Prometheus Restrained: Overcoming Atheism With Atheism

Atheism and the philosophical problems it cannot solve form the basis for the informed Christian critique showing the transcendental failure of this family of related outlooks. Now the term "Atheism" actually names a host of related worldviews, having different ethical and epistemological (views about what we can know and why) permutations, but with a common metaphysical denominator. No atheistic view includes a divine being as the ultimate metaphysical fact in the cosmos.

Materialistic atheism forms the basis of this critique, though the criticisms found here will apply equally well to disparate variations on this theme.

Atheism has grown fairly popular in America since the U.S. constitution not only does nothing to forbid it, but its Deistic outlook -- God exists but does not interact in human affairs -- actually promotes it, since this amounts to God as a musuem piece and nothing more in terms of historical eventuation. (The Declaration mentions divine providence, but says nothing about WHO comprises the "divine," leaving it an empty reference). In short, the do-nothing God of the founding documents of the U.S. differs in no material respect from the view which holds he does not exist at all. Thus, anyone who sees such documents as "Christian" implies that Christianity is consistent with Atheism, a most unlikely position to be accepted either by Christians or "Atheists."

Since the natural revelation of God clearly portrays Him sufficiently to all men to condemn them for their sins (barring their repentance and saving faith in Jesus Christ the Lord), there are ultimately no Atheists, but since the number of pretenders to this position prove significant, I will not here quibble over what to call them. If they prefer the label, then the label shall they have.

However, Atheism (Naturalism) is an utter philosophical failure, and has been for thousands of years, including that of the atomistic Epicureans of the first century (and before). The world needs an explanation because men want to know, indeed are commanded to find out about the world and subdue it to the glory of their Creator. This makes worldviews ethically obligatory, and they also happen to be inescapable since people are made in the image of God, and try to systematize and interpret their experiences, weaving them into a unit of thought or belief system. These are more or less rational in terms of their motivational responses to learning how to get by in life. The problem comes when comparing the different responses (interpretations and answers) given to the different questions which arise when we inquire about the world around us and our place in it.

Atheism's various answer run so various to the different questions that any comparison of them quickly brings to the fore its actual logical conditions standing behind the "titanic-like" promise of naturalistic sciences, and the Atheism these both assume and promote. To being our brief interrogation, we should like to pose a few of the classic difficulties philosophers have faced -- as well any thinking person who may have asked such interrogatives.

The ancient "pre-Socratics" (Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus to name a few) troubled themselves with an observation that change seemed both obvious and universal, and yet people do not cease to be the same people we knew as they get older, though they now look little like the person they were a infants. The fact that each retains the same name, and that we think of them this way, shows that a persistent identity remains through all the drastic changes their physiologies undergo.

This is one aspect -- one might also compare a seed to a huge redwood -- of the problem of identity through time. Given the drastic changes we observe, their constant and thoroughgoing nature, what justifies the assumption that this is the same person from one moment to the next, nevermind over 40 years?

The Christian answer to this comes obviously given its outlook. People are created as having both a body and a soul, and while the body, being material only, continues its changes through the full cycle of life, the soul matures in a different way, and provides an underlying identity not subject to the vicissitudes, wear and dissolution of the material world. Spirits do not rust either.

But this answer is not available to the Atheist. In fact, no good answer avails itself to the one who commits himself to the evolutionary and materialistic outlook, which affirms that change is the only constant, with each and every cell and somatic system traversing its way through the chemical changes common to us all.

But given this Heraclitean tendency to favor change over identity, this leaves wholly unexplained why we see identity, and need to in order to function in life, in one person from one day to the next. So you were Herbert Jones yesterday. Today is a whole new physiological ball game (if you are only 98 cents worth of chemicals). With inflation, we might be able to get a buck fifty for you. But this problem has yet to be tackled in any serious manner by Atheistic proponents.

Each of their weak rejoinders to the so-called "mind-body" problem only underscores the frailty of the naturalistic outlooks as they attempt to grapple with what their evolutionism denies. There is no Planck's CONSTANT in a world overrun by change, no aging by the SAME people from day to day, and as Heraclitus said it well, "They can never step in the same river twice." I hereby declare all identification cards for Atheists invalid and non-referring beyond twenty-four hours. They will need to renew them daily, given their views. No, wait. They must renew them hourly, or was that by the minute? Time is actually not the problem, no matter how small one slices the unit of time, we can always point to the faster transformational processes in this world. Explosions make for very difficult "time splittings" and the smaller units of time they do promote are distinctions without a real difference.

Change is real. So how does identity obtain at all? We are still waiting to hear from the atheistic world on this one. My advice? Don't hold your breath. They simply do not have enough variation of kinds of this native to this cosmos (no souls, no identity through time). By the way, laws of logic are likewise invariant, and retain their identity through time. Thus, given Naturalism's commitment to "all is material in origin that is real," there could be no laws of logic. Thus, Atheism eliminates the preconditions for rationality, and cannot claim to be rational on its own terms.

The tired old rejoinder that these are mere conventions of men is not an answer. It is a denial that there are LAWS of logic at all. Laws are not conventional. Only their descriptions are. Moreover, any affirmation of conventionalism is self-refuting. How is the claim that all linguistic references are only conventional ITSELF avoid this criticism? This is called the "Fallacy of self-exception," which enjoins upon all views a rule from which mine alone is exempted with no argument offered for the ARBITRARY (did I mention self-serving?) exception.

The sciences also require as a given assumption what is habitually called, "The uniformity of nature." This, please note, names a universal constant, which does not exist, given cosmological evolution. Thus, materialistic outlooks undermine the preconditions for the sciences they need to launch their assaults on other views. This is the fallacy of cutting off your own legs, which notoriously leaves hop-along Atheism with no "scientific" leg to stand on.

Atheism fares no better handling the historic "problem of induction," widely popularized by David Hume, the so-called "Scottish Skeptic." Hume noted that there seems no empirical (observational or data-based) reason to make the sort of assumption -- an extrapolation -- regarding the future, just because things seem to have occurred similarly in the past. We cannot observe future cases of any given grouping of data. So just because every crow we may have seen to date turns out to be a black crow, this provides no justification for assuming that "all crows are black" (even if this turns out to be true).

Inductions always involve extending what we know from the past into the unknown future concerning like objects or situations. Moreover, since we never have all the evidence (inductions are always incomplete), no induction is ever justifiable since the next instance on any one set may be the counter-instance we have not yet seen to our postulated idea that "all crows are black." The next one might be the white crow -- or blue crow. But since inductions form the primary basis of knowledge based on sense perceptions (we experience all our knowledge via one or more of our five senses), Atheism then -- if true -- would leave us with no knowledge whatsoever. This means that every fact you know is a proof that Atheism is simply false.

You obtained that information by some form of induction, and induction is not warranted on any Atheistic outlook. Without constants, you cannot have inductions either.

On the biblical view, God created all things "in the beginning" each "according to its own kind" (which statement appears 14 times in the first two chapters of Genesis. It also explains that God created men and women in his own image. So the mindset of the highest creatures corresponds to the objective world God created. Given this view, it naturally and smoothly follows that we percieve objects in classes which we note by see a common set of traits which they possess and have an OBJECTIVE warrant for expecting that future cases (in the case of strong inductions) will be like the past cases. The "kinds" (classes) of objects appear similarly because that is simply the way God created them (and the laws governing them and their behaviors). So all coins of roughly the same size and weight will fall at the same rate tomorrow as they did today -- given similar initial conditions.

This in fact EXPLAINS why inductions come naturally to us, and what warrants the good ones. Atheism in effect implies these simply are not possible to warrant, but since we MUST do this in order to know (and get by in life), Atheism requires blind FAITH (warrantless credulity) where the Word of God does not.

This embarrassingly leaves the naturalistic sciences "faith-based," while Christianity would render them rational (given the other biblical parameters governing them).

Finally, let us end our brief excursion into the problems of naturalism with a cursory overview of its inability to provide moral absolutes, and why this is such a problem for them. Think on the scientific enterprise for a moment. What would happen if all researchers everywhere instantly felt free to falsify whatever documentation they deemed "fun" or profitable. People trusting such bogus data in hospitals could die. Others might suffer medicinal side-effects they did not expect and would not have taken such drugs had they known of the possiblity of incurring such problems later.

All the sciences which we have come to respect come with ethical barriers -- confidentialilty issues regarding patents, warning labels, the removal of some known hazards from foods sold (or their removal from the marketplace), research protocols, conflict of interest issues, the required nature of scientific experiments (some must be double-blind to be legally proper), and other legal and ethical matters which affect which kind of science may be performed and under which conditions, and how its products may or may not be used. Please do not imagine that the use of nuclear weapons is not controversial. So is the storage location of spent fuel rods.

How, on an Atheistic account of things could one ever derive from matter in motion the universal invariant entities like moral laws one needs in order to assert "You shall not falsify research" (even if it profits you greatly), "You shall not murder" (by failing to note carcinogenic factors on packages for sale) and all the other variants of the ten commandments which underlie the sciences in practice. No ethics? No science -- at least none that westerners would want to live with. If anyone were free to use nuclear weapons on a whim, the desires of westerners could be a moot point anyway. Mushroom clouds are equal opportunity.

The sciences, as well the rest of the practical aspects of life -- professional ethics on the job -- whether one is a doctor, lawyer, minister, or even a food packer, each occupation carries certain risks to one's self and others -- their health, reputations or property -- which require ethical considerations, and ethically limited behaviors. Ethics are not escapable. This is why every society has them, even when the social mores of one seem less than palpable across its cultural borders. Westerners --even the most pluralistic -- are not prepared to accept genocide as a "cross-cultural" feature we should simply yawn at like the color choices for one's clothing, or whether women may or may not wear makeup (Puritans tended to frown on it, since they emphasized the development of inward virtues rather than artifically enhanced outward appearances). Although the Book of Esther seems plain enough to me [Insert shrug here].

In any case, the ethical pre-conditions for life, for the sciences, for professions and all social interaction need governing rules. Irresolvable conflicts arise without rules sufficient to distinguish the proper procedure or resolution in each case. This is why Christians believe in the 613 commandments (minus the ones repealed under the Newer Covenant -- dietary restrictions, Israelite land laws, tribal regulations, ceremonial ordinances, and the like).

Given the Christian view that the international, transcendent and sufficient legal code it names the Law of the Lord was given to men by God for just this purpose -- to impose as ethical and legal standards to supply the necessary preconditions for logic, science and morality in every area of life -- it makes perfect sense as to why Christians might do science in an ethical fashion. This is not only consistent with, but required by, the Christian worldview.

The Atheist, on the other hand, cannot do the inductions (since he cannot warrant them) by which one might claim to derive ethical lessons from observed cases of say "other animals," and even if he did, this would be a mere convention, which any scientist could feel free to exempt himself from when convenient. Conventions are not absolute. And absolutes are not conventional. Finally, attempting to derive what one ought to do from described instances forms the textbook example of this is-ought fallacy, which confuses what is the case with what OUGHT to be the case. What is true now is only normative if you think this is (right now) a perfect world (which cannot be improved).

This is obviously false. So is Atheism. In sum then, in each and every instance where the Christian worldview shows the intellectual and explicative (it explains well) strengths necessary to account for why things appear as they do (identity seems to exist through time), how we can know what we know (inductions can be warranted, but only by one worldview), and how we ought to live our lives (ethical standards, scopes, limits and behaviors), Atheism fails badly, not only in its inability to provide an account offering the necessary preconditions for the activity, knowledge type or idea in question, but in offering also rather botched (mutually incompatible) attempts to explain different aspects of what we wake up to in the morning, and what people actually do at work.

When Atheists "explain," that which Laurel giveth, Hardy taketh away. Whether this is a comedy, or more a tragedy, I shall leave it to the reader to decide. The inherent contradictions within the various naturalistically "explained" parts of the Atheistic outlook surely give away its man-made origin as a self-eliminating proposition, not fit to survive in the marketplace of ideas.

And this provides but a sample of its implicates, and the more greatly tangled webs they have woven. More could be said at length on each of these points (and several others). But that is stuff of a later day. Readers need coffee breaks too. Viva Sumatra.