Compared to theism, Atheists have not succeeded in promoting a more comprehensive, fact-accounting, reasonable, fair-minded worldview that constitutes an overall “better” explanation than does theism. There is great fluff and bluster about how theism does not stand up to scrutiny, but often the only Gods it ruins are the gods that Jesus was attacking too–childish, simplistic, or legalistic icons that were never the stuff of Yahweh. The hounds of skepticism ward off would-be zealots from the porch. But were the atheist to let those same hounds into their house they’d absolutely ravage the place. Put more bluntly, When the same manner of skepticism is applied to atheism the result is a nuclear wasteland, a Nietzschean void where morality is arbitrary or illusory, meaning is accidental if real at all, man is but a mechanical animal, the world is pointless, life is hollow, and empty pleasures or will to power are all that’s left to live for–and even then, if one would prefer to just die then, Sarte reminds us, we have no good reason to refrain. The only thing, that I can tell, keeping all atheists from reaching the same conclusions as Nietzsche is that they have not applied their anti-theistic skepticism very far beyond the pale of God-belief. Namely, they keep their doubt targeted on convenient objects like God, pedophile priests, or prooftexts–but don’t apply their doubt consistently to other things like humanism, political liberalism, language, scientism, naturalism, meaning to life, and ethics. And now that atheists since about 1876 onward have been shifting toward a “negative” form of atheism–making no claim–the atheistic pool has gotten shallower, internet atheism as I call it, the kind of atheism that is more schooled in Richard Dawkins than J.L. Mackie; Sam Harris than Graham Oppy; the kind of atheism that is gullible on Myther movements and ancient aliens; the kind of atheism that doesn’t know what “ontological” means. I’m not saying they are dumb or even that they are wrong, I’m saying that the educational sophistication of many contemporary atheists I hear from is not in philosophy, theology, or Biblical studies yet they are oh so eager to dismiss these fields of non-science for failing to be natural science. With their confidence in natural science at an all-time high they are strangely ignorant about how it is philosophy and even theology and faith which give the wind for science to fly. They moralize against Christian ethics, unaware that their morals are arbitrary accidental outcomes of blind evolution, their intentional attack on the faith was itself forced on them by genetic obligation and is therefore meaningless and “nothing personal,” their subjective experience of self is itself an illusion of the brain deceiving itself into “thinking” it can “think” “feel” and “want” with any autonomy, cognition, or conscious meaning; even the ability to discern “truth” is itself presumed when nothing in nature has reassured anything transcendent enough to count as a “truth claim,” the whole godless machine does not even have ghosts, it has organic graffitti: flat, scattered, gibberish, and no author in sight. Its squiggles don’t even have a Rosetta stone, some external reference point to make meaning from the squiggles. No, that human-named happenstance scrawled on the wall is meaningless lines of tissue, illuminated with meaningless neural jolts, on a meaningless planet, in a meaningless solar system, in a meaningless galaxy, in a meaningless universe, in a meaningless cosmos, in a meaningless void. “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless”–Solomon Atheists rarely dare to stare into the well where Nietzsche lept. Its only void down there, but its your best shot for avoiding God.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:09:50 +0000
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