: THE ILLOGIC OF ATHEISM
: BY MILES MATHIS
: Most people arriving here will assume I am a Christian or at
: least a theist. I am not. I am also not an agnostic. To be
: an agnostic is to be a doubter. But to doubt you must have
: a certain amount of information. A computer with
: insufficient data is not agnostic, for instance. A computer
: does not doubt, it reserves judgment. It refuses to give a
: conclusion when a conclusion is not in the numbers.
: Now, humans are not computers. I am not a materialist and not
: reductive, so I would never make that argument. I am only
: making a loose analogy here. I do not even call myself a
: skeptic, since the word has been polluted by modern use. A
: modern skeptic is like an agnostic, and he or she is likely
: to lean to a “no” answer every time. Are there gods?
: Probably not. Are there unicorns? Probably not. Is there a
: Bigfoot? Probably not. And so on. I resist this “skeptic”
: tag because leaning toward a “no” answer is a prejudice
: itself. It is unscientific. Beyond that, the so-called
: skeptic societies are stiff with atheists and agnostics and
: cynics and other faux-scientists, and I prefer to remain as
: far away from all that as possible.
: Of course, with the existence of Bigfoot and unicorns and so
: on we do have a great deal of information. We have made
: searches. The Earth is a limited environment and we have
: populated it widely and heavily and long. Even so, the
: mountain gorilla was not discovered until 1902, and huge
: populations of lowland gorillas were only recently
: discovered in the Congo (this very decade). Which is to say
: that we may lean a bit to a “no” answer for existence of
: larger beings in smaller areas we have scoured quite
: thoroughly, but even then we may be wrong.
: But in looking for proof of gods, our search is pathetically
: limited. By definition, a god is a being whose powers are
: far greater than ours, who we cannot comprehend, and whose
: form we cannot predict. This would make our failure to
: locate a god quite understandable. A very large or small
: god would be above or below our notice, and a distant god
: would also evade our sensors. Not to mention we only have
: five senses. If we are manipulated by gods, as the
: hypothesis goes, then it would be quite easy for them to
: deny us the eyes to see them. Only a god of near-human size
: in the near environs would be possible to detect.
: Again, this does not mean I believe in gods, any more than I
: believe in aliens or unicorns. I only point out that, as a
: matter of logic and science, a hypothesis that has not been
: proved is not the same as a hypothesis that has been
: disproved. I agree with the atheists and agnostics that the
: existence of gods has not been proved, but I do not agree
: that the existence of gods has been disproved. It would
: require a much more thorough search of the universe than
: has so far been completed to even begin to lean. As it is,
: our data is near-zero.
: For this reason, I find atheists to be just as sanctimonious,
: illogical, and tiresome as the deists and theists, if not
: moreso. Because the atheists are often more highly educated
: and often better able to argue (in limited ways), they use
: this education and argument to prop themselves up in the
: ugliest ways. They blow apart the beliefs of religious
: people and imagine this solidifies their own beliefs in
: some way. But it never does. People of faith are actually
: more consistent in their views, since they never claim to
: believe in science anyway. They are not immediately
: hypocritical, at least, since it is possible for them
: create a closed system of illogic that circles back in a
: self-affirming way. The search for truth is no part of
: their system, so it is no failure when they find none. But
: atheists cannot say the same. They base their system on
: science, so that the very first instant they fail to act
: scientifically, they are back to zero. Yes, it is the same
: zero as the theists' zero, but the theists aren't measuring
: and the atheists are. A theist at zero is just a theist,
: and no harm done. But an atheist at zero has had a fall,
: and must be damaged.
: To put it in philosophical terms, the atheist has chosen a
: position that is epistemologically stronger than the
: theist. By stronger, I do not mean that the atheist is more
: likely to be right, I mean that the position of the atheist
: requires more proof. The theist does not say he knows that
: God exists, he says he believes it. Faith is a belief
: whereas knowledge is a certainty. This gives the religious
: person some wiggle room. He doesn't need to talk of proofs,
: since a belief is never based on proofs. Belief and faith
: are built mainly on willpower. Atheists will say that such
: a foundation is quicksand, and I tend to agree, but
: atheists stand in even waterier mud. The atheist claims to
: be quite certain that there is no god, and he claims to be
: contemptuous of unsupported belief, so he must provide us
: with some firm foundation for his “knowledge.” This he can
: never do. If there are no proofs that God or gods exist,
: there are also no proofs they do not exist. The atheist is
: just as unscientific as the theist. The atheist's stance is
: just as mired in belief as the theist's, but the atheist
: also claims to disdain belief. So he must disdain himself.
: [Notice that my argument is not one of meaning or definitions.
: This is why I do not consider it to be equivalent in any
: way to igtheism or theological noncognitivism. I think it
: is clear that both the definition of a god and the question
: of the existence of a god are meaningful (or can easily be
: made so). My argument in this paper is not about
: definitions or meaning, or about metaphysics; it is mainly
: about the intelligence of humans. Given our limited ability
: to spot evidence and to collate it and interpret it, we
: would require much more "conclusive" evidence
: than a being that was more intelligent. For another god,
: the evidence of gods might be clear at a glance. For us,
: all the hard evidence in the world might not suffice, since
: we could not recognize it for what it was. This means that
: my argument is also not a variation of "we can't
: know." Given more data and more intelligence, I
: believe we could know, but the fact is we have nowhere near
: enough of either, which makes all the talk on both sides
: wearying to me.]
: Atheists always attack theists for being inconsistent, but
: atheists are wildly inconsistent themselves. For one
: example, let us consider Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens has
: been called one of the four horsemen of atheism (along with
: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris), and
: knowing him, it is likely a self-naming and
: self-glorification. Problem is, Hitchens is also famous for
: saying,
: more here
:
: http://netteandme.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-illogic-of-atheism.html