Tag: atheism

Uncaused != unpredictable

Michael Flynn is bemused by the customary atheist ineptitude where philosophy is concerned:

The usual suspects are at work where the Statistician to the Stars is manfully working his way through Thomas’ Contra gentiles, and TOF notices a peculiarity previously glimpsed on the blog of P.Z.Meyer: viz., so soon as You-Know-Who is glimpsed at the end of a syllogism based on causation, they will deny causation and declare randomness rules. But let randomness appear to make room for free will, and their universe becomes strictly deterministic with mechanical causes strictly propagating the past into the future. Often, the same person will make both claims, though usually on different threads. There is probably no solution to this game of intellectual Whack-a-Mole, but TOF was especially charmed by the notion that there is no cause for radioactive decay, which is said to be due to magical chthonic effects obtained by invoking “chthulu” or “quantum mechanics” or something.

One respondent even claimed that hurricanes were just as causeless as radioactive decay, despite the fact that meteorologists understand quite well the causes of hurricanes. That was when enlightenment descended upon TOF like little tongues of flame.

These people are confusing “caused” with “predictable”.

  • Because we cannot predict the time and place that a hurricane will form, hurricanes are “uncaused.”
  • Because we cannot predict the time and place that an atom will decay, radioactive decay is “uncaused.”
  • Because we cannot predict when a bird will strike a jet engine, the consequent engine failure is “uncaused”?  Say what?

But then, since Newtonian mechanics cannot predict which apple will fall from which tree at which time, let alone whose noggin it will bop (God playing Whack-a-Mole?), we would have to conclude that the motion of falling bodies is uncaused. Yet this was the very inspiration for the deterministic universe metaphor!

Perhaps we should let them continue until they have completely demolished the 19th century mythos, then pick up the pieces and rebuild a sane metaphysics.

And forget philosophy, it never ceases to amaze me how little history the average outspoken atheist knows. I mean, the moment you hear an atheist mentioning “war” in the same breath as “religion”, you already have confirmation that the atheist is a) a historical ignoramus, and most likely, b) a functional idiot. Especially if the discussion concerns, in any way, the existence of God.

Atheism and authority

Theos considers the history of atheism:

Nick Spencer is research director of the (excellent) “religion and society think tank” Theos, and so he views the subject with a quiet Christian scepticism. But it is not his purpose to attack atheism. Instead, he wants to tell its history as it has developed, chiefly in Europe, in the past 500 years.

He points out that atheism often starts in disputes about authority. In a thoroughly Christian society – and indeed, in some Muslim societies today – rejection of God was seen as a threat to public order. Quite recently, a British judge said that the law of England has nothing to do with Christianity. He may wish that to be true, but, historically, it isn’t….

Gradually, “atheisms” – there was never a single form – advanced to challenge authority. Some arose from questioning Scripture (“a heap of Copie confusedly taken”, wrote one brave man at the end of the 16th century). Some, often stemming from priests who had seen appalling abuses themselves, concentrated on the wickedness of church power rather than on metaphysics.

Other non-believers, usually among the grandest in society, saw themselves as bathed in the light of reason. David Hume wrote of “the deepest Stupidity, Christianity and Ignorance”. Percy Bysshe Shelley linked atheism with intellectual superiority: “Let this horrid Galilean [Jesus] rule the Canaille [the rabble]… The reflecting part of the community… do not require his morality.” In the current era of Richard Dawkins and the New Atheism, many atheists call themselves the “Brights”, pleased to make the rest of us out as dullards.

Some atheists – Dawkins, Sigmund Freud, AJ Ayer – resemble, in essence, that clever young schoolboy. They believe they have brilliantly proved religion to be a load of hogwash. In their minds, it seems an advantage that their creed does not appeal as much to women or the poor and ignorant. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche saw more deeply how European society’s moral order would collapse with the destruction of faith – but welcomed it. Christianity was a “slave morality”, he said, celebrating weakness and preserving “too much of what should have perished”. People such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler took up such thoughts with deadly enthusiasm.

But precisely because religion, though theologically grounded, is much deeper than an intellectual theory, it tends to regenerate when attacked. The author quotes one Soviet persecutor of Christianity: “Religion is like a nail, the harder you hit, the deeper it goes in.” Spencer believes that the New Atheism is an expression of anger at the curious phenomenon that all over the world, except among white Westerners, God is back.

I find it informative to observe that Western society is visibly collapsing, by a wide variety of objective metrics, even prior to the proclaimed triumph of atheist secularism and the advent of post-Christianity. One of the primary assumptions of atheist thought – the Enlightenment idea that Western civilization did not depend upon Christianity, but was inhibited by it – is rapidly being understood to be as false as the Christian apologists warned it was two centuries ago.

The choice cannot actually be reduced to: if you want to keep your flush toilets, refrigerators, and television, go to church. But that’s more or less what it amounts to in the end.

UPDATE: For those atheists too slow to follow the logic, perhaps this illustration might help:

A Nigerian man has been sent to a mental institute in Kano state after he declared that he did not believe in God, according to a humanist charity. Mubarak Bala was being held against his will at the hospital after his Muslim family took him there, it said…. Kano is a mainly Muslim state and adopted Islamic law in 2000. 

In fairness to Kano, there is genuine scientific evidence that atheists are neurologically atypical, if not necessarily “mentally ill” per se.

The consequences of an atheist morality

John C. Wright has entirely too much fun deconstructing what passes for the logic of an altruism-based morality of the sort advocated by midwitted atheists who genuinely believe Richard Dawkins is a formidable philosopher:

Now, the most common and most persuasive argument an atheist or materialist can make in favor of universal morality is a genetic argument. The argument is that, as a matter of pure game theory, any races and breeds that develops a gene which imposes an instinct for altruism toward other members of one’s own bloodline, will, as a matter of course, have a definite statistical advantage in the lottery of Darwinian survival, and will come to outnumber those races and breeds that do not.

The argument is that the purely blind and selfish drive of the genes we carry in us therefore mesmerizes us with an instinct to altruism and self-sacrifice which is not in our immediate self-interest, but unintentionally serves the self-interest of the family, clan, tribe, breed, bloodline, and race.

The argument is that this mesmeric spell makes us hallucinate that there is such a thing as a moral code we are bound to obey, but whether this hallucination is true or false, it serves the blind and selfish reasons of the parasites called genes dwelling inside us, whom we much, willy-nilly, serve and obey.

Putting this argument to the test, I asked a hypothetical question about the following rule of behavior:  “Abducting Nubile Young Woman to Serve as Concubines, Dancing Girls, or Breeding Stock is bad.” Is this a rule that bind only those who share the non-abduction gene, or does it bind all men, including those with not one gene in common with us? I used the hypothetical example of an abductor who is a Man from Mars. He is not of our tribe, nation, or race. He is, at least during the Obama Administration NASA days, beyond the reach of any reasonable expectation of retaliation from Earthlings.

Is it objectively wrong for the Martian Warlord to abduct a luscious Earthgirl like Yvonne Craig to his horrible harem of terror atop Olympus Mons? Or is it only wrong because the Selfish Gene says it is wrong? Is it wrong objectively, or only genetically?

(Of course I mean to use this as an excuse to post more pictures!)

The genetic argument as a basis of morality makes me laugh until I puke green foam from my nose. It is obvious enough that if my instinct for altruism is proportional to how many selfish genes I have in common with another, that I will always prefer my self over my brother, my brother over my cousin, my cousin over my second cousin, my family over my clan, and my clan over my race, and my race over the Slavs and Jews and Untermenschen.

Racism, and I mean REAL Nazi-style kill-the-Jews racism, is not only excused by the genetic argument for altruism, it is demanded by it. Aiding anyone outside your clad and clan and bloodline is treason to the Selfish Gene, ergo, by this logic, immoral.

For that matter, women’s liberation causes a drop in fertility rates, so it also is treason against the Selfish Gene. for that matter, monogamy is treason, polygamy is demanded, and the consent of the concubines in the breeding harem is not required, because the gene does not care if you wanted to have happy children, only many children.

So, logically, if altruism is basic on the Selfish Gene, abducting dancing girls and nubile starlets to the breeding harem is not only licit, it is the highest and most saintly and most moral of all possible actions!

It may not be coincidental that this “morality” is most often advocated by the sort of male atheist whose only chance of any sexual exposure to dancing girls and nubile starlets would be through forcible abduction and rape.

It should be apparent that if we were to seriously adopt this sort of biology-based “morality” on a large scale, our world would more closely resemble John Norman’s Gor than anything else. The first imperative for any human society that values stability, let alone survival, is to eliminate unrestricted female volition in sexual matters. That is why religions and governments have always concerned themselves with a multitude of rules restricting it in some manner. Because without them, the civilized society will not survive.

As Camille Paglia pointed out repeatedly in Sexual Personae, the female represents the chaotic and unreasoning aspect of humanity, vital for the survival of the species, fertile when husbanded, and insanely destructive when left unrestrained.

The inevitable decline of atheism

Another reminder that the future belongs to those who show up for it:

The world could see a resurgence of Christianity driven by population decline
in sceptical countries, the geneticist Steve Jones has claimed. Professor Jones said history had proven that religion grows rapidly during
large population booms, particularly in poorer countries. He argued that rapid growth in Africa could spark a new resurgence of major
religions like Christianity. However in increasingly atheist countries in Europe people are no longer
reproducing in sufficient numbers to avoid population decline, he told the
Hay Literary Festival.

“We atheists sometimes congratulate ourselves that the incidence of religious
belief is going down. But religious people have more children. Where are people having the most
children? It’s in the tropics and in Africa. It’s clearly the case that the future will involve an increase in religious
populations and a decrease in scepticism.”

It’s not only that. There is also the fact that most of the children raised in an atheist home eventually become religious; the only reason that the rate of growth of atheism briefly, (in historical terms), was fast enough to surmount that inhibiting factor is because the atheist population was so small. Atheists are at the literal bottom of the retention rate in comparison with every religious group from Hindus to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Even the mealy-mouthed Anglicans fare better.

A more important factor is that times of wealth and peace have always been a counter-indicator of religious belief. The rich and fat seldom believe they have any need for God, and they deeply resent any divinely inspired restrictions on their descent into decadence. At the end of the longest period of peace and economic expansion in the history of the West, it should be no surprise at all that we have an obese, decadent, depraved, diseased population that fears no God.

They will learn better soon enough. Both history and the Bible are very clear concerning the eventual fate of such societies.

Richard Dawkins is a self-described Christian

Of sorts, anyhow. It seems the Pope of Oxford is more than a little disappointed in the direction that Western post-Christianity is taking:

 Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist and scientist, has admitted that he is a “secular Christian” because he hankers after the nostalgia and traditions of the church.

Speaking at the Hay Festival, where he was presenting the first volume of his memoirs An Appetite For Wonder, the evolutionary biologist claimed that although he does not believe in the supernatural elements of the Christian church, he still values the ceremonial side of religion….

“I would describe myself as a secular Christian in the same sense as secular Jews have a feeling for nostalgia and ceremonies,” said Dawkins.

Other comments Dawkins has recently made make it readily apparent that he’s not entirely comfortable with the ability of atheism to fill in the void that Christianity leaves behind. It will be fascinating to see which of the vocal anti-theists becomes the first champion of cultural Christianity. On the other hand, Dawkins doesn’t seem to be thinking the matter through.

“You do not have to be reticent in what you say. You do not have to look around and say, ‘I hope I am not offending anyone’. You can pretty much speak your mind now in a way that you could not 50 years ago.” 

Oh, can you now? It seems to me that 50 years ago, British people were not being beheaded in the street. Many atheists, and indeed, many Christians, have assumed that although Christianity was integral to the development of Western civilization, it was not necessary to its continuation. And while many people still believe that, an increasing number of people are beginning to realize that is simply not the case.

Of course, there are also those who think that Western civilization is possible without Christianity or people who are genetically Western, but then, they are the modern equivalent of the Green Cheese Society and all that is necessary to refute them is to point out, and I quote: “de de de de de dink, the niggers is not able to survive. Man’s sole “jabringing” object disfigure religion trauma and nubs the inside the trauma of representation.”

And it is very hard to refute that.

The unreason of atheism

John C. Wright points to an aspect of atheism I observed myself when I was writing the book that was published as The Irrational Atheist:

There are many brands of atheism, but they all have some points in common. First, one common point is that none have a rational explanation of the objectivity of moral rules.

Not all cultures agree on what priority to place on various moral rules, but one thing that is so obvious about moral rules is that they are objective. When guilt pricks us, it does not say we betray a matter of taste or opinion; the feeling of guilt is the feeling of having offended a law. When injustice rankles, we do not accuse those who trespass against us of having breached a matter of taste or opinion; we refer to a standard we expect the other to know and acknowledge. We cannot help it.

In all human experience, everything is open to doubt but this. No man with a working conscience can escape the knowledge. It is the one thing we cannot not know. And yet atheists are at a loss to explain it.

I do not call atheists immoral, but I note they cannot give a rational reason to account for morality.

In any atheist worldview, moral laws are an invention of man and serve his contingent purposes, or an imposition of Darwinian survival mechanisms that serve the contingent purposes of the Selfish Gene. Such purposes as the preservation of life or the pursuit of happiness are subjective, hence not laws at all. Whether selected by nature or by man, if moral maxims are selected merely as a means to an arbitrary end, they are merely expedient conveniences.

In the end, nihilism is the only rational atheism. And since most atheists rightly shy away from nihilism and its concomitant despair, they tend to trap themselves into philosophical unreason. Which is, of course, is often more than a little ironic due to the oft-heard atheist claim to be a true devotee of reason.

They call conscience an illusion and morality an artificial construct. But if they are not correct (and there is considerable logic and evidence to conclude that they are not) then even the most staunch atheist must admit that he is the delusional one.

Mailvox: irritated by atheists

DB has a tough time maintaining an even keel when arguing with atheists:

How do you maintain your temper when arguing with atheists. I cannot. I find myself so angry that I cannot take anything they say at face value. God has spoken to me and told me to stop arguing with atheists. I can still witness but under no circumstances may I argue. I am directed to pity them and pray for their salvation.

Do you ever wonder if you are helping them or if you are getting through at all? I feel a visceral anger at them and the damage they have caused our society. I am no longer going to be arguing on the internet or in person. How can they be anything but enemies of all that is good?

Since good is defined by God and since atheists are, by definition, active disbelievers in God, logic dictates that atheists are enemies of God and all that is good. This logic is confirmed by observation; examine any evil and the chances are high that atheists are disproportionately caught up in it, or at the very least are overt advocates.

But that doesn’t mean you should get angry with them when they start arguing dishonestly, attempting to pass off rhetoric as dialectic, moving the goalposts, holding you to standards they don’t hold themselves, offering repeated bait-and-switches, and falling silent rather than admitting defeat. To the contrary, such behaviors indicate that they know they are losing the argument.

The reason I never get even a little upset by the atheist with whom I am debating is because I know they are not my intended audience. I don’t care if they cling stubbornly to their erroneous beliefs nor do I care what they do in order to preserve them. To me they are little more than a stage prop, a straight man, a feeder of lines. The worse my interlocutor’s behavior becomes, the more convincing my arguments are perceived by the audience. In fact, for me the difficulty is not maintaining my equanimity, but rather, avoiding the temptation to intentionally trigger the bad behavior and thereby winning a rhetorical battle rather than a comprehensive dialectical one.

(NB: this is precisely why atheists go out of their way to be so offensive and to upset the Christian. It is an attempt to win the rhetorical battle by making you lose your temper.)

So, if you are a Christian who finds that atheists tend to make your temperature rise, apologetic debate is probably not for you. Serve the Kingdom in another role; pray for them. Pick them up when they fall down. Help them when they need assistance. More souls have been won for Jesus Christ by kindness than by words.

But atheists are prouder, more intelligent, and less emotional than the norm, and are therefore less convinced by deeds than words. So, many of them require their pride in their intelligence to be broken before they can reach a state of mind that permits them to hear the Good News and contemplate it rationally. And this is where people like me can open up their minds, by forcing them to acknowledge the myriad flaws in their arguments and by making them question their previously unquestioned assumptions. I know that I am getting through to at least some of them, because they have let me know that has been the case.

It’s rewarding and inspiring to see atheists transform from bitter enemies of God to fearless servants of Jesus Christ. If you keep in mind that the next arrogant, irritating, and slippery-tongued atheist you meet may be the larval form of a John C. Wright or an Apostle Paul, I suspect you will be able to find some charity in your heart for them.

Broken and lesser beings

You may think that we exaggerate the craven wretchedness of our enemies. You may think that my boundless contempt for the r/selected, Larry’s muscular backhands for his craven adversaries, and John C. Wright’s withering scorn for the wormtongues is fueled by either a) a sense of offense at being opposed or b) an oversensitivity to criticism.

It is not. It is fueled by our clear-eyed view of what these creatures are. It is our awareness that they are, like the soul-destroyed abhumans roaming the Night Lands, broken and lesser beings who seek to pull others down into the mire that torments them.

By way of evidence, consider their own words about themselves. Here, for example, is Damien Walter:

I was 30 and, by any measure, deeply unhappy. I’d been pushing down a lot of horrible emotions from a damaging childhood, grief from many losses, and had trapped myself in a life I didn’t fit in to from a desperate need to fit somewhere, anywhere. I had no kind of spiritual practice at all. I was a standard issue atheist, and any encounter I had with religion was edged with inherited and unexamined scorn. Consequentially, I really had no tools to process the pain I was feeling. Today, my argument with the radical atheist rhetoric of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett – both of whom I had read heavily at university – is that it leaves the bulk of its believers utterly amputated from their own emotional reality. It certainly had me. I was miserable, and in trying to escape from the causes of the misery I’d driven myself, repeatedly, to the borders of emotional collapse where I had, at long last, collapsed.

This is why they preach equality. This is why they preach tolerance. This is why they seek to disqualify and destroy those who stand above them, immune to the manifold terrors that haunt their empty chests. They are damaged people, broken individuals, fallen souls.

They live lives of lies and self-deceit. They lie about others; they lie about themselves:

I am by nature a non-political person. I tend to see both sides of most arguments, and there are merits and faults with any position in any political debate. Extremism is always wrong. Beyond that, who is right is mostly a matter of your tribal, partisan allegiances.

No doubt that is why he didn’t link to Larry’s piece he was criticizing and why David Barnett intentionally and admittedly evaded The Guardian guidelines in his hit piece aimed at me, lest I defend my position in a convincing manner.

But no matter what lies Damien and his broken kind tell, they will find no comfort whatsoever in confronting the likes of Mr. Corriea and Mr. Wright. They will find no peace through confronting me. They will find nothing but emotional collapse in this lifetime and damnation in the next as a result of their rejection of the Way, the Truth, and the Life that we do our feeble best to serve.

At least Damien has taken one step forward in abandoning the intellectually bankrupt world of the radical atheist. He knows there is something else out there. But he is still caught in the soul-sucking mire, he is still lost in lies and desperately lashing out at the likes of Larry and me in a vain attempt to find fulfillment in the approval of those he foolishly seeks to emulate.

But he will not, because there is no fulfillment to be found there. There is none to be found in telling lies, in making-believe, because even if he manages to convince others of his falsehoods, he will never be able to convince himself that they are true.

What Damien does not realize is that our strength, our being whole, does not come from within, but from without. The Earth-Current flows through us; we are empowered by the Master of the Master-Word. It is not enough for a man to reject the nonsensical teachings of the self-proclaimed wise, it is necessary to repent and to humble himself before God, after which he can stand again, washed in the sacred blood of His Son, unafraid, unbowed, and unbroken.

Atheists are terrorists

It’s true, it’s the law:

Saudi Arabia has introduced a series of new laws which define atheists as terrorists, according to a report from Human Rights Watch…. Article one of the new provisions defines terrorism as “calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based”.

Now that we understand that the Left has absolutely no regard for the freedom of thought or the freedom of expression, what reason can be given for why the West should not follow the lead of Africa and the Middle East in criminalizing both homosexuality and atheism? The Left has often lectured us on the moral superiority of those cultures, have they not?

Such actions can be fully justified on traditional grounds, historical grounds, moral grounds, and perhaps most importantly, pragmatic grounds. The reason past laws were relaxed was in the name of secular tolerance, but as has now been amply demonstrated, atheists and homosexuals are not at all willing to be tolerant of those who disagree with them. So why should anyone else be tolerant of them?

In the long term, it doesn’t really matter. Either circumstances will force the West to put its house in order, or it will be overrun by those less progressive societies which refuse to tolerate its self-destructive elements.

Backfire

In which John C. Wright explains how reading an slanderous anti-Christian short story helped him move on from atheism and embrace Christianity:

Mr. Chiang’s short story, as far as I was concerned, not merely failed of its object, but was counter-productive. One of the things that made me suffer no regret when I was called away from the cramped intellectual jail of atheism into a wider and more wonderful world, was my growing conviction that my fellow atheists were shallow, men without insight into real human nature. I read Chiang’s story and I thought: is this the best my side can do? Is this cheap slander the best argument we can muster against our hated enemies, the Christians? In those days I kept wondering why, since my side had the Sixteen-Inch Guns of Truth and Logic, our gunners kept shooting blanks. Why were we sneering all the time, instead of setting out the evidence?

To get a notion of the depth of the contrast I saw, find a comfy chair by the fire, read HELL IS THE ABSENCE OF GOD by Ted Chiang, and then, without rising from the chair except perhaps to toss another log on the fire, pick up and read SMITH OF WOOTTON MAJOR by J.R.R. Tolkien, or perhaps LEAF BY NIGGLE. It does not matter whether you are an Atheist or a Christian or are another faith or uncommitted: anyone reading those two author’s work in contrast will see that one has an insight into human joys and human woes, a compassion toward even human folly or pride or sloth. And the other one shows nothing, no humanity, no understanding. The heart of Chiang’s work is not in the right place. Even though I thought Chiang’ world view was true and Tolkien’s was false, I concluded Tolkien’s insight into real life was keen-eyed, and Chiang’s was superficial.

He cites an earlier review of Chiang’s short story, written when he was, as he described at the time, “an unrepentant atheist”:

“The satire “Hell is the Absence of God” reads like it was written by someone who never met a Christian, or read anything written by a Christian. In this tale, those who see the light of heaven are grotesquely disfigured (their eyes and eye sockets are removed) and loose free will, and become perfect in faith, so that they are automatically assured of entrance into paradise. The main character, mourning after the death of his wife, seeks to find a spot where an angel is leaving or entering the world, so that he can, if only for a moment, glimpse the light of heaven, so that he can loose his eyes and his free will, but be assured of meeting his wife again in heaven. All goes as planned, but God capriciously sends the man to Hell in any case. Hell is not a place of torment, but a bland area much like earth, merely separate from God, peopled by Fallen Angels who sin was not rebellion, but free-thinking. Hence, out of all created beings, only the main character is actually suffering in Hell, since he is the only one who longs not to be there, and, thanks to his free will being destroyed, is the only one who loves God wholeheartedly. Again, all efforts of the main character to rejoin his wife are futile. There are secondary characters whose lives are also ruined and for no particular reason.

“I myself am an unrepentant atheist, but I would never pen such trite antichristian propaganda. If an author is going to set a story in an alternate universe where the Christian myths happen to be true, the author should become familiar with (or, at least, hide his contempt for) the source material. Read Thomas Aquinas or John Milton. Christians may be wrong, but they are not stupid.

“Over all, Mr. Chiang is an excellent writer, who writes wonderfully about big ideas, but weds them to a theme of dispirited nihilism. He is capable of subtle and penetrating characterization, except when he trots out a tired leftwing cliché, whereupon suddenly everything becomes flat and predictable (see, for example, his treatment of the CIA, Big Business, the Military, and the Victorian Age).”

And so we see that even shadow testifies to the existence of the Light. I thought Wright’s take on Chiang was spot-on. I have the collection of short stories to which he refers, and while I found them intriguing, and even bordering on brilliant, I also thought it was remarkable how every single one of them felt essentially flat. I didn’t know why at the time, but now I do. Put simply, Chiang is a tremendous talent crippled by postmodern secularism.

He is, as I once explained to R. Scott Bakker, a color-blind painter. It makes no difference how flawless his technique and his skill are, because when the sun is green and the grass is purple, there is a certain disconnect from the human experience that cannot be avoided.

As I said to Tom Kratman yesterday, in the end, WHAT you write is considerably more important than HOW you write. An accurate truth, even clumsily described, is more significant than a pretty lie, no matter how eloquently the lie is told.