions [about human life] rang all the more hollow." Yancey asked people impacted by the tragedy, "Is that what you've experienced?" One Newtown survivor told Yancey:

I have seen an outpouring of grief, compassion, and generosity—not blind, pitiless indifference. I've seen acts of selflessness, not selfishness: in the school staff who sacrificed their lives to save children, in the sympathetic response of a community and a nation. I've seen demonstrated a deep belief that the people who died mattered, that something of inestimable worth was snuffed out on December 14.

Yancey adds:

In the midst of trauma even a sternly secular culture recognizes the worth of individual human beings, a carryover from the Christian belief that each one reflects God's image. I recalled that after September 11, 2001, the New York Times committed to running an obituary to honor each one of the three thousand people who died in the World Trade Center attacks, as if they mattered and were not cosmic accidents in a universe of pitiless indifference.