Atheism: It's What's for Dinner!

It's not every day that I get to make fun of Answers in Genesis. Oh, wait, it is.

Today's screed against reason comes from Roger Patterson, a moldy excrescence on a piece of cheese. It's called "Living a Lie? Are atheists building a worldview on Christian principles?"

As you may be aware from recent news reports, atheists and other humanists in London and Washington, D.C., are promoting their faith in a godless existence.

He just dives into the empty pool head-first, doesn't he? The term faith is a slippery one because it represents not only several different species of internal states (the one that matters to them is "religious belief"--faith in something you can't possibly prove), but also a social institution and a set of practices related to that type of institution.

I'll silently amend his misspelling of the word "buses" so nobody notices.

They are using signs on public buses that ask the question, “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.”

The effrontery! The shock!

As people are confronted with this question, even more questions are likely to arise. If he is logically consistent, the atheist must ask why he should be good if the world he lives in is nothing more than a series of random accidents and if people are nothing more than animals with big brains. The atheist might also have trouble deciding whose standard of good should be endorsed. Does he become a follower of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Adolf Hitler, Charles Darwin, or does he start his own sect of atheism and borrow a bit from everyone[?]

1) The basis of a scientific understanding of the world is that there are laws. Without "purpose-in-the-intentionally-designed-sense of the word" does not mean "for no reason whatsoever." And it certainly doesn't mean that the world is "random"--far from it!

2) Why do you assume that one must select a fully formed, inflexible morality? What makes you think that there is one? It's interesting how you think of morality as a series of codes, invariable principles that are set apart from the world, self-sufficient and simple. That's really sort of grotesque, and it is certainly not how "morality" has been conceived of for most of human history. If I may go on a little academic jag here, your idea of enduring principles of right and wrong is an illusion, and I would say it is one that is grounded in an unthoughtful literacy.

Let's imagine that there is no writing. There is no written word. No alphabet. No system of symbols that allows us to adequately reproduce the strings of sounds that we make when we speak aloud. Indeed, where there is not even a sense that spoken words can be seen at all. Language is completely auditory. In such an environment, where whatever rules are articulated are by necessity historically situated pronouncements, where the meting of justice is a performative memory act (and psychology shows that memory is affected by the context of recall), where is there even room for a permanent, self-sufficient Law-Unto-Itself? I mean, what we would recognize as the law would not be a "thing" out in the world (an illusion fostered by literacy) but something that one does, a transient, situational event.

What I am contending is that it is no coincidence that the three most obnoxious religions are the "Religions of the Book." Their inflexible dogma is ultimately a reflection of a type of idol worship: they worship their books, which do not change (OK, they actually do, but "faithful" usually choose not to recognize this, and their pastors certainly never draw attention to this fact). That fixity of right and wrong is an illusion encouraged by writing.

One of the practical problems of an inflexible morality is that unless it is comprehensive in ways that no writer is capable of anticipating, it will eventually be inadequate. For instance, there is no way--no way--that a Bronze Age text can contribute to the discussion of fetal stem cells. Well, the writers of your Bronze Age text might stone scientists for practicing witchcraft... Hey! That's basically what they are doing!

3) Why would anyone by default embrace a morality system based on someone else's beliefs, like Dawkins or Hitler, perhaps the most lopsided and ridiculous pairing of moral codes that can be made. One guy looks at, what, snail shit for a living, the other kills Jews. Please. One's own sense of right and wrong has worked just damned fine for most of human history. Just because one or another religion (or all really dangerous ones) takes credit for what is basically a human instinct, for instance, to not kill each other willy-nilly, does not mean that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is a divine commandment. Indeed, I think that it suggests that religion takes credit for that which was already a given without it.

I may be trailing off here....I'm sort of tired. I'm going to stroke my facebook pet for a while. Her name is Puddles.

HJ