In an atheist world, it doesn’t matter…
In an atheist world there is no good and no evil; just better and worse. There is no meaning or purpose; things just are.
In an atheist world we are just a bunch of atoms that came together by accident. These atoms interact chemically and physically in accordance to their chemical properties. These reactions may be called thoughts and emotions, or even called life; but in their truth it is just chemistry.
We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a 1 percent bit of pollution in a universe … we are completely irrelevant. —LAWRENCE KRAUSS
If the atheist does not allow for a transcendent determiner of an ultimate truth, no such truth can exist and all we observe and experience is subjective and relative. We may agree not to rape babies, not because it is wrong, but because we agreed. We agree to help the starving poor, not because it is good, but because we agreed to do so.
An anonymous, and HONEST, atheist commented recently on a blog:
We are Atheists. We believe that the Universe is a great uncaused, random accident. All life in the Universe past and future are the results of random chance acting on itself. While we acknowledge concepts like morality, politeness, civility seem to exist, we know they do not. Our highly evolved brains imagine that these things have a cause or a use, and they have in the past, they’ve allowed life to continue on this planet for a short blip of time. But make no mistake: all our dreams, loves, opinions, and desires are figments of our primordial imagination. They are fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses for a moment in time. They served some purpose in the past. They got us here. That’s it. All human achievement and plans for the future are the result of some ancient, evolved brain and accompanying chemical reactions that once served a survival purpose. Ex: I’ll marry and nurture children because my genes demand reproduction, I’ll create because creativity served a survival advantage to my ancient ape ancestors, I’ll build cities and laws because this allowed my ape grandfather time and peace to reproduce and protect his genes. My only directive is to obey my genes. Eat, sleep, reproduce, die. That is our bible.
We deride the Theists for having created myths and holy books. We imagine ourselves superior. But we too imagine there are reasons to obey laws, be polite, protect the weak etc. Rubbish. We are nurturing a new religion, one where we imagine that such conventions have any basis in reality. Have they allowed life to exist? Absolutely. But who cares? Outside of my greedy little gene’s need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife. Only the fear that I might be incarcerated and thus be deprived of the opportunity to do the same with the next guy’s wife stops me. Some of my Atheist friends have fooled themselves into acting like the general population. They live in suburban homes, drive Toyota Camrys, attend school plays. But underneath they know the truth. They are a bag of DNA whose only purpose is to make more of themselves. So be nice if you want. Be involved, have polite conversations, be a model citizen. Just be aware that while technically an Atheist, you are an inferior one. You’re just a little bit less evolved, that’s all. When you are ready to join me, let me know, I’ll be reproducing with your wife.
When a child suffers from hunger, it constitutes particular combinations reacting chemically in a specific environment at a particular point in time. Hunger is just a certain mix of juices in the stomach and the absence of others that we have learned to call hunger, but it is not a tragedy; it just is.
When a family is incinerated in a volcanic eruption that destroys the village, it is not a catastrophe, it is just chemicals.
When all is ‘relative’ and nothing is absolute, there are more or less pleasant experiences, not good and bad for there can be no values as such.
There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. —FRANCIS A. SCHAEFFER
There may be events and circumstances we accept or reject, but even the act of accepting or rejecting those circumstances is an illusion because there is no freedom of thought. The notion of ‘choice’ is merely perceived thus – just chemical reactions. There is no freedom of will because the properties of the chemicals dictate what happens not some illusory freedom to choose. (For that would make you ‘god’ over the inviolable properties of chemicals, and that is untenable in the atheist perspective.)
[Free will is] a psychological illusion that we can reflect upon our own mental contents and try to take the perspective of why we were thinking what we were thinking when we made a decision at the time. -JESSE BERING
For even those thoughts that produce hypotheses, arguments and conclusions are only chemical reactions. And ironically, when those chemical reactions come to a conclusion about those chemical reactions, that is circular logic anyway; which runs contrary to the conventions of scientific thought.
The atheist life has no meaning. They will argue differently. In fact, articulating it forthrightly like this may even be found offensive. (Who can decide that someone else’s life has no meaning? Well, no one can, but that is a Christian belief, not an atheist one.) Indeed, there are several arguments to make out that morality has an evolutionary cause (despite what other atheists may have claimed before).
Atheists think that by ‘proving’ a naturalistic cause for morality they disprove God. I say that form of ‘morality’ is a form of humanism where a bunch of people collectively agree to ‘be good’ for the sake of harmony, order or other desirable outcome. What they are really describing (as in the case of the study with Chimpanzees who are said to behave ‘morally’ by sharing their food) as behaviour that is ultimately reduced to selfishness.
Atheists are often vitriolic and condescending in their response, which is one of the reasons where I publish on a platform that does not support comment. I am not interested in converting atheists, for that is a logical impossibility. (Their a-priori assumption is that physics must be able to resolve the argument, which means a metaphysical creator cannot be argued.) But allow me to make two points:
<> Christians/ believers can also be vitriolic in their response, and sometimes annoyingly patronising by offering up the person they are debating to the ‘love of God’ to persuade their wicked hearts.
<> Atheists are not (necessarily) bad people simply because believers in an absolute moral authority (i.e. God) and Atheists don’t. Either person can behave poorly or exemplary.
What I am saying in this argument is that the ‘doing good’ that atheists do can only be judged by as ‘good’ if there were an objective standard of good. In the absence of this standard, the behaviour does not change, but instead being able to be claimed as ‘good’, the atheist must be satisfied that those behaviours be classified (merely) as what other people consider to be acceptable and sufficient.
An honest atheist would have to argue that this is enough, because there is no need for God to judge good and evil, and that is not possible for God to judge it because God does not exist.
An atheist who is not a nihilist, or at the very least a fatalist, is a fraud. The atheist who claims a purpose to their life is delusional and does not understand the ramifications of their own worldview fully.
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. —C. S. LEWIS
Atheists make many claims about their life and their newfound freedom from an oppressive God. Atheists claim that they are above ‘superstition’, even though research suggests otherwise. And, whilst I have no statistics to support this, a think more atheist converts (or de-converts) resort to blogging and evangelising (per capita) than converted theists.
When people discover there are no fairies and no Santa, they don’t turn into a-fairies and a-Santas, and nobody feels compelled to save the children from this abomination. Not so the theist who becomes atheist. They evangelise like mad, all in the name of reclaiming society from the warped god-botherers; but methinks they protest too much. I perceive (but don’t know) that this is more likely a gnawing need to re-affirm what does not quite feel right. (Of course this will be denied.)
Thomas Nagel, (philosopher and atheist), says he simply doesn’t want there to be any such person as God. Platinga thinks it is because (…)
(T)here would be what some would think was an intolerable invasion of privacy: God would know my every thought long before I thought it. For another, my actions and even my thoughts would be a constant subject of judgment and evaluation.
Whilst I am loathe to resort to cliché, it seems to me that ultimately the debate between atheism and theism is one where everyone (simply) believes what they want. And whatever the other guy chose is wrong. At least that would be the conclusion if you judged by the level of philosophical sophistication that informs the debate.
My worldview has an equal chance of being wrong since God can never be proven, it remains a 50-50 proposition. At least my choice explains why I think and feel that it matters. Whether that is because I need it to matter or whether it actually matters, doesn’t change anything because … I HAVE PERMISSION TO LIVE MY LIFE AS IF MATTERS. Unlike atheists, if they were honest…