Are Atheists Reduced To This?

Are there any laws or First Principles that atheists aren't forced to deny, adjust, or change in order to preserve the world-view faith of atheism?

For instance”

The Principle of first cause

The Principle of sufficient reason

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

In order to maintain their atheism, atheists are reduced to ignoring all of the above Principles or Laws.

In order to maintain their atheism, followers must downplay the magnificent, awe inspiring and in truth, the miraculous. For example the exquisite fine tuning of the universe. For those of us who need a mental image to grasp a concept, scientists have described it this way. Imagine an aircraft carrier weighing 100,000 tonnes. If the weight of the ship was balanced to 10 ^ 1,230 (the fine tuning of the cosmological constant) the ship's balance could not be off by more than billionth of a trillionth of the mass of a SINGLE ELECTRON on one side or the other, or the ship would capsize. In a mocking tone and to preserve his atheism, Richard Dawkins says the constants are “more or less” finely tuned.” Mm hmm. “More or less finely tuned.” There's an understatement for you. Atheists have to guard themselves from grasping the truth of their situation. If atheists admit to recognizing the precision and order that allows our universe to exist, then they have to recognize the existence of whatever created that order and precision.

. Atheists are reduced to denying all forms of “proofs” and probabilities except scientific proof and probabilities.

. Atheists are reduced to believing that material things can just pop into existence without an external cause.

. Atheists are reduced to believing that matter can create itself.

. Atheists are reduced to saying that the universe is Necessary and that it explains itself. The problem is, it isn't and it doesn't!

. In order to maintain their atheism, atheists are reduced to asking inane and incoherent questions like:

- So what created this eternal Being?

- So when did this eternal Being begin to exist?

. Atheists are reduced to declaring nothing to be something and non life to actually evolve into life.

. Atheists are reduced to denying our objective moral intuitions as well as their authority.

. Atheists are reduced to stating that design is not design. “We must constantly remind ourselves that what we are seeing is not designed?” Francis Crick re: Genome Project

. Atheists are reduced to posit finite infinities, causeless beginnings and beginningless beginnings in order to preserve their faith.

. Atheists are reduced to abandoning classical historical scholarship and deny known and knowable facts of history, but only as they apply to the person of Jesus.

. Atheists are reduced to following whatever ethical standard is currently in vogue and call that a reasonable way to live.

. In order to remain an atheist those people must believe, they must FORCE themselves to believe in infinite regress and the material infinite.

Does this not boggle the mind? These people who do not need God in order to be good people are forced to tell themselves colossal lies to support their belief system. And then they declare themselves Brights!

. Atheists are forced to ignore Occam’s Razor and go in search of ever more complicated solutions in the science of origins, abandoning one after another, after another, after another, not because of new evidence but because of a need to avoid the conclusion indicated by current evidence.

Without this their atheism fails.

. Atheists are reduced to denying that laws of logic, mathematics, moral laws, and physical laws exist independently from us in order to make atheism seem logical.

. Atheists are reduced to denying the very scientific evidentiary principle (observing, testing, verifying) they worship, for to not do so would prove their suppositions false. They must deny that everything that begins to exist has an external cause for its existence. They must deny that you can't get more in the effect than you had in the cause.

. Atheists are reduced to saying, “I'm not someone who believes God doesn't exist because that would require evidence, and there isn't any evidence that God doesn't exist. Instead, I'm a non believer. You don't need evidence to be a non believer.

. Atheists are reduced to denying even consciousness and the “I.” They are forced to deny our very self in order to make atheism not seem absolutely absurd, illogical and incoherent.

Atheists are forced to look at the human abilities of self-reflection, art, medicine, the enjoyment of music and say it comes from an illusory direction of will. In fact, they are forced to say that self-will or freewill choice are also an illusion. In reality, according to atheism, these things are determined only by chemical exchanges. Even though our vocabulary is enormous, our grammar complex and our conversations deep and meaningful, it all comes, say materialists, without purpose or meaning save for that which we individually invent or pretend to have. These atheists look at the human ability to codify language, our unbounded creativity, selflessness, love, the exercising of our rational faculties, our ability to develop an argument, follow a line of logic, draw conclusions and frame hypotheses and call it the simple, random and unguided firing of neurons. Our strong spirit of enquiry, our research in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, medicine and physics while noteworthy for some, is nothing of lasting consequence to an atheist for all will, on atheism, come to an absurd and meaningless end. Yearn for meaning in life? It too is of no lasting import. It’s the same illusion that causes us to devote so much of our time to philosophy, theology and ethics. Or so the materialist world-view claims. Atheist are forced to say that our religious sentiments and practices and our intense and endless quest for meaning can be traced to some random mutation eons ago.

The concept of atheism forces us to say that it’s only the illusion of the “I” that questions not only our origin but also our destiny. It’s only the illusion of the “I” that has a refined aesthetic sense that admires beauty and longs to be surrounded with it. When we cultivate a garden, put flowers in a vase, or hang up a painting, it’s the illusion of the “I,” according to atheism that is expressing a love of beauty and a strong creative impulse. Our poetry, painting, dance, drama and music, our weekly craft groups where baskets are woven, wool is spun, shawls are knit, and photo albums are covered, all this, says the ardent materialist, is carried out for no particular reason save to follow the command of chemical exchanges.

Reason, language, enquiry, wonder, longing, religion, morality, aesthetics, creativity, imagination, aspiration and humour, to such intangible but fundamental qualities, atheists like Bertrand Russel can only respond, and in the total absence of proofs or evidence, yet driven by a desperate desire to be free from all accountability to one’s Creator, they hope that you will agree, “That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction . . . that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

The atheist’s philosophical and powerful emotional reaction to the fact of a universe with a beginning and to the impossibility of life arising unaided from non life shows that we are far, far more than a mass of chemical exchanges, more than mere thinking machines.

Yet in this meaningless, vacuous, philosophy atheists are forced to dwell.