Dr. William Lane Craig lists them:
Five unprovable assumptions of science
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Category Archives: Atheism
The uncaring atheist
Anti-theists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins take considerable delight in declaring that atheists can be as moral as theists. They remain obstinately impervious to the observation that atheistic morality has no objective standard by which to be judged, no frame of reference, and no foundation other than the vapours generated by the heat of Dawkins’ rodomontade; they prefer to ignore this and proclaim stoutly that they are just as good as the God crowd. It turns out that they’re not:
These are not the brightest days for organized religion. Pope Benedict XVI has come under sustained scrutiny for his role in the investigation of sex abuse scandals tarring the Catholic Church. The practices of fundamentalist Muslim women are being attacked by the Quebec government as uncivilized. And, more broadly, many traditional and long-standing congregations across the country must face the reality of their own worldly demise due to substantial declines in Sunday attendance.
Despite all this bad news, however, there remains much to celebrate about religion and its relationship with society at large. Not the least of which is that those who attend religious services are the most charitable in their donations and the most eager to volunteer. Without organized religion, the world would be a much poorer and less comfortable place for those less fortunate.
Last summer, Statistics Canada released a survey on Canadians and their charitable habits. While less than one in five attend church regularly, those who do are far more likely to give to charities, and are substantially more liberal in the size of their gifts to both religious and non-religious organizations. The average annual donation from a churchgoer is $1,038. For the rest of the population, $295.
With respect to volunteer effort, two-thirds of churchgoers give their time to non-profit causes while only 43 per cent of non-attendees do likewise. And churchgoers put in twice as many hours volunteering.
All this munificence is in stark contrast to complaints from anti-religion authors such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Philip Pullman, all of whom have found themselves getting substantially more ink in the wake of the Catholic Church’s sex scandals. “I’m an atheist,” Hitchens once said. “I’m not just neutral about religion, I’m hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one.” Pullman has claimed religion is “the most wonderful excuse for behaving extremely badly.” Their argument: the world would be a better place without churches.
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How Christopher Hitchens copes with futility
Albert Camus in his novel, The Plague, makes the point that without God humans live in an indifferent, incomprehensible universe that has no rational meaning or order. Camus’ solution to this little problem is not resignation or stoicism but to fight back even though it may be with the knowledge that the fight is futile. For an atheistic existentialist, life’s meaning is found not in overcoming, but in struggling against the apparent evil in the natural order of things. This struggle in the certain knowledge of ultimate failure defines man’s freedom: he is not merely a puppet of the natural order that created him.
I think this is a daft way to live but, as can be seen in this exchange with William Lane Craig, it seems to be an energising principle behind Christopher Hitchens’ attempt to live with the futility of his own existence. The difference between Camus and Hitchens is that, whereas Hitchens never tires of expressing his hatred of all things Christian, Camus had a grudging respect for believers who lived by their Christian principles.
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Who made God?
Is a question atheists often pose to counter a theist’s argument that a creator God is likely because of the universe’s complexity and appearance of design.
The question, “if God made the universe, who made God?” contains a category error:
A category error occurs when someone acts as though some object had properties which it does not or cannot have. The reason why it cannot have those properties is because the properties belong to objects in some other category or class. For example:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
The above sentence commits at least two category errors. One is the attribution of the property of color (green) to something immaterial (ideas). This is an example of a property (color) which “ideas” cannot have. A second is the attribution of a property of speed/manner (furiously) to an action (sleep). This is an example of a specific property which sleep does not have, even though sleep can have other, similar properties – like soundly or quickly.
God, by definition, is in the category of things that are not created.
The universe began at the big bang; before the big bang it did not exist. It is in the category of things that are created.
To ask “who made God?” can only make sense if it is asked about a created god, not about the uncreated eternal Christian God.
So, for an atheist to ask, “if God made the universe, who made God?” in order to try and weaken the argument for God from design is illogical.
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Arrest Christopher Hitchens for supporting an illegal war
As it happens, I supported – and still support – the Iraq war, but this is considerably more sensible than Hitchens’ crusade to arrest the Pope:
It should also be remembered that Hitchens was an outspoken advocate of the 2003 Iraq War which some international lawyers deemed illegal. A case could arguably be made, therefore, to have himself brought to the ICC for war crimes on the grounds of being a leading cheerleader for an illegal war. After all, he now seems to be a keen proselytizer for international law, at least when it suits his ideological goals.
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Atheist says he has converted to Christianity after listening to Christopher Hitchens
After being a hard atheist for 8 or 9 years, the speaker from the audience at the University of Florida says he has converted to Christianity having seen Satan himself – in the guise of Christopher Hitchens – on stage.
Obviously the speaker is not serious, but the reaction of some of the bystanders is interesting – they want to shut him up.
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How arrogant is Dawkins? Let me count the ways
Well, one way.
Bertrand Russell, mathematician, philosopher and atheist, when asked what he would say to God if he met him after death, answered “Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!” Although he continued to call himself an atheist, Russell acknowledged that, technically, he was an agnostic, since he didn’t believe in the non-existence of God.
Richard Dawkins, when asked the same question, not only didn’t answer it, but mocked the questioner. Today’s coterie of atheists really do give atheism a bad name and would undoubtedly make atheists of the past wince; even though I still disagreed with them, at least they had a modicum of wit, finesse, decency and understood the philosophical difficulties that hard atheism presents.
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A new form of Christian evangelism: atheist conferences
The blustering rudeness of contemporary atheists appears to have driven at least one person closer to God:
THE Global Atheists Convention in Melbourne last weekend worked a miracle on me.
I’ve never felt more like believing in God. Especially the Christian one.
My near conversion occurred because the convention’s speakers managed to confirm my worst fear.
No, it’s not that God may actually exist, and be cross that I doubted.
It’s that if the Christian God really is dead, then there’s not much to stop people here from being barbarians.
I’d have hoped that the Atheists Convention’s speakers would have reassured me not just by fine words but finer example that a godless society will nevertheless be a good one.
But what did they show me instead? First there was the world’s most famous atheist, former Oxford don and Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins, who smeared Joseph Ratzinger as the “Pope Nazi” and mocked Family First Senator Steve Fielding as dumber than an “earthworm”. The insult to the Pope (right) is truly vile. As a 14-year-old, Ratzinger was conscripted by the Nazi regime into the Hitler Youth, then compulsory for all German boys.
Yet Dawkins was far from the only speaker to unleash the hatred he claimed Christianity inspired. ABC Science Show presenter Robyn Williams boasted he could mount “a devastating argument against religion in two words: ‘Senator Fielding”‘, an insult which the hooting crowd clapped.
Added Williams: “Richard Dawkins said his IQ is lower than an earthworm, but I think earthworms are useful.”
Rationalist Society president Ian Robinson joined in, asking if there were any believers in the audience, adding: “OK, I’ll speak really slowly.”
The fourth speaker, Age columnist Catherine Deveny, saved her worst for the ABC’s Q&A show on Monday, tweeting from the set that fellow panellist Peter Dutton, the Opposition health spokesman, had “a face of a rapist”.
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Atheist insecurity
Melanie Phillips has an excellent article on the recent Australian atheist convention:
Dawkins preaches to the deluded against the divine.
LIKE revivalists from an alternative universe, 2500 hardcore believers in the absence of religion packed into the Global Atheists Convention in Melbourne last weekend to give a hero’s welcome to the high priest of belief in unbelief, Richard Dawkins.
The bestselling author of The God Delusion was similarly fawned over by the Australian media, which uncritically lapped up everything he said.
This was even after (or perhaps because) he referred to the Pope as a Nazi, which managed to combine defamation of the pontiff with implicit Holocaust denial.
By comparison, Family First senator Steve Fielding may feel he got off lightly when Dawkins described him merely as more stupid than an earthworm.
For someone who has made a career out of telling everyone how much more tolerant the world would be if only religion were obliterated from the human psyche, Dawkins manages to appear remarkably intolerant towards anyone who disagrees with him.
Today’s anti-theists resort to insulting their opponents, are sanctimoniously self-righteous about atheistic morality, are irrational, fundamentalist, angry, untruthful, bigoted, arrogant and intolerant. And, according to Melanie Phillips, insecure.
Other than that they are a lovely bunch.
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Atheists sawing through the branch they are sitting on
As they meet in Melbourne to celebrate their lack of faith:
More than 2,000 atheists from around the world are gathering in Melbourne, Australia, to celebrate their lack of religious belief.
It is thought to be the world’s largest gathering of atheist thinkers. There is a determination to avoid what one session calls Atheistic Fundamentalism, says our correspondent.
Participants will be urged to avoid “missionary zeal” in their determination to promote their non-religious message to the world.
As this article notes, Dawkins’ brand of neo logical positivist scientism rests as much on faith as Christianity, Judaism or the foam-flecked ravings of a benighted pagan animism – also known as Anglican-nouveau:
The truth is that science, like religion, starts off beyond reason and then becomes rational. Science is based on faith that the universe is rational. No scientist would begin to do science if they presupposed the universe is beyond understanding. The scientific search for the most simple and elegant theory is motivated by faith that such a theory exists. Charles Townes, a Nobel Prize winner for physics, said: “Science is so successful we are enthralled. Many people don’t realize that science basically involves assumptions and faith . . . nothing is absolutely proved.”