ILLOGICAL ATHEISM A Comprehensive Response to the Contemporary Freethinker from a Lapsed Agnostic

Bo Jinn ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

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~Copyright 2013, 2015 by Bo Jinn All rights reserved to the author, in accordance with International European and domestic law of copyright, for the reproduction, distribution, circulation and alteration oftbis work in any manner and under any name. Any such reproduction or distribution may be allowed if and only if the express written consent of the author is forthcoming in that regard, with the exception of minor excerpts for the purposes of review or citation. Failure to abide by these terms will result in immediate legal action. All of the views expressed in this book are the author's own and he asserts the utmost moral respect for all persons cited, whether living or dead. Nothing in this book is intended to provoke any kind of social hate or bigotry and the sentiments of the author are opposed to any such inference.

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To a friend most dear "I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification." G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows

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CONTENTS

Introduction 11

Chapter 1: Roots of Modern Atheism 21 1.1 Intellectual Atheism 25 1.2 Emotive Atheism 35

Chapter 2: The Silent Spectrum 41 2.1 The Atheist-Skeptic 43 2.2 The Atheist-Agnostic 45 2.3 The Anti-Theist 4 7 2.4 The Naturalist/Materialist 49 2.6 The Deist 53

Chapter 3: The New Atheist 57

Chapter 4: The Celestial Teapot 67

Chapter 5: The God of the Gaps 79

Chapter 6: Fallacies of Origins 91 6.1 AdHominem 91 6.2 The Genetic Fallacy 97

Chapter 7: Fallacies of Conjecture 105

Chapter 8: Counter-Fallacies 115 8.1 Ontological Absurdity 117 8.1 Five Ways to Folly 123

Chapter 9: The Darwinian Fallacy 129 9.1 Evolution and Evolutionism 129 9.2 Evolutionary Determinism 141 9.3 Created Gods and the Fallacy of Complexity 143

Chapter 10: The Pluralistic Fallacy 147

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Chapter 11: The Faith Delusion 153

Chapter 12: The Default Position 157

Chapter 13: Faith: An Appraisal 169

Chapter 14: The Day With No Yesterday 189 14.1 Premise 1: What Rocks Dream Of 191 14.2 So Many Worlds, So Little Time 207

Chapter 15: The New Jihad 219

Chapter 16: Why Atheism is Necessarily False 233

Chapter 17: Imagination and The God-Shaped Void 249

Chapter 18: A Brief Introduction to Morality 261

Chapter 19: Morality, Immorality and Amorality 265

Chapter 20: The Amoral Landscape 275

Chapter 20: Secular Skeletons: Setting the Bloody Record Straight 287 20.1 Liberte, Egalite, Fratemite ... Sang 293 20.2 Los Cristeros 299 20.3 The G-4 303 20.4 Hitler, Mussolini and other "Christians" 311

Conclusions 321

Bibliography and Recommended Reading 325

Books, Journals & Articles 325

Other Sources 337

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BOOK I

ORIGINS

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Introduction

"He who stands for nothing, willfall for anything."

Alexander Hamilton

It is safe to assume that I shall be wmrung no popularity contests among the atheist community for my chosen title, much less the words that are to follow. As an unashamed apostle of heterodoxy, I daresay I shall not be receiving invitations to any apologetics conventions to reiterate my views either. I suppose most readers would classify the contents of this book as apologetics. Whilst I myself am not averse to this description, I do believe it is problematic for a number of reasons which, I've no doubt, will be made amply clear in due time. I am not especially religious, to the extent of the common definition. I am not an apologist, much less an evangelist. Indeed, as I do type these words, my general sentiments toward our subject are anything but apologetic. Long experience has taught that two not entirely mutually exclusive things are certain on the path to truth: cognitive dissonance and a quiet resentment for whatever view opposes our own, hence the cardinal virtues of tolerance, compassion and respect in rational discourse, a courtesy which the more ardent followers of the New

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Atheist Movement have been somewhat reluctant to extend to their theist counterparts. This prevailing impression was reaffirmed to me quite recently by the illustrious Richard Dawkins at the so-called "Reason Rally" on the 24th March 2012 in the secular stronghold of Washington DC where, to the ovation of an audience of devotees, he professed his call to arms:

"Mock them. Ridicule them. In public. With contempt." One needn't pursue one's own curiosity too far into the depths of New Atheist cultism to strike upon the well of seething hostility that drives its purpose. And it is a phenomenon I have encountered quite intimately, surrounding myself, as I have throughout my life, specifically with people who think differently than I, because they are the only people who could possibly make me think. I grew up, like most Europeans, in a community shaped by a long Christian tradition which, I can report, has only recently embarked upon the great Cultural Revolution, and with such leaping and bounding strides that I myself could chronicle the transformation from my own adolescence to the present day. Religion became a matter of mere casual assent by the time I reached my early teens, the language of the faith- blessings, prayers, blasphemies and the rest - reduced to idle gibberish by

12 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM my early twenties. All the other gifts of the long-delayed revolution followed in due course. To this day I am not entirely sure whether my own generation was bred into it, or whether it befell us from the outside with all the allure of a Trojan Horse. Either way, the social fabric, and the values and principles woven into it, has fast become, here, now, what it has long been in most parts of the western world: a mere afterglow of those mores of yore, continually battered away by the great rush of modernity. There developed a bitter anger and frustration about it all which found its object in any institution or ideology which dared to resist the slow spoliation of the traditional ethos. Religion, specifically, became a symbol of repression, a pharisaic figurehead obstructing the unfettered expression of unbounded instinct which- as it was widely accepted - should under no circumstances be unfettered. The taboos of old became the new traditions and the old traditions fast became the new taboos. This was the fertile soil in which the first seeds of freethought were sewn. In the context of those little pockets of simmering anger for the ball and chain of religion, I suppose the prospect of atheism was a definitive emancipation from what had long been regarded as airy-fairy and outdated superstition. I myself was not altogether fetched by the revolution, even when faced with the inevitable fact that tradition was all about

13 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM me seeping ever so steadily down the gutters of history and into the primitive realms of antiquity. Still, it had seemed to me that meaning was something completely human; something that had to be sought from the inside out, whereas religion inverted the view ofthe true sanctity of humankind. God, if he existed, was most certainly something, and most certainly not Someone, and that something, being at most a fairly interesting theory, was only marginally important to my own life. As a matter of sheer expediency I never felt compelled to say I was an atheist, until an atheist finally came along and rather overenthusiastically pointed out to me that in fact I was. That, incidentally, was the day I chanced to blunder into the fleapit ofNew Atheists. Now, the first thing that struck me about the New Atheism is that there was nothing much very new about it. It was little more than the incensed and fanatical tittering of a world view with which I was already fairly familiar, but which had - apparently - began to transform itself into a new religion. I quickly learned that this is a label which the modem atheist resists with what then seemed to me very suspicious ferocity. To my amazement, the religion was also fervently proselytized by a bulwark of cyber-active, barely post pubescent disciples. To be sure, I was not so much driven toward God as much as I was repulsed by this new and pestilent mainstream nonsense, and having encountered more than a few lapsed agnostics

14 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM roused back to their former spiritual roots by this fresh influx of antireligious zeal, I have hitherto come to view the New Atheists as probably the best thing that ever happened to western Christianity. For a long time, the names Dawkins, Dennett and Harris were but faint echoes in the backdrop of this fresh interest in all things religious, right up until the four famed New Atheist manifestos graced the sanctified bookshelves of my personal library through a dearly beloved friend of mine, whereupon the source of that same reckless egotism and self-proclaimed intellectual superiority, so typical of the more forthright of "freethinkers", was revealed to me in a single sentence:

"Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. "1 Apart from manifesting the deep-rooted obstacle to Mr. Sam Harris' nirvanic pursuit, it demanded no profound psychological intuition to appreciate there was something gravely amiss about his words. This same sentiment finds itself expressed in language rather more subtle in the works of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and rather less so in the work of the late Christopher Hitchens. It became very apparent to me very quickly that this was flagrantly not the work of the band of magnanimous luminaries of whom I had been assured. But I was not

1 Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton (2005) p. 52-53

15 ILWGICAL ATHEISM as much surprised, nor concerned, with how the emotive force of this new spate of literature had the effect it did on so many young men and women as I was by the fact that such a plethora of naYve argumentation, fallacy and generally unsophisticated white noise went completely unnoticed in the process. I have therefore endeavored to bring it to notice, explored its grimy depths, catalogued its errors and pried as deeply into the mass hysteria and fanaticism patience would permit, befriending a few atheists along the way for good measure. After High Pope Dawkins, Cardinal Hitchens, Bishop Dennett and Sensei Harris came the lower and more moderate figures in this New Atheist priesthood: Krauss, Stenger, Atkins, Shermer e bella compagnia, all engaged in the same pernicious enterprise of myth-mongering that their beliefs are not beliefs, thereby seeking absolution. I, for one, do not intend to oblige. Therefore, if you care to include, under the umbrella of apologetics, literary resources penned for the sole purpose of warding off the bothersome new atheistic evangelizers, then this book might qualifY, Closing my brief introduction, I suppose I should add a few words of experience about this whole tricky business of God-belief from the point of view of the lapsed agnostic.

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Whilst conversion can happen in any number of ways, a few classroom syllogisms will not go far in convincing the reader to change her view of ultimate reality. That is only rightfully so. And I have no illusions of producing converts. Conversion itself is a nebulous term. I do not, for instance, believe that people remain committed to the same belief they profess to hold with the sort of consistency that they might portray or even imagine of themselves. I myself cross the line between one belief and its opposite upwards of five times a minute, and far more often due to circumstance, whim or fancy than intellectual irreconcilability. There is nothing truer of man, and no truth more vehemently resisted. I am certain that this is true even of Mr. Dawkins and Mr. Harris. On a purely theoretical level - which by no means exhausts the equation- one can only go as far as to render atheism an utterly useless and anarchistic fit of frustration, after which God seems to loom like a poltergeist of possibility. I might add that I am among the worst of those who would dare identify as Christian, a fact evidenced by my own iniquities as much as it is by my general indifference as to the evangelical force of this book. Thus, the atheist's conversion to Christian life, as I myself have come to understand it, might be summed up as the sudden and irritating thorn of conscience, the forfeiture of all fun and the initial worry of possible schizophrenia, culminating into a peace and joy that is so

17 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM odd, so new, so overwhelming and so unprecedented that all rationalism seems to rather appropriately fizzle away as a needless extravagance ... Or, at least, that is what I am told. At any rate, it was either going to be Christianity, Zen, the Golden Cow or the Cult of the Flying Purple Gorgon. If atheism were the only other alternative, I would have gladly gone with the Purple Gorgon. My title no doubt gave away my contention long before my introduction. Nevertheless, I will spell it out plainly, as I shall endeavor to do everything else: Atheism, as any rational human being may understand it, is not a logically coherent position. I will go a step further and claim that up until a few centuries ago this must have been accepted wisdom. At any rate, a combination of hardcore marketing, propaganda and a socio-political scene ripe for the belief to take hold has changed all that quite significantly. We can formulate the central thesis of this book in the form of a Core Argument: Premise 1: Theism and atheism are asymmetrical beliefs. If theism is true, then atheism is false, and vice­ versa Premise 2: Illogical beliefs are false beliefs Premise 3: Atheism is an illogical belief. Premise 4: Therefore, atheism is false.

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Conclusion: Therefore, theism is true (i.e. God, or something like God, exists) It is my hope to demonstrate to the atheist reader unostracized by my words thus far, that atheism is not a belief that can be rationally maintained and leads to inevitably self-contradictory assertions. My less optimistic endeavor will be to show how most popular modern brands of atheism and atheistic argumentation are, for the most part, highly unsophisticated, fallacious and, at worst, logically incoherent. If neither of those objectives can be realized, at the very least it should be my desire to shine the unflattering light of truth over a particular strand of modern culture. Philosophers will tell you that even the strongest line of reasoning is rationally avoidable. It may just surprise you to find out this proverb does not hold for atheism.

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Chapter 1 Roots of Modern Atheism

"The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."

George Orwell

There is a crucial difference between believing something for no reason at all and believing something that is completely illogical. By that token, I would like to submit that atheism is, in fact, completely and furthermore utterly - unequivocally - illogical. This is a point which I hope to expand upon later. For now, however, I am concerned with building a context of cultural and philosophical origins.

The New Atheist movement began, like most fanatical movements, as a reprisal in the years subsequent to the atrocities of 9/11, and has since found a whole host of distraught and disillusioned young souls with which to expand its sphere of influence. Since then, the New Atheists have become somewhat of a global phenomenon, and quite successfully marketed themselves as a club for the cerebral milieu, where those who join can be assured of recognition among the most learned of modem western man. Internet-based organizations like 'TED Talks' and

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'Big Think' have facilitated the New Atheist expansion quite nicely. Aside from the conceited foundations of the campaign, however, there is a more disquieting detail which only serious scrutiny could expose, and that is that New Atheism possesses all the hallmarks of a militant ideology - an unmistakable feature of its leaders one finds all but completely ignored by the reviews, even those of the foremost contemporary apologists.

Atheism has become not so much a matter of abandoning religion as the vigorous imposition of an entirely new religion, and a phantom religion at that. For these reasons, I would like to isolate a number of nuances between the essential beliefs/philosophies to which the atheistic worldview is committed, and which, in the present authors view, render all atheistic belief without warrant, and the dynamics of the contemporary atheist sub-culture, which render it nigh indistinguishable from any other mainstream religion. This first book is focused predominantly on the latter. I wish to do this, not merely to paint a clearer picture of how contemporary atheism has risen from the intellectual mud of history, but also to dispel the myth that the more recent revolution which has driven its expansion has come about as the necessary correlative of some illusory human progression. Whilst there is nothing new or particularly intelligent about popular atheist argumentation to which I can personally attest, I would venture that there are a greater number

22 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM of atheists in western culture today than there have been in recent years. This drift seems to me to be a point in favour of my thesis rather than against it, although I am sure that there are more than a few readers who have bought into the self-serving myth that their generation is so much more enlightened than any other that came before it. If so, I encourage you to read on.

There are two forces that spurred the influx of modern atheism: the emotive force and the intellectual force. I shall begin with a brief exposition of the latter before proceeding to the former. I must warn that whilst I have made my best efforts to keep my content simple and the prose clean, certain philosophical terms are inescapable. Remembering all too vividly the plight of the philosophy freshman, the only words of encouragement I can tender are the ones often told me by one of my old philosophy professors:

Always make it a rule of thumb that if something sounds extremely simple, it is more likely to be extremely simplistic.

With that, let the complications begin.

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1.1 Intellectual Atheism

"The Intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society which honors the servant, but has forgotten the gift."

Albert Einstein.

The roots of western atheism are firmly planted in a tradition that goes back - as most things do - to Ancient Greece, and a philosophical school typically attributed to the pre-Socratic thinker, Epicurus.2 The starting point I am talking about is, of course, Naturalism: the belief (and I do emphasize that word) that the universe is self­ sufficient, causeless and requires no explanation beyond itself; its foundational premise being the timelessness of mass energy and the laws by which it is governed, through which all things that ever were came to be, for our sake and for our salvation, and all the rest of it. Epicurean materialism subsisted for centuries as a dominant school of thought throughout the western world, until the rise of Christianity in Ancient Rome during the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, marking the beginning of an age-old enmity which reached its climax right around 17th century and the dawn of the Great Enlightenment.

2 - See; Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy: 2"d Edition Penguin (2001) p. 203-253

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The Enlightenment was as much a Europe-wide political revolution as an academic revolution, and the latter did precede the former. The secular revolution is still going on today, and some four centuries down the line it has lost little of its momentum, as evidenced by the continuing expansion of atheist nomenclature, each term more frivolous than the last: "Rationalists", "Modems", "Brights", "ChildrenoftheEnlightenment", "Humanists", "Secularists", "Progressives", "Freethinkers" - but a few of the self-serving monikers adopted by hundreds of associations the world over, united in their common purpose of eradicating all traces of the Judea-Christian heritage. It is between the sordid sheets of the Enlightenment that the miracle of Empiricism was born, and reared, as it were, from the philosophical cradle to its mature form - its full capacity for discovery and illumination- science. The marriage of science to naturalism during the 1 mid-to late l8 h century, ministered most famously by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, symbolized the brokering of a union which was nothing short of a shotgun wedding of academia to ideology. Science thus became the bride of a completely self-sufficient naturalistic worldview, a crooked union sealed by a single vow, as pervasive as it is perverse:

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"What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know. "3

I think anyone living in 21st century society can relate to this sentiment. And I would like to submit that it is precisely this naturalized epistemology which, in the last analysis, undermines the very faculties without which science would be no more possible than rational thought. "That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance ofscience could ever empower it to answer," remarked the Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medowar. And at the risk of acknowledging those limits, the questions must be deemed pointless. Scientific materialism thus reduces humanity to a state where the most fundamental questions one can possibly ask are questions not worth asking, precisely because they are questions for which science has little or nothing to say. And the scientific atheist, both mute and proud turns his back, dismissing the deepest inquiries of man as fleeting indulgences with no real purpose beyond distracting feeble minds from the painful reality of nihilism. The reality is quite the reverse. 3- Bertrand Russell's famous dictum

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Upon honest reflection, our natural fascination with the perceptible universe somehow finds its reserve in the natural sciences lackluster in some fundamental way. It so happens that apart from being a cold-blooded and shallow interpretation of reality, this view is also false. There are points where the sets of science, reason, imagination and faith intersect across the spectrum of human understanding, and to stray too far in either domain is both intellectually perilous and, unfortunately, quite inevitable. The copiously over-quoted Professor Einstein once said "imagination is more precious than knowledge". He was not isolated in his opinion. Why? A pause for thought must precede the answer to the question: is there really a fundamental incompatibility between science and God? Or is it merely a misapplication of methodology - the wrong form of inquiry, given the enormity of its Object4. There is an even more distressing problem at the heart of the scientific verificationist revolution which has led to the pronouncement by some of the world's 5 leading scientists that "philosophy is dead" • And the egregiousness of this - the ultimate act of intellectual 4 - Category Fallacy: A category mistake, or category fallacy, is a semantic or ontological error in which things of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. Eg. "How heavy is the number 5?" "The color red tastes bitter." 5 - Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow- The Grand Design P. 7

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matricide - is amplified by the fact that scientific journals continue to find themselves riddled with ill­ substantiated philosophical pronouncements! The God Delusion itself is not a book of science. It is in fact a book of philosophy, and affords testament to the fact that even the most celebrated scientists are liable to deception in their willful ignorance of the discrepancy - itself a philosophical question. Consider statements like "Evolution disproves God" and "The universe created itself' or "nothing created something". None of those statements are scientific, they make no immediate sense, and the average believer, when asked for his reasons, will rarely proffer an answer beyond some anecdotal hearsay which traces back to the lips of some representative of the scientific establishment. Take, for instance the central argument in Mlodinow's book; The Grand Design, the abridged version of which goes something like this: Because the law of gravity and the quantum vacuum exist, therefore, the universe will create itself from nothing. Translated this into a simpler, logical format: Because something and something else exists, therefore, some other thing will create itself from nothing. This is no mere caricature of the derivatives of M-Theory, easily the most flouted subject in the history

29 ILWGICAL ATHEISM of popular science. And one must not be lulled by the mystique of grandeur that the theory is anything more than what it seems. Absurd. And this is not because we are some lower form of intellect incapable of grasping the inaccessible and sacred pinnacles of understanding that only scientists occupy. If something came about because of something else, it follows that something was caused by something, not by nothing - much less so if it came about from two somethings. And if we were to accept a notion as unfathomable as a self-creating universe, would we yet be denied the possibility of miracles? Sure enough, upon a more in-depth investigation we find that what Mlodinow calls "nothing", in quantum physical terms, is not "nothing" at all. As one theoretical physicist recently put it: "In recent years, physicists have begun to anticipate that the matter that composes the entire visible universe might have been created spontaneously - a mere consequence of the instability of empty space. Supeificially, then, it might seem that we have the answer: there is something rather than nothing because "nothing" is unstable (rather in the way that a pencil balancing precariously on its point is unstable). That is pretty exciting stuff, but it isn't really an answer to the question and, in any case, "nothing" in quantum physics is far from that- it is a seething maelstrom ofactivity, to the extent that one might view the substantial universe

30 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM we inhabit as the froth on top. Awestruck as I am by the laws ofphysics, no amount of wishful thinking (note the words) can allow me to make the mistake of supposing that a law by itself can ever create anything. In addition to being unable to conjure up material existence, the laws ofphysics cannot create meaning either. "6 Still, the lengths to which certain scientists have stretched in order to justify the theory of the universe ex nihilo should, at the very least, call to consideration whether it is truly their science that has pushed them beyond the bounds reason, or whether perhaps their science is leaping forth to the defence of more dogmatic motives-a fit of compulsion which has grown continually harder to resist since the day the vow was taken all those centuries ago: "What science cannot tell us, mankind WILL NOT know." There have been claims by the likes of atheists in the vein of Mr. Lawrence Krauss that the universe is itself an illogical place and that logic simply won't do to understand it, which makes one wonder why Mr. Krauss bothers to do science at all given that there is precious little beyond logic for understanding much of anything. And the same people who've sold themselves as the champions of reason and the torch-bearers of truth, 6- JeffForshaw, Science and Religion United in a Shared Sense of Wonder, The Observer, Sunday 28'h October 2012

31 ILWGICAL ATHEISM having demonstrated little aptitude for either truth or reason, then expect us to sit back and accept that there is no point in thinking about anything, since the task has been left in their very capable hands. The myth that belief in God is anti-scientific sprung from the loins of this same deformation professionnelle. The myth continues to propagate until today among sections of the scientific community, fuelled an inexcusable ignorance of where science ends and philosophy begins, coupled with a vain desire to be identified as the locus of all truth, a role in which academics take especially enormous satisfaction and one which, for obvious reasons, they are highly unwilling to forsake. Even though this view is virtually never endorsed in any other aspect of everyday life, it seems to revitalize with uncanny resolve the second the divine foot creeps over the threshold of due consideration. This epistemic temperament has not been without consequence. Ina recent book entitled The Master and His Emissary/ British Psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist chronicles the unfolding of the Western World from the perspective of neuroscience and the myth of the "divided brain", another legacy of post-Enlightenment rationalism. McGilchrist's

7 - lain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making ofthe Western World, Yale University Press (2009)

32 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM prediction is sobering to say the least. The human mind, crippled generation after generation, evolving evermore rapidly around technology and a highly constricted academic methodology, seems doomed to perish in the midst of a battle ground, where faith and reason lie poised within their trenches, as God looms high over the crossfire of ever-dwindling synapses. "Anybody who has seriously been engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple ofscience are written the words: "Ye must have faith". It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with ... Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. That is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of nature and therefore a part of the very mystery that we are trying to solve. "8 Thus wrote, the Patriarch of Quantum Theory Max Plank in 1932. His caution has gone unheeded. It is my belief that atheism proper, cited for the supposed intellectual irreconcilability between theism and science, can be traced back as a direct result of this deficiency in epistemology. The deficiency can be expressed as follows: Premise 1: Human understanding is at once rational, intuitive and empirical.

8 - Max Planck, Where is Science Going? (1932)

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Premise 2: Science is purely empirical. Premise 3: The belief that science is sufficient for human understanding is a fallacious episteme.9 Premise 4: Atheism implies that science is sufficient for human understanding. Conclusion: Therefore scientific atheism is based on a fallacious episteme. Whilst this thesis has nothing to say directly about whether or not there is a God, it is worth noting as a context for what I would like to put forth in later chapters: that the myth of science as a vocation that finds its natural home in the atheistic caucus turns out to be nothing more than the fraudulent product of religious propaganda.

9 - Episteme: The philosophical framework within which beliefs are produced.

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1.2 Emotive Atheism

"One ought to hold on to ones heart,· for ifone lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too. " Friedrich Nietzsche

To every ideology, there is an emotive counterpart, for an idea by itself does little to spur revolution, much less the kind of wide-scale revolution at the tiniest kernel of which modem atheism finds its sanctuary. The stardust of passion renders whatever idea over which it is scattered as infinitely more alluring as contagious, and the quicker that emotion can transmit from one person to another, the quicker the idea spreads until it achieves its full state of maturity.

This is the tried, tested and proven fast-track to Ideology.

The fiipside to passion is that it can facilitate even the most ridiculous and dangerous propositions, provided they are believed with enough indignation, a point which has been marked in the blood of millions again and again throughout history. Emotions precede reason. It would be a wonderful world in which beliefs were, for the better part, plausible conclusions reached on the

35 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM basis of evidence or proofs. The reality, however, is that in the case of our most cherished beliefs, this is almost never the case. A belief is a soldier. It accepts itself as true from the start, it takes its orders and marches bravely out to the battlefields of ideology, seeking every reason under the sun to make itself seem more true - even if it is at the expense of rationality, which it invariably is. This says nothing of atheism specifically. The same concept applies to any belief. That includes theistic religion. At the risk of falling foul of the most banal fallacy, I should make it clear that I am not trying to argue that atheism is illogical because its origins are unsound, but only to perhaps coax the atheist into entertaining the possibility that her beliefs might just have been a misguided conclusion. The glaring fallaciousness of its logic is an entirely separate matter - one I hope to demonstrate in due time.

The ascent of western modernity is rather more than slightly relevant to the discussion. We take it completely for granted just how much this sudden and inebriating dose of liberation has affected the mind of modem western man who, finding himself in the aftermath of half a century characterized by all the terrors of totalitarianism, grows ever more suspicious of anything that he perceives as a threat to his freedom. Rather than taking attention away from the Church, the events of September 11th, which prompted the first publications of New Atheist literature, seemed to invigorate the same deluded notion

36 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM of Christian authoritarianism, snidely hampered by an almost mechanistic association to fundamentalist Islam. The clever technique of cataloguing all the grotesque evils of anything marginally associated with the chosen target is, needless to say, the oldest trick in the propagandist handbook. Translated into the work of Christopher Hitchens, the nutshell version of this technique runs as follows:

"Religion = Genital mutilation, indoctrination, rape, witch-hunts, torture, murder, war, death, destruction, Hell, lies, deception, sexism, sexual repression, terrorism, disease, plague, famine, holocaust, thought crime, fascism, homophobia. Conclusion: religion is evil."

"All propaganda has to be popular, and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach, " remarked a little known Austrian politician. And ofthe atheist churned in the seething cauldron of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, numerous and conspicuous in their passion, the evidence of this emotive edifice is without question. That same putrid stench of militarist propaganda, immediately familiar to anyone who has cared to peruse the work of Herr Goebbels, reeks from the pages of the New Atheist scriptures. Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state, writes Professor Chomsky. And the seeds of rage carefully planted, barely

37 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM passable logic will do for the idea to take hold.

Take as an example one of the more bewildering notions alluded to in the very preface of Dawkins' God Delusion: the myth of the "oppressed atheist", ousted by the relentless and tyrannical onslaught of religion. 10 Whilst I cannot speak on behalf of the North American atheist society, having lived out the better part of my life in Europe, I can safely say I have never seen, heard of, or indeed met anyone who has once seen or heard of a hate crime or any form of persecution perpetrated on the poor, lowly infidel for the sake of his atheism. As if that were not ridiculous enough, Dawkins also thought to include "a partial list offriendly addresses for individuals needing support in escaping from religion."

Was there something we all missed? Was a small village of Scandinavian atheists recently purged by a resurgent mob of the Norwegian KKK? Has there been a recent 10 - Dawkins, God Delusion, p 3-4: "My fourth consciousness­ raiser is atheist pride. Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about. On the contrary, it is something to be proud of, standing tall to face the far horizon, for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind. There are many people who know, in their heart of hearts, that they are atheists, but dare not admit it to their families or even, in some cases, to themselves. Partly, this is because the very word 'atheist' has been assiduously built up as a terrible and frightening label. Chapter 9 quotes the comedian Julia Sweeneys tragi-comic story of her parents' discovery, through reading a newspaper, that she had become an atheist. Not believing in God they could just about take, but an atheist!"

38 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM proliferation of internment camps in the United States littered with the decomposing corpses of non-believing Americans?

Rule number 1 in rallying an enraged mob: Convince them they have an enemy. The core premise behind the institution of Islamic fundamentalism is the apocalyptic potential of western oppression. The Holocaust was sanctioned by a German people convinced that all non­ europids were flaws in the gene pool. The Ancient Romans, no less, drove armies across Europe and the Mediterranean on the pretense that the lands beyond their boarders were occupied by some sub-human species threatening to extinguish the light of Roman glory. Should we then be surprised that both Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have proclaimed sentiments tending toward the nuclear obliteration of the Middle East?

The atheistic pulpit of self-proclaimed intellectual superiority, too, is no recent introduction of the New Atheists. The theme has recurred throughout history, as far back to the original Humanist Movement of the early 20th Century. The intellectual hubris would be more tolerable were it not in a form so discernibly ludicrous, not to mention its highly un-intellectual disposition to dissenters. And that New Atheism does not enjoy quite the same degree of psychotic determination as other radical religious sub-groups is best explained by the demographic

39 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM of its principal adherents, consisting mainly of white, middle-to-upper-class adolescents, whose fight for self­ superseding causes extends only as far as the boundaries of cyberspace.

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Chapter 2 The Silent Spectrum

"I am here, and here is nowhere in particular."

William Golding

G.K. Chesterton rightly pointed out almost a century ago that the man who rejects God, duped into the illusion that he believes nothing, invariably proceeds to believe almost anything. Thus, it may come as a surprise to some that atheism comprises a spectrum ofworldviews broader than any other religion in the world, and the tangled web of obliviousness has been staunchly preserved for good reason. One need not justify a belief which is known to no one but oneself.

No major denomination of beliefs is uniform. This is as true of atheism as it is of every ideology. Skeptics, agnostics, deists, evolutionists, positive atheists, negative atheists, agnostic-atheists, atheist-agnostics, puritanical naturalists - these spinoffs are not mutually exclusive, nor are they same. Now the tide has made its retreat and the time has come to draw the lines in the sand. We shall define "mere atheism" as the belief in the non-existence of God or anything like God, including any form of

41 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM divine intelligence, supernatural final cause or pan­ psychic theory (a view popularized by the atheist idol Carl Sagan). We can elicit six divine attributes which would be accepted by any monotheistic tradition and resolutely resisted their opponents. A Being;

1. Uncaused

2. Immaterial

3. Eternal

4. Omnipotent

5. Omniscient

6. Personal

Let this serve as the definition of our Subject.

I should point out that some of the following descriptions are being presented within the narrow context of popular culture and that for the purposes of brevity only the most salient features of each shall be discussed.

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2.1 The Atheist-Skeptic

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" Carl Sagan

A skeptic is someone who will only be satisfied of the truth of any particular claim provided his own threshold of evidence has been met. A healthy mindset to inquiry - when the recommended dosage is followed.

The atheist-skeptic is typified by a willingness to be skeptical of just about everything and anything in the known universe- and particularly beyond it- with the convenient exception of her own atheism, to say nothing of her tendency to suddenly lapse into the gracious acceptance of propositions which suit her ideological taste, as evidenced by an alarmingly sizable portion of the atheist population (supported by Dawkins'') who, for instance, believe Jesus Christ never existed, a hypothesis which virtually no serious historian in the modern world supports.

The reluctance of the Dawkinite to entertain any indication for the truth of theism is matched only by the readiness with which she embraces the dogmas of 11 -Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 96,97

43 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

Naturalism: Science can answer everything, or at least anything worth answering. The universe came from nothing, or was always there, or both. Life and existence are the result ofchance, necessity or both. All oflife sprung from the stuff that rocks dream of. All human behaviour is determined and there is no such thing as free will. The essence of consciousness is the grey stuff between one's ears. Belief in God is an evolutionary mistake. Atheism is the natural consequence of intelligence. This is not to mention other periphery philosophical assumptions like the Dawkins' belief in Cosmic Darwinism, for which no proof or evidence exists at all. The burden of proof is one which is seldom even attempted, much less sustained, conveniently sidestepped with the eternal disclaimer "awaiting further evidence".

It is also worth noting that there are no limits on the extent to which one can raise one's burden of proof, to the point where he could deny everything and anything, including logic itself. It is fair to say atheism restricts itself to a shorter list of claims by comparison to most theistic traditions, and therefore its demands upon basic human intuitions are, perhaps, not as apparent. And the key word there is "apparent".

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2.2 The Atheist-Agnostic

"As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myselfas an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods. "

Bertrand Russell

Russell's quote sums up the reasoning of the atheist­ agnostic rather concisely. So long as the atheist-skeptic is engaged in the task of filtering out any evidence brought for the existence of He whom he can under no circumstances allow into the theatre of his thoughts, the atheist-agnostic is forever justified in his ignorance.

Thus the platitude of denial: "I don Y know if God exists, only that He is highly unlikely."

There is a nasty little twist to this bit of psychology which Russell's words clearly demonstrate, for the atheist-agnostic assumes that rejecting God is the same

45 ILWGICAL ATHEISM as rejecting any other random thing that one might not possibly know about but may, by some miracle of chance, exist. Russell's teapot for instance. The analogy remains as hopelessly simplistic as it was the day of its first formulation, and I sit back and marvel at how such a blunder in reasoning could have ever issued from Mr. Russell's pen. But we shall come to deal with this fallacy at some length soon enough.

To the credit ofthe atheist-agnostic, he at least humbles himself to the fact that God cannot be disproven. His blunder lies in the presupposition that the chances ofthere being a God must be very small. However, when asked for the variables factored into his probability equations, the question is generally followed by either stone-dead silence or a digression.

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2.3 The Anti-Theist

"Ifyou can hate the sin but not the sinner, I can hate the belief but not the believer!" New Atheist Motto.

If you have dabbled in New Atheism for as long and as intimately as I have, you will no doubt have come by this line at some point. The New Atheist, unsatisfied with mere non-belief, despises the fact that other eople do, and it is in virtue of that disposition that he devotes enormous energy to rendering it basically impossible to even engage in rational discussion.

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2.4 The Naturalist/Materialist

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein

We have already spoken to some extent about classical naturalism in the previous chapter. Committed to the view that the universe is eternal, infinite and uncaused, in a sense one might say that for the naturalist the universe is God, and that what most people refer to as 'God' is just a metaphor for the reality we all perceive. This was the accepted wisdom among the atheist community for at least two millennia before it was quite literally blown to shards by the Big Bang. Henceforth, atheism has increasingly split off from the main branch of classical naturalism and there are a surprising number of atheist intellectuals who have taken up their new abode in different forms of universal pantheism. To the credit of the materialist, he remains committed to those convictions without which, it must be said, his atheism would seem somewhat of a charade.

Scientism is the core dogma of the materialist and it comes in the two fundamental states of ideology - solid and flaccid.

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Hard Scientism: The belief that science can answer everything.

Soft Scientism: The belief that science can answer anything that is worth answering.

Both versions render God nothing more than a needless hypothesis, to employ the Laplacian phrase. In one sense scientism prophesies a unification of every field in the academy: music, literature, psychology, philosophy, law -mere offshoots of the supreme discipline of science. In another sense the materialist predicts that there is no aspect of one's life, from his deepest angst to his most sacred joys, which might elude the all-pervading microscope of science - that will not one day become open to sets of proofs of some mathematical or naturalistic description. And we can hardly blame the scientific community for subscribing to this prospect of academic deity.

There is, however, one small problem that is bound to vex the eager scientist, for since scientism is itself not a statement of science but of philosophy, the last word remains, as it always has, with those bumbling, unkempt armchair thinkers, waddling around their pristine university halls like mockeries to academia. There are a great many more problems to boot. Mathematics for instance. Science cannot explain mathematical formulae or rules of logic are, but rather takes them for granted as a priori truths essential to its function. The semantic

50 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM content of phenomena like language and mind, likewise seem to afford no conceivable scientific description. One can no more determine the content of a human thought in terms of the electro-chemical synapses in the brain than grasp the meaning of a Shakespearian sonnet in terms of the ink of the pen-strokes. Indeed, science cannot even speak for itself There is a philosophy of science, but there is no science of science. These are just a few of the logical incongruities we shall be exploring in later chapters.

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2.5 The Deist

"] now believe there is a God... By the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together."

Sir Anthony Flew

For over four decades, the British analytic philosopher Sir Anthony Flew occupied the seat of an atheistic papacy since conferred upon Mr. Dawkins, and there has been no broader repertoire of careful argument crafted with the sole scope of refuting the God-hypothesis attributed to a single name. However, five years before Flew's death and after fifty years of devoted service to the atheist cause, something happened. Something that shook the foundations of the New Atheist world.

Antony Flew announced that he believed in God. 12

It goes without saying that Flew's conversion did a little more than perturb his former atheistic compatriots. This was, after all, a man who had written more on behalf of the secular faith than all Four Horsemen combined. 12 - Anthony Flew & Roy Abraham Varghese, There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (2007)

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To be sure, there was no shortage of self-assuring explanations concocted after the terrible tragedy, whether it was that Flew was old and senile, that he grew wary of his own death or that he was led astray by the Christian enemy with whom he so shamelessly fraternized. These were not just the proclamations of idle internet blogs either. The wild fit of cognitive dissonance found itself expressed even unto the great atheist archdiocese. 131415

There are, however, a few things worth noting about Flew's deconversion. Flew did not believe in an afterlife. He did not believe in divine providence or the power of prayer. He rejected virtually all creeds of all religions everywhere with the possible exception of Genesis 1: 1. As a matter of fact, Flew's conversion hinged entirely upon the intellectual irreconcilability with the very thing wherein hardened atheists place all of their deepest and sincerest hopes- the origins of life. Until his dying day, in fact, Flew never claimed to believe in a personal God or any other of the additions usually ascribed to theistic faith.

The Spinozan deist is thus a rather curious figure in

13- Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 81 (see Dawkins' reference for a textbook example of cognitive dissonance.) 14- Richard Carrier: Antony Flew Considers God .. Sort Of(Secular Web, 10 October 2004.) eg. Update (March 2006) Para. I 15- Mark Oppenheimer, The Turning of an Atheist, New York Times (November 4th 2007)

54 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM the atheist spectrum for the fundamental reason that he is not an atheist at all. He believes in God as a theorem not a person, limiting himself to the proposition that God is, but makes no claims as to what or who he is. Yet despite this fundamental inconsistency with mere atheism, the New Atheist movement has done everything in its power to keep their saints by laying claim to any apostate which strays from the herd if they can stand to gain any kind of intellectual credibility from doing so, their most popular victim of all being Mr. Einstein, whose poor, bedraggled old head still seems to find itself tapestried across the internet, the eternal mouthpiece to the infinite imbecilities of the cyber-dweeb. Apathetic as I am toward the finer details of God's uncertain place in Einstein's no doubt fascinating worldview, it is about as well-established that he would reciprocate the opinions of Richard Dawkins on the perfect souffle as he would his views on the ultimate foundations of the universe.

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Chapter 3 The New Atheist

"Those who will not reason are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves." George Gordon Byron

Community sustains ideology. In the case of New Atheism, that community 1s facilitated predominantly by the internet. In the opening minute to the Four Horsemen (2007)16 recording, widely regarded as a milestone in New Atheist history, Daniel Dennett opens the discussion with the following proclamation: "Religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically, without being rude." Now, If these words were meant to imply some painstaking effort on the part oftheN ew Atheist Patriarchs at respectful, constructive criticism, I feel myself called upon to give my most sincere assurances to the reader that if the faintest shadow of civil discourse is to be found 16- Discussions with Richard Dawkins: The Four Horsemen (2007) Episode 1

57 ILWGICAL ATHEISM amid the morass of berating, defamatory, anti-academic hogwash that spawned the New Atheist world, then I, with all my powers of literary comprehension, did fail quite horribly to detect it. The ill-concealed hostility, on the other hand, has reflected in the thoughts and words of their disciples, their trails marked in vitriol all across their congregating space -the World Wide Web -where they have taken their war in ways one can scarcely imagine. The internet has provided the atheist community with a titanic voice, and the fact that what began as a small group, began with such an immense reservoir of cybernetic persistence is a big part of the answer as to how and why it has spread so quickly, for there is no conceivable lie or demi-truth that is large or extravagant enough that you cannot get people to believe it, and there is no better medium for the most extravagant oflies than the internet ... particularly if the lies are scandalous and feed the vain illusions of intellectual grandeur to which 21st century man is ever so disposed. The fact that the propaganda machine is so abundantly accessible to so many young and budding academics is a growing source of distress, especially when its effects are so obvious on large sections of the internet-atheist community. Stray but an inch over the digital border - interfere in any way with the minds of their people - and you can expect a reaction. Oh and a New Atheist reaction is something to behold indeed. Any shadow of religious

58 ILWGICAL ATHEISM identity daren't be expressed in their dominion, lest sections of one's brain be ridiculed beyond reason, well­ rehearsed choruses from the sacred scriptures of Hitchens and Harris recited verbatim in her general direction, lest she be laden with the burdens of every remotely god­ believing human being for the last two thousand years, reviled as an advocator of terrorism, genital mutilation and human sacrifice, and, most incongruously of all - deemed "irrational" and "oppressive". And we are to believe that all this is some rather eccentric attempt at courteous discourse? The level of dedication to the atheist cause has permeated through every single major public gathering in cyberspace. From video sharing websites to social networking, there is scarcely a domain wherein the territory of the New Atheist has not been asserted. The propaganda is manufactured, shared, rated, promoted and consistently updated- from surveys to statistical analyses to all the latest updates of religious scandal and hopeful omens of the decline of faith, woven across a large, intricate and efficient network with totalitarian tenacity. New Atheism is a well-oiled digital machine, driven by its final cause to separate the archetype of science and reason from the mainstream western faiths, leaving only one choice: "Be religious ... or be smart." - a cause fuelled unconsciously and gratuitously by a sizable and cyber-active workforce, consisting mainly in hypnotized

59 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM adolescents. You can be sure that any information-based site that is susceptible to public modification, review or criticism will very likely be wrought to portray religion in the worst possible light. Statistical surveys stretch beyond all manner of optimism to reflect an explosion of atheistic belief across the western world and a parallel decline of religion. History has been written for us too. So far the list of crimes on the secular indictment for the Christian Churches lists: the forgery of 2000 years of human history, the endorsement of human sacrifice, genocide, the tactical military use oflocusts, witch hunts resulting in the massacre of millions of housewives across Europe in the Dark Ages, the capture, torture, forced recantation and brutal execution of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin as well as the repression of all scientists and modem science in general, the Holocaust, both World Wars, the African slave trade, every single recorded case of HIV-AIDS, the setting-up of the Global Institute for Child Molestation, a proposed international bill for the immediate incineration of all homosexuals, mass theft and embezzlement, conspiracy to sabotage western freedom, global warming, and last and most heinous of all: the Great Atheist Apartheid of the 21st Century. The gargantuan energy that has been injected into shrouding religion in conspiracy, deception, despotism and criminal inclination is no mystery to anyone with the

60 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM slightest psycholinguistic insight, and who has also taken immense pains to grind through a copy of The End ofFaith or God is Not Great. The New Atheist cause is not, nor has it ever been, a matter of challenging religious claims on rational grounds so much as the exploitation of fragile, intellectually sensitive young minds, driven on the hot squalls of deception to the belief that people who disagree with them are basically psychopathic 17 or sub-human in their natural inclination to some kind of supernatural 18 servility • If grown adults want to indulge in this kind of warped behavior, then there is little that can be done for them. But by classifying all external beliefs under the meticulously demonized label of "religion", all possibility for rational discourse has effectively been sabotaged beyond recovery in one too many young minds, particularly since that same label, in excluding them from the discussion, excuses their ignorance. On that subject, let us consider for a moment, a few of the more prominent features of organized religion: - A set of positive beliefs about ultimate reality. - A community of disciples. - The determination toward the righteousness of its own worldview and the parallel conviction toward the wrongness of all dissenters.

17 - Sam Harris, The End ofFaith, (multiple references) 18- Hitchens, God is Not Great (multiple references)

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- A Hierarchy of respected religious leaders. - The organizational machinery required to spread its faith. The false conception that religion is defined as "belief in God" is understandable, bearing in mind that the tradition of western atheism began in the seedbed of Christianity, but that definition makes the obvious oversight of worldviews widely accepted as religions: Buddhism, Jainism and Scientology to mention but three. The positive assertions about reality which religions make are by no law of reason restricted to beliefs about God. The number of institutions devoted to the spread of atheist dogma rivals that of just about any religion in the west: Atheist Alliance International, The International League of Non-Religious, The International League of Humanists, Rationalist International, The European Humanists Federation, The British Humanist Association, The American Humanist Association, American Atheists, the Secular Coalition for America and so the list goes on. All of these organizations come complete with their own shortlist of evangelists who make no secret of their delight whenever they claim a new disciple. Some even differ on matters of"atheology". The anarchist might oppose the notion of state, but for the sake of organizing society after the state has fallen, he may not absolve himself of politics. Neither the

62 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM democrat nor the autocrat would pander to the anarchist by granting that they alone should justify themselves, for he is in no pressing need to justify himself. If anarchists can be treated like a cult of political extremists, I see no reason to regard the New Atheist as anything less. I conclude with the prophetic words of Arthur Guiterman in Gaily the Troubadour (1936);

First dentistry was painless. Then bicycles were chainless, Carriages were horseless, And many laws enforce less.

Next cookery was fireless, Telegraphy was wireless, Cigars were nicotineless, And coffee caffeineless.

Soon oranges were seedless, The putting green was weedless, The college boy was hatless, The proper diet fatless.

New motor roads are dustless, The latest steel is rustless, Our tennis courts are sodless, Our new religion -godless. 19

19- Arthur Guiterman, Gailey the Troubadour, "First Dentistry Was Painless", 1936 E.P. Dutton & co.

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BOOK II

FALLACIES

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Chapter 4 The Celestial Teapot

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. "20 Bertrand Russell

Since its original formulation, the celestial teapot has been subject to all manner of reapplications, Bobby Henderson's notorious Flying Spaghetti Monster being perhaps the most ubiquitous. The derivatives of Russell's teapot all seek to suggest the same basic proposition. Reduced to syllogistic form, the argument runs as follows:

Premise 1: The existence of something requires evidence.

Premise 2: Without evidence for something, we are not justified in believing it exists. 20 Bertrand Russell, Is there a God? (1952) Illustrated (Unpublished)

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Premise 3: God is something.

Premise 4: There is little or no evidence for God.

Conclusion: We are not justified in believing God exists.

There has been a useful fiction conjured to supplement to this argument. I am talking about that profoundly inane contention "you cannot prove the non-existence of anything,"21 which we shall tackle this on its own merits. For now, let us try and understand the God Hypothesis in terms of a typical case presented before a court of law. Merely expressing skepticism toward the prosecutor's evidence in a case of homicide is not liable to get the counsel for the defence very far. Assuming his client values his liberty, he might provide an alternative explanation for how the victim was killed, or else demonstrate by way of alibi that his client could not have possibly been the killer. If the prosecutor can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the best explanation of the facts is that the accused murdered the victim, the guilty verdict is produced. That is the vague pattern of all judicial proceedings.

Now, the fact that cries out for a hypothesis is the universe and everything in it, to which the theist submits 21 -Dawkins, God Delusion p. 54

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God as an explanation. The atheist cannot avail himself of perpetual silence, lest he submit to the mercy of the court. It is neither here nor there whether the theist's claim is extraordinary, however infinitely or eternally extraordinary the Claim is, especially bearing in mind the thing it seeks to explain.

There are three alternatives available to the atheist, and after centuries of deliberation, all the combined intellectual energies of mankind has yet to tum up a fourth:

The atheist might claim that the universe demands no explanation outside of itself rather the same way the theist would plead on behalf of his God. This, however, seems to be an explanation which grows ever-more untenable in light ofthe best evidence of modem science. At least for now, it is certain that the universe is not, as the atheist had previously supposed, eternal in the past nor eternal in the future nor infinite in space. Still, devoid of any evidence whatsoever, the hypothesis itself seems prima facie absurd when one considers that eternity has already come to pass, a blatant paradox. Flattering though it is to assume that the universe spent an eternity grinding its way to the splendid accomplishment that is the reader, it does baffie the mind how anyone could think this is any less ambiguous and inexplicable than a First Cause.

The second alternative is to propose that time, space

69 ILWGICAL ATHEISM and matter began, which seems, at once, more reasonable until the obvious question follows: From what? And the atheist's answer: Nothing. To which my answer has always been: Nothing will come from nothing. Speak again, lest you mar your fortunes. Needless to say, Shakespeare's counsel, straight from the mind of Parmenides to the lips of his King Lear, has not gone heeded.

The third alternative is silence, and whilst I would never dream of silencing an interlocutor, I cannot help but insist upon this option.

The point is that an extraordinary hypothesis is inevitable. The mere theist is by no means bound to claim absolute certainty as to who God is or what his nature is. There was only one man in history to my knowledge who claimed that he did, and thereby divided the world into those who think him a liar, a madman or both and those who think him God in the flesh. I might add that this is still the common response to anyone who claims knowledge of things beyond the bounds of space-time, both atheist and theist alike.

The rejection of any hypothesis must be justified by strong contradictory evidence. This necessitates either a proof that the explanation is logically incoherent, or a viable alternative. Neither seems to exist - at least not in any compelling form. As such, a method has been

70 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM devised as a comical means of sidestepping the problem, taking a page out of the handbook of politics: For want of rationality, satire works just as well if not better. This is the covert reasoning behind the infamous Flying Spaghetti Monster trend, which, in the last analysis, boils down to little more than petty word games. I came across a recording of an old debate which was very illustrative of this point where Russell's teapot took the form of a "special computer" which, after a series of questions put to Prof. Wolpert by his interlocutor, Prof. Lane Craig, was left with little to distinguish it from the Being it sought to replaceY Apart from further demonstrating the incompetence of certain scientists when it comes to matters of philosophy, the short exchange captured the essence of God-parodies like unicorns, Flying Spaghetti Monsters and, incidentally, Russell's teapot.

I should add that the impossibly vague, mysterious and impalpable character of God is not some recent adaptation of the theist to circumvent the philosophical issues. If we were to go by the Judea-Christian texts, we are afforded no physical description of their Protagonist beyond a few references to turtle doves and burning bushes. The all-too-popular parody of an old man with a white beard floating on a cloud - the product of early Renaissance art- was probably a consequence of the fact

22- Lewis Wolpert v William Lane Craig, Is God a Delusion?, February 28'h 2007, Central Hall, Westminster

71 ILWGICAL ATHEISM that there are no shortage of biblical men old, bald and bearded.

"I am that I am" spoke the Deity himself in Exodus 3:14. No answer more appropriate has ever been written or uttered since. The idea that God is an object of perfect knowledge is certainly no product of theology. It is in fact a product of scientific naturalism. Being the point at which the theist humbles himself to the reality that he cannot understand everything, this is exactly the point of impasse with the atheist.

The God hypothesis is not arbitrary or unnecessary, but the logical inference of the facts as they are given. And the counter-hypothesis is still pending. To illustrate the point, let us assume the case of an atheist favorite:

There is the theory that the myth of the unicorn first came about when an ancient nomadic people discovered a number of peculiar objects washed up on their shores. After much deliberation as to the particular shape of the objects, their weight and bone-like texture, they were led to the conclusion that they were the horns of some species of animal and, allowing reason to lead the limits of their experience, formed the hypothesis that the horns must have belonged to some large and powerful species of horse.

Considering the position of the ancient nomad, this

72 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM explanation can hardly be called irrational. We can bicker about whether, for the purposes of the nomads' theory, unicorns really existed. We only need notice two things: Firstly, the unicorn was not conjured up to fulfill some secret natural inclination to believe in mythological creatures, but as an explanation for a set of facts. Secondly, the existence of unicorns was not refuted for want of evidence. Rather, many years later, it was discovered that the horns were not horns, but tusks, belonging to a small whale we know today as the narwhal. Notice, also, that the unicorn hypothesis could hardly be deemed a failure, for the horns did indeed belong to an animal, albeit not precisely the kind of animal the ancient nomads had imagined. The comparable claim would have been that nothing at all like the unicorn ever existed, and that the hypothesis was unnecessary, which would have been even more false. One cannot imagine that the a-unicomist's suggestion that "the horns popped out of nothing" or "were there from eternity" would have gone down terribly well with his nomadic brethren, yet somehow this is deemed perfectly acceptable to superior Modem Man. It is equally unlikely that our caveman ancestors would have accepted the disclaimer that their faculties for logic and reason were deeply flawed, or that reality itself is, at its foundations, profoundly illogical, as many atheist figureheads have contended on both counts.

Concluding on premises 1 and 2: Every set of facts

73 ILWGICAL ATHEISM requires a hypothesis. God is a hypothesis. Hypotheses must be refuted or substituted. No mere denial absolves the atheist. No mere ignorance absolves the agnostic. Finally, the substitution of the God hypothesis leads inevitably to illogical propositions ... More on that later.

What of Premise 4?

The problem with Premise 4 in the argument from Russell's teapot analogy is that it renders the argument entirely subjective, creating a defensive wall to theistic belief that can be infinitely expanded to suit the object of its protection. The psychology of the problem finds itself so aptly portrayed by Ebenezer Scrooge in The Christmas Carol where, when confronted with the ghost ofhis long deceased friend, Jacob Marley, asks:

'Can you- can you sit down?'

'I can.'

'Do it, then.'

Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it.

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'You don't believe in me,' observed the Ghost.

'I don't.' said Scrooge.

'What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?'

'I don't know,' said Scrooge.

'Why do you doubt your senses?'

'Because,' said Scrooge, 'a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!'

Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones ...

Likewise, for the anxious skeptic, no amount of evidence, no matter how logically sound, will convince her of something she does not want to be convinced of, for any evidence with which she is presented cannot match the infinite capacity of her skepticism, a point

75 ILWGICAL ATHEISM made as poetically by Dickens as it was philosophically by Descartes, hence the Cartesian catchphrase: cogito ergo sum. And if one might demand proof of his own existence, then there seems to be little worth in the mindset of the skeptic, taken to its logical extreme. The same can be said about a number of other basic beliefs we take completely for granted. One could not, for instance, prove that he did not pop into existence 5 minutes ago with all his present memories, or that the deliverances of his senses are the product of actual experience as opposed to electrolytic stimulation by some mad scientist in a laboratory we could not see or touch or taste or hear.

Just as there is surprisingly little that one can prove in the natural world, there is no part of our immediate experience which cannot be explained away as hallucination, and there is certainly no logical inference which cannot be dismissed on the basis of human logic/ intuition that is inherently untrustworthy. In other words, premise 4 in the argument from Russell's teapot analogy can be extended to accommodate virtually limitless levels of skepticism which cannot be surpassed with any feasible amount of evidence, and can be applied to just about any belief. The skeptic is therefore faced with two fundamental questions:

1. What is his own personal standard of evidence?

2. Is it reasonable?

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So, what can one propose as an objectively reasonable standard of evidence? I myself am inclined to concur with Alvin Plantinga, in that the standard of evidence is met at the point of birth. It does seem to me now that God is a properly basic belief, which sufficiently developed children are privy to in ways that most adults are not, and that the blatancy of His being is not something that emerges as a farce with the accumulation of experience, so much as it is abandoned for less laudatory motivations. It is every bit as basic as the belief that I am alive and present in the real world and not the Matrix, and every bit as true as the ghost of Jacob Marley.

Over the course of the last century, science has invested huge energy into proving an alternative to the God Hypothesis and failed. I would venture that as long as the hypothesis remains unscientific, they will continue to search, and they will continue to fail, and mankind will convene in a century or so to have the same ceaselessly fascinating debate that has been going on for the last twenty-five centuries. For ifthere is indeed an explanation for the universe, it cannot logically be scientific, for as soon as the explanation becomes scientific, it becomes a part of the universe, and therefore ceases to be an explanation.

As much as the atheist may prefer certainty, the kind of certainty he would prefer may never come to pass,

77 ILWGICAL ATHEISM no matter how many lifetimes he has at his disposal. The question is therefore not: what can we know? But rather: what do we believe? To that extent, the only options available to us are each as impossibly vague and mysterious as the other.

The conclusion of the argument from Russell's teapot; "belief in God is not justified" does not follow. The premises are builtonadeeply misconstrued notion ofGod's place in ultimate reality. The error can be summarized by the observation that there is no set of facts calling out for the hypothesis that a teapot was launched into orbit. On the other hand, we find ourselves in a universe which cries out for an explanation, a burden which science is not apt to bear out by itself. And the attempts it has made to do so, far from being the glimmers of future success, presage failures far more cataclysmic, a subject for Books III and IV. God is the missing piece to the logical puzzle, not a needlessly extraordinary proposal. If the atheist insists that he requires extraordinary evidence, I submit that reality is extraordinary enough.

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Chapter 5 The God of the Gaps

"Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide. "23 Richard Dawkins

A powerful pillar in the New Atheist temple is the "God of the Gaps". On this supposed view, God does nothing more than perform the function of filling in the residual grey areas in present scientific wisdom. Dawkins, in particular, has peddled this notion by making a sideshow out of a few Young Earth Creationists, which has added an important source of fuel to the whole "God is anti­ science" fable.

The God of the Gaps view of the theistic hypothesis is fallacious, for two reasons: First; it is an enormously mistaken misrepresentation of the relationship between

23 - Dawkins, God Delusion P. 125

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God, the universe and science. Secondly, the way the objection is phrased actually leads to an argument against its main proponents. We can once more turn to the useful tool of allegory to understand how and why this is the case:

Let us suppose two ancient scientists are wandering a wide and barren expanse when, suddenly, they stumble upon an unmanned Harrier jump-jet.

Neither scientist has ever seen anything remotely like a fighter plane before in their lives and no sooner than they come upon the aircraft its engines suddenly fire up. The Harrier rises and begins to hover, side to side, forward and back, then shoots out to the sky with astonishing speed, then returns and settles gently back to Earth.

The ancient scientists are so amazed at the feats of this unknown entity that after due deliberation they form the belief that the Harrier must have been designed by someone or something extremely intelligent, who must somehow be at work within the aircraft itself. They resolve that since the aircraft was designed by someone intelligent, and they themselves were intelligent beings, that they should therefore be able to study and understand it.

Over years of arduous study and research, they strip the aircraft to its barest bones; deducing the laws of jet propulsion, internal combustion, aerodynamics

80 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM and mechanics. They elicit the many composites and materials from which the aircraft is constructed. They strip apart the very mind of the vehicle and the interface between its elaborate computers and mechanical parts, even discerning the complex digital language by which these mechanisms function.

The more the scientists learn, the less "mysterious" the aircraft appears. As they gradually deconstruct the once magical machine that had so baffled them at first, they fill with intellectual pride. Before long, they discover that the loud roars are but the sounds of exploding jet fuel, and not the roars of some great lion or some such nonsensical myth which they had originally conceived. They even conclude that the aircraft was probably produced on an assembly line in a mindless process by blind machines.

After years of painstaking scientific examination, the scientists more or less figure out just how the aircraft works and how it was made, leaving only the mystery of how the plane is able to take flight entirely by itself. Since this is a mystery that cannot be explained by any scientific means of which they know, they simply dismiss the question as irrelevant. And at the end of this glorious journey of discovery, one scientist turns to the other and says:

"I suppose it was never created after all."

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Now, as outside observers with an ostensible God's­ eye view of the tale of the two ancient scientists, we have no problem in seeing exactly where they went wrong. Did the unraveling of the aircraft's mechanism and how it was built have any effect on the existence of Sir Sydney Camm, Sir Stanley Hooker or Ralph Hooper? Suppose one were careful to add that Camm, Hooker and Hooper were the ones operating their aircraft from a control room thousands of miles away, and that their hope was that someone would find their precious creation and fly it back home to them. No way for the primitive scientists to have deduced that fact scientifically, they need only have accepted the proposition that the aircraft was there for a purpose and then proceeded to try and understand and unravel what that reason was. Instead, they refused the notion on the presuppositional ground that their beliefs could under no circumstances extend beyond their science. Thus they reached a false and illogical conclusion, and instead of flying the aircraft back to its makers, crashed and burned in the middle of a desert.

Putting aside the metaphorical significance of our poor scientists' demise, for the time being we are more concerned with the error in their reasoning. For in no way does it logically follow that something was not designed from the mere fact alone that that something could be understood scientifically. Function and agency account for two entirely different explanations as to how and why

82 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM something exists. An Aristotelian reckoning might serve the reader well at this point: The Harrier's material causes are the components from which it was constructed. Its formal causes are the laws of mechanics, aerodynamics and internal combustion. Its efficient causes are Ralph Hooper, Sir Sydney Camm and Sir Stanley Hooker. Its final cause is to be flown home to its creators. Only the first two of those causal categories were open to science in the study of the universe.

Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

On the Aristotelian model at least, any contingent thing that demonstrates functionality implies all four causes, not just two. What the "God of the Gaps" argument basically does is misattribute the wrong causes to God. That is Dawkins' first mistake. His second mistake is to proceed to dictate that science can explain all the formal and material causes behind the universe (i.e. Fill in all the gaps). The matter of agency is left completely neglected since, as Dawkins maintains, the universe has no final purpose.24 Ergo, the "Theory of God" is not meant to fill the same gaps that science is meant to fill. The God of the Gaps argument is, once again, constructed on a category mistake, which may be elicited from the stepping-stones of its premises:

24 - Richard Dawkins, River Out ofEden: A Darwinian View of Life; Perseus (1995) p. 133

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Premise 1: God is an explanation for how the universe works

Premise 2: Science is also an explanation for how the universe works

Premise 3: As science explains more, God explains less

Premise 4: Therefore, as science advances, God retreats.

Premise 5: Science is advancing.

Conclusion: God is retreating.

The argument blatantly confuses the explanatory power of God with the explanatory power of science. God is a causative explanation for why the world is - a final and efficient cause - not how the world works - a material and formal cause. This has always been the monotheistic view. What's more, the argument is quite suicidal. The very fact that there are gaps to be filled implies order, which in tum implies functionality, which in tum is at least suggestive that a final, efficient cause exists. And this is not just reasoning of the lowly author either. This was the logic of virtually all of the patriarchs of modem science. People like Isaac Newton, Thomas Bayes, Kepler, Bacon, Leibniz, Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Max Plank and Einstein. These were all men who saw no conflict whatsoever between science and God precisely

84 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM because the universe is intelligible. As the immortal C.S. Lewis put it:

"Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in law giver."25

To even suggest that science can be done is to imply intelligibility, and intelligibility implies intelligence. The fact that we can do science at all flies in the face of the supposed purposelessness of the universe. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible at all - that it functions according to an apparent order. 26

So, if there is no logical opposition between science and God, then what is the true root of the God of the Gaps? I believe the answer is twofold.

The covert psychology of the "gaps" contains at its root a pre-conceived notion of who God is and how he works- a kind of claptrap projectionism, whereby one forms an idea of how God should have gone about his work and finds that it does not conform to reality. The fallacious root in this formulation of the Gaps Argument,

25- C.S. Lewis, Miracles, Fontana (1974) p. 169 26- Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality, trans. Jagdish Mehra, World Scientific Pub, First Edition (1999)

85 ILWGICAL ATHEISM once again, begins with the completely arbitrary definition of the God-world, for one could just as well postulate that he believed that an intelligent deity would create a universe filled with flying pink elephants, and upon determining that no such rose-colored, airborne mammal exists on Earth, eliminate the hypothesis of his own imagined god. This was the real problem underlying the proposal of Darwinian evolution and the Copernican revolution. The "gaps" are not really occupied by God at all, but the naYve imaginings of people who presume they would have done a much better job of things, or that an infinitely powerful and wise Being, should have done a far better job of things.

But who is to say that is true? And on what grounds? The proposition itself requires the premise of a moral assessment which does not exist in the atheist world. Perhaps someone else's idea of how the universe works is exactly what they would expect of a benevolent, wise God. And if it isn't- so what? The mere fact alone that some people are, at least in my view, idiotic, bitter, arrogant or overbearing does not seem to detract in any way from the probability of their existence. For centuries, mankind believed that all the stars and planets revolved around the Earth. Since it happens that that is not the case, the stupendously arrogant conclusion that has followed, is that God was wrong, not us.

86 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

There is another aspect of"gaps psychology" liable to deceive, and manifests in the words of many prominent scientific atheists, including Richard Dawkins. The subliminal consensus, even among theists, emerges to be a view of God operating as some kind of magician. People seem to adore mystery and miracle, a point made amply clear by Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Science, in one sense, exposes the magic act. Once that is done, the tendency has been to then laugh in the face of the Deity for being so apparently easily understood, after which we proceed to use His tricks for our benefit. In his book, The Abolition of Man, C.S Lewis grasped this observable fact in the technological revolution with uncanny insight, writing:

"There is something which unites magic and applied science, while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline and virtue. For magic and applied sciences alike, the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men,· the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice ofthis technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting."

Just as immense magical powers tainted the minds of every evil magician across literary fantasy, Lewis

87 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM maintained that science had the exact same potential. It is safe to say that his warning has since been vindicated.

Science in our world, like magic in the fantasy world, can be understood and applied by us through its own law­ book-with the small qualification that it is infinitely more powerful and damaging than any magic spell that has ever been devised in any book of high fantasy. We define "magic" as "that which is not scientifically possible" and so anything subject to repeat experimentation is excluded from the realm of mystery. But this law of nature, proven in virtue of repeatability, may just as well be a law of gravity as a law oflevitation. The astonishing magic and mystery of the universe can in no way be diminished by the fact that it can be understood. The geniuses of the past did just the opposite. They marveled at the brilliance of the world's Maker and they certainly did not exclude him for his own laws.

The philosophical problem of the God of the Gaps derives from the core episteme of mainstream atheism, namely the view that ultimate reality could, at least theoretically, be explained in its scientific completeness, rendering anything inaccessible to the scientific method unknowable, and therefore as worthwhile as if inexistent. With a materialistically sufficient explanation for the universe, there is not, nor will there ever be the need to invoke anything beyond it. Matter + Energy + Time +

88 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

Chance or Necessity. That is the summary of the atheist worldview. The line of reasoning does not rest so much on the fact that God retreats as the gaps are filled, but rather operates on the assumption that science is able to fill in all of the gaps, including the ultimate question of universal origins.

Thus, there will be no more need for God, at least insofar as his explanatory power is concerned. But has the history of science up until the present day really demonstrated that science will ever advance as far as the atheistic extrapolation purports? For every gap that science closes, ten more always seem to open in its place. We might, in the same vein of fallacious projectionism, ask: if the God of the Gaps argument had any actual validity, then would not one expect to be living in a universe where science should have been able to fill in all of the gaps a long, long time ago? Yet the gaps keep opening again and again. Exponentially. Why? Why did science not stop at the atom? Instead we find that matter branches out into sub-atomic particles, and further still sub-sub atomic particles: electrons, protons and neutrons, bosons, quarks, dark matter, dark energy, anti-matter and beyond that- who knows? What lies beyond the black hole? Even when science does reach a dead-end, that dead-end is invariably a mystery which must be taken as a priori to posit later theories. What is energy? What is gravity? What is consciousness? And let us assume,

89 ILWGICAL ATHEISM as the atheist must, that these barriers of our ignorance will eventually broken through: is it more likely that the mystery will be solved or that more mysteries will emerge as a result? The past has demonstrated quite clearly that science creates many more mysteries than it explains. And what of multiverses or the notion of an infinite cosmos to which several prominent atheists have subscribed? In that unlimited sense, both naturalism and theism necessitate that science affords no ultimate explanation, for one dictates that the universe is eternal and infinite, whilst the other maintains that it derives from an eternal and infinite Cause.

On both views, science emerges as incapable of giving us the full picture. The gaps, it seems, can never be completely filled with any effort of science. That acknowledged, this whole business of gaps does seem, like the whole of the atheist enterprise, very much ado about nothing. As for the New Atheists, who have both professed to rejoice in the admission of unknowingness, one should find it quite remarkable that the idea of an ultimate unknown has made them so uncomfortable.

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Chapter 6 Fallacies of Origins

6.1 Ad Hominem "Ad hominem" is the philosophical term of art used for arguments that receive the sanction of that specific class of individuals whom the argument seeks to convince, on the sole basis of a pre-determined and usually unflattering impression of the sort of person who holds the target belief. In a sense ad hominem is not really an argument at all. If properly framed, however, it can result in a psychological conviction of truth that is more powerful than even the most bullet-proof logic.

Arguments of this sort have no rational worth, but they will be - and in most cases are - accepted as valid on the basis of the covert presuppositional truth and moral righteousness of one ideology and the converse evil and stupidity of the other. The argument proceeds in two stages, which might summed up in the form of the following two statements:

1. All Jews/Christians/Muslims are stupid. Therefore God does not exist ...

2. . .. Furthermore, this is why these moronic, knuckle-

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dragging theists believe what they believe ...

As such, the ad hominem attack generally takes an caricatured exemplar of the opposing belief and seeks to misrepresent it in the worst possible manner in order to create the psychological impression that the opposing belief is not trustworthy, since the person who holds the belief is not trustworthy. The second part of the argument constitutes a fallacy of origins, the popular edition being the smaller sub-category of the Freudian Fallacy. Once the impression is firmly implanted that the atheist is rather intelligent and righteous and the theist is overall rather stupid and thus prone to evil, it then becomes remarkably easy to explain away the opposing belief in terms of its origins. This is realized through the magic of propaganda, which we have already discussed to some extent in the context of the New Atheist texts. These sorts of techniques have been employed with particular Machiavellian subtlety in the literary work and orations of Sam Harris, with his well­ rehearsed innuendos and allegories, incessant uses of the words "insane", "psychotic", "stupidity" and "madness", invariably applied in co~unction with the religious denominations he most despises. To Harris' credit, these little subliminal NLP tricks of the trade, which he so very artfully employs in his books and speeches, have proven by far more effective than any attempt at rational argument. Not to mention the borderline conspiracy-

92 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM theorist whoopla, which emerges plainly in his analysis of Christian involvement in the American scientific community:

"It is also worth noting," writes Harris, "that one can obtain a Ph.D. in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of the Bible. A handful of Christians appear to have done this; some have even obtained their degrees from reputable universities. No doubt, others will follow in their footsteps. While such people are technically "scientists, " they are not behaving like scientists. They simply are not engaged in an honest inquiry into the nature ofthe universe. "

Leaving aside what many of us already knew - that in Harris' ideal world, like Dawkins', it seems that adherence to the atheist religion would be an indispensable requisite for higher education- scandalous claims akin to the above are shockingly reminiscent of the type of maneuvers employed by anti-Semite propagandists like Ernst Hiemer. 27 On top of that, Harris actually has the audacity to claim that there are Christians filling universities for the sole purpose of giving their worldview more credibility, when that is exactly what he himself did in 2009, obtaining a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience at the age of 40. A year later, by some

27 See; Heimer's Der Gipfiltz.

93 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM extraordinary coincidence, Harris published his book The Moral Landscape, in which his newfound status as a neuroscientist was a vital selling point. And I have yet to learn of any further contribution to his field than the book he wrote with the specific intent of challenging religious authority on matters of morality.

But do not assume for a moment that that is the worst that New Atheist indoctrination has to offer, for Harris simply pales in comparison to his former compatriot, since deceased, Mr. Hitchens. An abridged compilation of the unsubstantiated anecdotes strewn across their work illustrates the point:

"Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis ofa theologically defensible reading ofthe Bible." 28

"Orthodox Jews conduct congress by means ofa hole in the sheet, and subject their women to ritual baths to cleanse the stain ofmenstruation. Muslims subject adulterers to public lashings with a whip. Christians used to lick their lips while examining women for signs of witchcraft. "29

28 Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, Random House (2006) p.9 29 Hitchens, God is Not Great, p.54

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"Religious ritual since the dawn oftime has insisted on snatching children from the cradle and taking sharp stones or knives to their pudenda. In some animist and Muslim societies it is the females babies who suffer the most ... the aim is clear- to kill or dull the girl's sexual instinct and destroy the temptation to experiment with any man save the one to whom she will be given. "30

"Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense ofour religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky survivors ofsuch a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career of human stupidity that led them over the precipice ?"31

Project Reason ... Don't make me laugh.

30 Ibid. p.223 31 Harris, The End ofFaith, p.224

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6.2 The Genetic Fallacy

"Genetic Fallacy: The alleged mistake of arguing that something is to be rejected because of its suspicious origins. More widely, any mistake of inferring something about the nature of some topic from a proposition about its origins." Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

For reasons unclear, there has been enormous emphasis within the atheist community on the banal observation that people tend to remain with the religion into which they were born and raised. That is not to say that tracing a belief to its root cannot be helpful for the purposes of self-examination. As a means of falsification, however, the way one comes to a particular belief is a non sequitor. This is fairly easily proven. Consider the proposition "Murdering innocent children is wrong". It is neither here nor there whether one believes it because he was raised to believe it, because he was forced to believe it, or because he was tricked into believing it. The origin of the belief simply has no bearing on its truth, assuming of course that one believes it is true. We might take, as another example, Richard Dawkins' belief that infanticide should be encouraged, provided the infant is

97 ILWGICAL ATHEISM physically imperfect (though he has not yet pronounced himself on the extent of the imperfection). That belief may well be explained as a consequence of Dawkins' demented philosophy, but then again dementia may just as well be a consequence of his beliefs as the other way around.

The best way and the only way to demonstrate an untruth is through an evidence-based, logical conclusion to the contrary. The genetic fallacy can never satisfy this test. One might only speculate as to why it has become an atheist favourite. An educated guess would take us back to the inherent distrust which courses through the veins of the western modern, and that deep seated resistance to anything that claims authority over her. The subliminal psychology at work can be articulated as follows:

"Anyone who believes in God is taught to do so, by liars, despots and hypocrites who, for the sake of power, would deprive them of their freedom. We must reject everything the liars and the hypocrites have told us, live our lives, choose our truths, which cannot under any circumstances accord with theirs, for nothing and no one possessing power of us can ever be trusted, least of all a divine power."

I do seem to recall a certain Bible story from my youth were the same words were uttered by a talking snake.

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It has been almost a century since Sigmund Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion, where he famously depicted theistic religion as a sort of childhood neurosis. Dawkins and Dennett in particular devote the large portions of their principal manifestos to the same effects, indulging in vain explanations from biological, cultural and psychological evolution as though these explanations possessed of a shard of actual evidence or intellectual credibilityY But then it is unsurprising. Re-hashed and often diluted editions of the theory expounded most famously by Freud around a hundred years before Dawkins or Dennett, and by the materialist Ludwig Feuerbach several years still before Freud, have been re-written and re-published again, and there has been little added to their sophistication. And the numerous fleeting historical and psychological assumptions that have been put forward with these psychoanalyses are no minor addition to the fact that the arguments themselves have no logical validity. Freud's own glaring error has been pointed out time and again, both by his contemporaries and ours. 33 To his credit, he proffered a rather novel psychoanalytic approach to arguing against religion which became a surprisingly dominant view in the academy around his time. However, if we were to 32 - Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell, Part II:"The Evolution of Religion", Penguin (2006); Dawkins, God Delusion, Chap. 5 33 - Ernst Nagel, Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy, Methodological Issues in Psychoanalytic Theory pp.43-44

99 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM build a psychological hypothesis to explain a particular belief, I daresay one could do far better with the Atheist Delusion.

I would like to submit that even though a belief cannot be disproven, one can glean powerful suggestive evidence which indicates that that it might be illogical. The New Atheists have reiterated that the fact that any particular religion is good does not for a moment suggest that it is true. I would have to disagree. But before proceeding to my argument, I must digress on another argument that has been heavily criticized by the atheist community; one which we will come to discuss in more detail in the third part of this thesis.

The Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, credited to the philosopher Alvin Plantinga, and provocatively nicknamed the "Argument From Darwin's Doubt", puts forth, in a nutshell, that atheism gives us very good reasons to doubt the truth of any belief bearing in mind that the very notion of belief emerges as the result of haphazard rearrangements of matter and energy, unguided by any scope beyond the survival of the species. In other words, there is no reason why an unguided process, centered on proliferation of the species, should produce beings capable of knowing truth, for the simple reason that evolution is not concerned in the very slightest with truth.

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It would be beyond the scope of this book to delve too deeply into the merits of Plantinga's argument, or the arguments which have been brought against it. For now it suffices to recognize that the only real way to counter Plantinga's argument is for the atheist to submit that evolution is more likely to produce true beliefs rather than false beliefs, insofar as far as survivability of humankind is concerned. In order to escape the logical trap, the atheist is compelled to accept that true beliefs generally favor survival and vice-versa, and thus that if a belief were to favour survival, it would be more probably true than false. That seems elementary. In fact, most atheistic philosophers have countered Plantinga's argument in this exact way. 34 Assuming that the atheist agrees that the evolutionary driving force of survival is more likely to produce true beliefs, we can submit the following probability argument:

Premise 1: True beliefs have greater survivability value than false beliefs.

Premise 2: If a belief favors survival, it is more likely to be a true belief.

34- See; James K. Beilby, Naturalism Defeated? (2002) Cornell University Press, Branden Fitelson and Elliott Sober, Plantinga s Probability Arguments Against Evolutionary Naturalism ( 1997) University of Wisconsin-Madison, Churchland, P.(l987). Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience. Journal of Philosophy LXXXIV, 544--553

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Premise 3: Belief in God favors survival

Conclusion: Therefore, belief in God is more likely to be a true belief

On pain of acquiescing to Plantinga's argument and the self-referential incoherence that comes with it, it seems to me that premise 1 is inescapable. If a belief favours survival, then there is an increased likelihood of truth.

Premise 2 is uncontroversial.

What of premise 3? Does belief m God have survivability value?

Well, one need not even defend this proposition since the New Atheists themselves have tacitly conceded it. If, as Freud and Dawkins both maintain, belief in God is wish-fulfillment, clearly there must be some kind of socio-psychological void that theism seems to fill and atheism leaves quite empty. After all, the very notion of wish-fulfillment necessitates that there is a wish to be fulfilled - a hunger to be satisfied. We needn't recount the voluminous studies that have been performed which demonstrate as a matter of scientific fact more irrefutable than most, the psychiatric benefits of theistic faith. I will however take this opportunity to refer the reader to the 35 work of Professor Andrew Simms , former President of 35- Andrew Simms, Is Faith Delusion?: Why Religion is Good for

102 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM the Royal Institute of Psychiatry in Britain and also the work of Harold Koenig and David Larson among others.

The psychiatric term "delusion" runs a lot deeper than simply a belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, as Dawkins maintains. Delusion is, after all, a psychiatric term, and is determined through close analysis of the effects a particular belief has in the individual's personal experience. 36 By that definition, at least, religious faith is quite the opposite of a delusion. As Professor Simms remarked, it is one of medicine's best-kept secrets. Particularly among Christian adherents in western society, religious practice seems to result in lower levels of stress and depression, better physical health, better interpersonal relationship and family life and a much lower inclination to substance addiction among other behavioral and mental disorders. The psychiatric data for atheism and agnosticism, on the other hand, appears to run quite in the opposite direction.

A number of recent studies performed by members of the American psychiatric association determined a strong correlation between a "lack of faith" and depression and suicide. 37 This correlation can be viewed on the macro

You Continuum (2009) 36- Ibid. p 5 37- See also; Miller L; Wickramaratne P; Gameroff MJ; Sage M; Tenke CE; Weissman MM; Religiosity and major depression in adults at high risk: a ten-year prospective study. Am. J. Psychiatry 2012; 169:89-94; Smith C; Snell P: Souls in

103 ILWGICAL ATHEISM level as well. Is it sheer coincidence, for instance, that those nations with the highest levels of depression and suicide over the last 50 years also happen to have been the most irreligious? Former constituents of the Soviet bloc, China, Japan, all of Scandinavia, the UK, and France among others, all form the upper quarter of those particular statistics.38 And since most of these countries occupy the upper-tiers of economic prosperity, politically stability and technological advancement, to attempt to infer some other correlation would seem to me to be little more than an exercise in straw-grasping. If those are the hallmarks of "progressive man", then it safe to say, at the very least, that evolution has gone horribly slipshod.

Transition: The Religious Lives of Young Adults in America. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009; Dan Blazer, Religion! Spirituality and Depression: What Can We Learn From Empirical Studies?, Am J Psychiatry 2012; 169:10-12. 10.1176; 38- World Health Organisation, Suicide rates per 100,000 by country, year and sex; available at http://www.who.int/mental_ health/prevention! suicide_rates/ en!

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Chapter 7 Fallacies of Conjecture

I am not aware of any precise technical term for the type of fallacy we are dealing with in this chapter, although I am sure I am not the first to write about it. The fallacy of conjecture is committed whenever an argument is framed on the basis of what one should expect to be the case if any particular hypothesis were true, afforded minimal to no background evidence with which to make the prediction. It is what one might call the "Projection­ Prediction Objection" where the atheist ascribes a particular temperament to the God that should be, if he were (which he is not), and then goes on to predict how the world would be if his strictly hypothetical God had in fact created it.

The bare version of the argument runs as follows:

Premise 1: God is such a being that he would create Universe 'A'

Premise 2: We live in Universe 'B'

Conclusion: Therefore, God did not create our universe

The fallaciousness of the line of reasoning traces back to the first premise, which essentially puts the Creator at the mercy of the imagination. A Nazi might assume

105 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM a divine Creator would be the sort of person who would create an exclusively white race of human beings that prefer unconditional war to unconditional love. An environmentalist might conceive of a world in which the natural order did not depend on predation and human progress on the burning of fossil fuels. Of course, the most universally advocated expectation from the handiwork of a benevolent God is the general absence of evil and suffering. Whilst it is true that the problem of evil certainly poses a most formidable problem which theodicists have grappled with for centuries, it is important to recognize the tautological character of the objection. Any question in the world can be framed in the manner of "why did God do this and not some other thing?" It simply cannot suffice to ascribe our own subjective ideas of how things should be and then proceed to infer that our own impression of the Deity does not exist on the basis of questions the likes of:

Why did God make earthquakes? Why did God wait so long to make human beings? Why does the appendix exist? Why is the universe so big? Why do black holes exist? Why do people have to die? Why does God remain so silent?

All these questions are valid, so long as they are not asked with the scope of begging the question in favor of atheism, lest everything that we perceive as the

106 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM shortcomings of our own likeness of who and what God is becomes automatic evidence against Him. We can, after all, take the same reasoning and apply it to atheism in the same way:

Why do we inhabit a universe based on laws? Why does life exist? Why does anything at all exist? Morality, beauty, art, truth, goodness and a whole host of other things fairly useless in purely evolutionary terms - where did they come from? Why do we even consider life's purpose if the universe itself has none? Why is life conscious? Why are humans self-aware? And most fundamentally, why do humans ache with desire for something that does not exist?

The atheist's response to all these questions would no doubt consist in some chance-based explanation on the basis of evolution or Dawkins' ideas of cosmic Darwinism which, incidentally, would be no less faith­ based than the submissions of theist. In other words, what this ultimately boils down to is sheer incredulity as to a Deity's quite plausible reasons for making the universe the way He did, the same way that thoughtful theists are incredulous that an atheist-materialist worldview affords the best explanation for the fact that the universe somehow works, and that all our beliefs concerning ultimate purpose are little more than biological blunders. One focuses on order, the other on disorder. Theists are

107 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM inclined to view the universe as a grand and beautifully designed machine. The atheist, on the other hand, is disposed see it as a chaotic mess. By that token one should find it quite bemusing that the New Atheists have deemed theirs to be the only appropriate mindset for the scientist. As the immortal Sir Isaac Newton wrote in his Principia:

"Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety ofthings. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will ofa Being, necessarily existing. "39

One should not be inclined to think that she should have ever lived in such a universe at all if the naturalist view were true. One might well be wrong in thinking so, but, then, you see the point. The practice of reconciling a theistic worldview with the facts of physical reality is the entire scope of natural theology, and the fact that the principal New Atheist figureheads dismiss all theological talk as mere white noise speaks much of their understanding of the position they attack.

The argument from conjecture has taken another form, particularly in the oratory and literary tradition 39 Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica, "The General Scholium"

108 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM of Christopher Hitchens,40 which we might call the Prophecy of Doom Fallacy or the Argument from Personal Insignificance. In Hitchensian script, the argument would run something like this:

You are small beyond imagination. You are a minute chunk of animal flesh inhabiting a tiny speck of dust, helplessly cast in the middle of a vast ocean which seems to intent on your destruction. Ice ages shall freeze us over. Asteroids will pummel the Earth. Before long, the sun will become a red giant and vaporize all life as we know it. If that doesn't end you, the ultimate heat death of the entire universe will. Hardly a grand plan becoming of an all-benevolent Being!

The irony in these words is that, m his book, Hitchens also criticizes Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher who maliciously preached the end of the world in a vain attempt to amass a great discipleship. Still, his objection, even if it were absolutely certain (after all, two billion years of future scientific endeavor might prove otherwise), only makes sense if the ultimate plan for mankind were to reside eternally in the present universe. Who ever said that had to be the case? To the best of my limited knowledge, the Christian Bible certainly does not. If the universe and the Earth really are doomed to

40 Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great, Ch. 6 "Arguments from Design"

109 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM end forever, it seems to me that would suggest that those "Bronze Age peasants" were correct about at least two things if nothing else: the universe had a beginning. It shall also have an end. We might add that these were two propositions vehemently denied by naturalists as far back as Democritus and Epicurus, a tenet of atheology only recently discarded.

If mainstream science depicted a universe that was future-eternal, I am almost certain Mr. Hitchens would have slated the Biblical account of the End Times. When it was found that the universe began, the new question became; "why not sooner?" If other planets fit for the development of organic life were found to exist close to ours, alien life would have no doubt become an incessant atheist talking point. It turns out that such planets are few and far between, therefore it follows the universe was not designed for life after all.

The way the universe should have been, as far as the New Atheist is concerned, seems to be an ever-morphing tautology which can adjust to any set of altering circumstances to fit the visions of its prophets. As a tiny speck of ignorant nothingness floating about in infinite space, none of us are in a position to make any fleeting assumptions about how the universe should be. At any rate, if we were going to proselytize on behalf of atheism by resorting to doom prophecy, I could have made it far

110 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM worse for the theist than Mr. Hitchens. Incidentally, the vast majority of us now living will be dead before the turn of the century. I'd have thought that would have been an altogether more pressing concern than the ultimate fate of the universe a few quadrillion years down the line. Perhaps a metaphor might better illustrate the point:

Suppose there were a small tribe of ten primitive humanoids in a cave some five hundred thousand years ago. Imagine that these were among the first community of human beings on the planet, inhabiting some cave in some remote part of the world, never hunting within more than a kilometer of their home. From high up in the mountains, they see that the Earth stretches for miles and miles beyond the horizon, across seas and oceans - lands they perceive as entirely different realms which no primate human could ever possibly traverse. Between themselves and the ends of the Earth lay vast expanses of land, desert and frozen glaciers battered by the elements, utterly inhospitable to any kind of human life. With the exception of one proto-atheist, the rest of the humanoids conjure a belief in the Great Spirit who created the world and everything in it. But the atheist primate, unable to perceive how or why a benevolent deity would create the world the way he did, proceeds to ask: "Why do the land and sea go on and on, so needlessly exceeding our purposes? Why is so much of our planet so completely unsuited to us? What kind of Great Spirit would create a

111 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM planet so large?''

You see the point. These days we are more concerned by the fact that the Earth is too small. The impossibly distant future is too vague and the vastness of the universe too awe-inspiring to afford a viable premise for any argument.

The Psalmist proclaims; "Lord, when I consider your heavens, the work of thine fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast set in place, what is man that thou art mindful of him, the seed of Adam that thou carest for him?" Has current observation put us beyond the threshold of the Psalmist's awe? Precisely what size would Mr. Hitchens or Mr. Dawkins have preferred for our universe? One galaxy? Two galaxies? A few solar systems, perhaps? Perhaps they have preferred that Yuri Gagarin had had hit some kind a divine barrier between the Earth and the stars putting a halt to all science as we know it? How disappointingly uninteresting would that have made the universe? I am reminded of Robert Southey's Goldilocks: one really must ask what kind of universe would have been just right for the New Atheists.

Similarly meaningless objections have been framed relating to God's "timing". Why did God wait so long to send Jesus to humanity? Why wait so long to produce life at all? One would think for all this bother about time, mankind had been waiting in some kind of celestial

112 ILWGICAL ATHEISM queue for the last 13.7 billion years. If it is one thing modern science has taught us, it is that time is riddled with complexity liable to baffle us for centuries to come. Even so, the mere notion of time applying to its Maker is unfathomably self-indulgent.

The whole question of why God "wasted" so much time, space and energy only makes sense in the context of a God who had shortage of such things. By what measure is the God of the universe supposed to be the God of efficiency? These seem to me intellectual problems which derive from the shallow notion of God as the same sort of finite being that we are, on par with the man who confuses himself with the question "How does God listen to so many people praying at one time?'' The theory never seems to occur, to the one who cannot accept it, that the universe might have been made the way it is and that time may have lapsed the way it did for reasons we have yet to fully understand. We are, after all, talking about billions upon billions of years in a future for all intents and purposes unknown. To speculate on such cosmic lengths of time across a near endless space of possibility, and then go on to infer the conclusion that everything is purposeless, is not only unreasonable, it is an extremely poor compass for the human race.

In a world where relativism has been deeply ingrained in western thinking, it is no surprise that everyone wants

113 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM a God who conforms to their idea of what He should be, what He should do and how He should think. However one must realize that neither reality nor its hypothetical Maker is in any way bound by how we feel things should be or how they should have happened. It should instantly occur to any sane human being that expunging any possibility objective purpose of existence from the existential equation in a fit of intellectual frustration is highly counter-productive to any quest of true discovery. But to go the step further of actually attempting to argue for the moral superiority of the reaction is nothing short of sheer lunacy.

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Chapter 8 Counter-Fallacies

"Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence."

Napoleon Bonaparte

In Chapter 3 of The God Delusion, Dawkins purports to dismantle all of the most formidable arguments the theistic tradition has managed to scrape from the pits of intellectual despair over many long centuries of contemplation which has largely proven useless. In keeping with the blueprint of the largest straw-man ever erected in honor of atheism, six of these self­ styled arguments tum out to be yet another infantile parody of theology. Of the only two actual arguments Dawkins addresses, both are around ten centuries out of date. Few philosophers rely on Aquinas' versions of the teleological and cosmological arguments or Anselm's ontological argument. You would think, after making the statement that arguments for the existence of God have been codified for centuries by theologians41 (and still ongoing I might add), he might have actually bothered to bring a few of these arguments up. Instead he panders 41- Dawkins, God Delusion, p.76

115 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM to the intellectual vanity of his most typical disciple by cherry-picking a small selection of arguments common knowledge to anyone who has taken an Intro to Philosophy course, as though this is the best two millennia of careful philosophical deliberation has turned up.

Slimy trick. And it appears to have worked.

I have no intention of dignifying Dawkins' twisted outlook on theistic philosophy by addressing his objections to "Arguments from Personal Experience" or "Arguments from Scripture". One might just as well draft a philosophical proof of the lack of transcendental causative powers of flying spaghetti, and waste just as much time and energy, though not nearly as much spaghetti. Frankly, the person who leapfrogs into atheism over the back of a Richard Dawkins exegesis of the Judea-Christian Bible could not have had very far to leap in the first place. Instead, we shall focus specifically on Dawkins' philosophical objections, which are just as patently absurd.

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8.1 Ontological Absurdity

Even most theist philosophers no longer endorse Anselm's version of the Ontological Argument, so even if Dawkins had succeeded in making a valid counter­ argument, which he did not, it would not have meant much to begin with.

In his sub-chapter on the Ontological Argument, Dawkins correctly relates how the argument had confounded Bertrand Russell, going on to say that Russell was too over-eager to be disillusioned if logic seemed to require it. 42 The suggestion that one can be "disillusioned by logic" is troubling enough. The perspectives of the philosophical community on the Ontological Argument are quite polarized, and whilst my own intuitions have not permitted me to subscribe to it, even in its most recent and refined renditions, I believe it makes a point worth thinking about, and a point which Richard Dawkins plainly misses.

Anselm's version of the argument runs as follows:

Premise 1: God is the greatest conceivable entity.

Premise 2: Existence is an attribute of greatness.

Conclusion: God must therefore exist.

42 - Ibid. p. 82

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The immediate problem, as Dawkins is quick to point out, is the presumption of Premise 2. Ironically, however the "knockdown argument" Dawkins presents, courtesy of the philosopher Douglas Gasking, is one that would actually point to the fact that existence is indeed an attribute of greatness, unwittingly going on to provide a backhanded proof of the second premise Anselm's argument:

Premise 1: The creation of the world is the most marvelous achievement imaginable.

Premise 2: The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.

Premise 3: The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.

Premise 4: The most formidable handicap for a creator would be nonexistence.

Premise 5: Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being - namely, one who created everything while not existing.

Premise 6: An existing God therefore would not be a being greater than which a greater cannot be conceived

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because an even more formidable and incredible creator would be a God which did not exist.

Conclusion: God does not exist.

The absurdity entered the stream ofDouglas Gasking's reasoning at the same point it enters Richard Dawkins'; that it is not logically possible for something non­ existent to do much of anything, much less create the universe. The only thing that is non-existent is nothing, and nothing is no more capable of being than of doing or possessing any attributes that can be called "great".

In short, Anselm's argument, like the modem-day version of the Ontological Argument proceeds from logical possibility to logical necessity, whilst Dawkins' counter-argument proceeds from logical absurdity to logical absurdity.

Over the years, the argument has been re-formulated, Alvin Plantinga's "Possible Worlds" adaptation being the most recent, and one which, for the sake of elucidating Anselm's line of reasoning, I shall now attempt to relate.

"Possible Worlds" are hypothetical constructs of the way the universe could be. One might think in terms of an inexhaustible number of parallel realities. It is to be conceded by atheist and theist alike that the only constraint on these possible realities is that they cannot violate certain rules -rules like classical logic and arithmetic. 1

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+ 1 = 2 is as true on Planet Earth as it is in Middle Earth. The same can be said about the logical law of excluded middle and the law of non-contradiction, for these are rules that apply in any possible world.

Ergo:

Premise 1: A maximally great being (God) has maximal excellence in a given possible world W if and only if He is omnipotent and omniscient (i.e. is present everywhere, at all times and is all-powerful)

Premise 2: Therefore, a being has maximal excellence if he has maximal excellence in every possible world.

Premise 3: It is logically possible that a maximally great being (God) exists in at least some possible world.

Premise 4: If it logically possible that God exists in some possible world, then God must also exist in every possible world.

Premise 5: If God exists in every possible world, then God must also exist in our world.

Conclusion: Therefore, God, an omniscient,

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omnipotent being exists in our world. 43

The logic of the argument follows necessarily from the first premise. If it is even possible that God could exist in some conceivable universe, He must, by definition, exist in all conceivable universes, for we could otherwise conceive of a being even greater than God, namely a God that could assert his presence across the margins of our wildest imaginings.

It goes without saying that the Ontological Argument is a huge extrapolation from simple a priori rational intuition. And for our purposes, that is completely beside the point. The argument can be understood and subsequently refuted or rejected. Dawkins achieves none of those things. Furthermore, the asinine logic, not even his own (and very likely subscribed to on the sole basis of philosophical authority), demonstrate that he has not fully understood the argument, much less refuted it.

43 Alvin Plantinga's Ontological Argument.

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8.2 Five Ways to Folly

The "Cosmological argument" to which Dawkins refers is actually a misreference to the broader category of arguments of which the Thomist Argument from Contingency merely forms a part. Briefly, the argument states that since the universe is not itself a necessary thing, something necessary must exist beyond it - the Unmoved Mover- the Uncaused First Cause.

When philosophers (and scientists for that matter) speak ofthe contingency of the universe, they mean that this, our specific universe, need not have ever existed, which is to say that either nothing at all might have existed or that a completely different type of universe could have existed in its place.

The opposite of contingency is necessity, which is to say that any particular proposition or thing simply could not logically be any other way than as it is. Thus it is as mathematically necessary that 1 + 1 = 2 as it is logically necessary that ifA= B and B = C, then A= C. These truths would subsist in any conceivable universe as eternal and unchanging, regardless of whether there were human minds to apprehend them or, indeed, if the universe itself had never even existed. We can be equally certain that if there are realities parallel to ours they would not pay host

123 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM to any married bachelors or four-sided triangles.

Conversely, there is nothing necessary about the properties of finite objects in space and time. We can, after all, conceive of oranges being some entirely different colour. This is true of all things physical, including the universe itself and the very laws by which it operates, which brings us to Thomas Aquinas' point.

Some necessary thing must exist.

To employ the jocular phrase, turtles all the way down simply will not do. On pain of a reductio ad absurdum of contingent things infinitely regressing in the past, we have to hit rock bottom somewhere. Therefore if we had to sum up Aquinas' first three proofs in a single syllogism:

Premise 1 : There must be something necessary and uncaused.

Premise 2: The universe is contingent.

Premise 3: Therefore, the necessary uncaused cause must lie beyond the universe.

Conclusion: The necessary, uncaused cause is God.

Now, there are a number of things to notice about Dawkins' rendition ofthe Contingency Argument. First off; he agrees with Premise 1. Dawkins accepts that there must be something that is necessary and uncaused, submitting that that something is the universe itself. He,

124 ILWGICAL ATHEISM like virtually all atheists, believes the universe is a brute fact; uncaused, eternal and necessary, whether it extends to the boundaries of our own cosmos or a compendium of infinite universes lying beyond it. 44 And since Dawkins also endorses Multiverse Theory, that means he also accedes to Premise 2- that our universe is contingent.

In fact it may surprise you to find out that Dawkins agrees with every premise of the Contingency Argument, including its conclusion, only to perform a bit of logical sleight of hand at the final step in Aquinas' logic, substituting God for the Multiverse. Why this little parlor trick solves nothing is a subject for the next part of my thesis.

Aquinas' prediction of a cosmic beginning might seem parsimonious until one realizes that the dominant view among the intelligentsia of humankind throughout history was that the universe was eternal. It is safe to assume that Richard Dawkins would have counted himself among the many exponents of a steady-state world had he been living at any time prior to the 1930s.

Dawkins' argument against Aquinas' fourth proof is, on the plus side, comical, though it affords no philosophical point of challenge. The Argument from Degree simply states that in order for very notion of the Good necessitates an ontic locus of Goodness, against

44- Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 145

125 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM which all things good or bad are to be measured.

Dawkins' response: "That s an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum ofconceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension ofcomparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion."

In equating the notion of goodness with physical sensation, Dawkins makes a telling admission, for he eludes the obvious fact that smells and sensual pleasures are categories wholly apart from truth, morality or beauty. A person might like one smell and hate another. All matters of personal taste are equally relative, by which logic we are to infer that Dawkins reduces all aspects of human experience to equally relative summation.

We would be correct.

His rejection of objective moral truths, for instance, is the direct consequence of his repudiation of the moral locus against which the degrees of moral goodness are weighed. This is all aside from the fact that Dawkins' parody is completely misconstrued, which is to be expected from someone who seems to have a very blurred

126 ILWGICAL ATHEISM notion of what he is trying to refute.

The Good, like God is a metaphysical and not a physical notion. Hence, there can be no such thing as a metaphysically necessary smell any more than a metaphysically necessary taste or a metaphysically necessary orgasm. Any feature of the created world that creeps into the notion ofits Creator is only liable to deceive us. This is as true philosophically as it is spiritually. Indeed, observing the problem in spiritual terms might serve to illustrate the point better. The Christian path to God, like many of the eastern spiritualties, is founded, among other things, on a principle of separation from the chains of worldlinessY There is a distinction to be made, as the Christ himself did, between earthly bread and the bread of Heaven. The equivocation of goodness to sensation confuses a physical good which is arbitrary and subjective, to a metaphysical good which is necessary and objective. The theological term for this, incidentally, is idolatry. Finally, there is Dawkins' rebuttal of Aquinas' Teleological Argument, which he makes primarily on the basis of Darwinian evolution, a subject which he knows a great deal more about than everything else, and as such will require more careful scrutiny.

45- Matthew 16:24

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Chapter 9 The Darwinian Fallacy

"Darwinian evolution, specifically natural selection, does something more. It shatters the illusion of design within the domain of biology, and teaches us to be suspicious of any kind of design hypothesis in physics and cosmology as well. "46 Richard Dawkins

9.1 Evolution and Evolutionism

These days, expressing a belief in evolution has seems to have become as grave a betrayal as its denial, and Richard Dawkins in particular has gone to great lengths to make sure that remains the case by making a straw man out of a few nutty Young Earth Creationists, as though Judea-Christian orthodoxy were absolutely contingent on the belief that precisely 144 hours interceded between the point of ex nihil a creation and the arrival of the first man, and that only a few thousand years have come to pass since then. Atheist orthodoxy, on the other hand,

46- Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 118

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1s quite fundamentally committed to Darwinism. In Richard Dawkins' own words:

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. "·47

It is for this reason that atheists will guard Darwin's precious theory tooth and nail from attack. However, seeing as how the vast majority of scientific theories are abolished or amended, probability does mitigate against the future of the Darwinian account. We have since moved on to N eo-Darwinism. In the future there will be no doubt be a Neo-Neo-Darwinism, and so forth ad infinitum, or at least as long as the commitment to methodological naturalism continues to compel the scientific community to squeeze some new and equally useless theory of unguided speciation from evidence.

A quick reading of chapter 5 of The God Delusion reveals the truth: that almost all of the supposed a! theological implications of Darwinian theory are not scientific at all. But by incessantly repeating the mantra "evolution disproves God", Dawkins and Dennett have done much to perpetuate the idea that one cannot maintain evolution and theism at the same time, and that one must therefore declare oneself an enemy to God, or an enemy to science. That, coupled with a powerful thrust behind 47- Richard Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker, W.W. Norton (1996) p. 6

130 ILWGICAL ATHEISM the subliminal notion that all the materialistic-atheistic implications of Darwinian theory are undisputed fact has quite successfully conjured two false impressions in mainstream culture: that the religious are necessarily anti­ evolutionist, and that because they are anti-evolutionist they are, as Dawkins professed: either stupid, evil or ignorant.

The account of human life emerging from pure matter and energy as the result of a random, unguided process with no preceding scope or purpose cannot, nor can it conceivably be, the subject of empirical proof. It is a philosophical conjecture as theological as the teleology it decries. Mere empirical observation cannot make the metaphysical leap into purpose any more than it can into purposelessness. That is, was, and always will be an act of faith.

As it happens, there have been two relatively recent discoveries of modern science that have tainted the atheistic vision of Darwin's magnificent theory, which we can only briefly touch upon for the time being. The first of these discoveries comprises the various universal constants of spacetime which, together, create the image of a universe so infinitely modified for the permission of organic life it has caused a growing number of committed atheists to retreat to various Multiverse hypotheses and the Anthropic Principle.

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The second maJor development of contemporary science concerns the origins of the first life, still rife with mystery, and without which the entire process of evolution would simply be a non-starter. The information-baring property of DNA is the necessary starting point of the whole evolutionary process, and not itself a product of the evolutionary process.48 As I have come to understand it, these have been the foundational premises of the infamous proponents of Intelligent Design; those despised hobgoblins of the scientific community.

Another hypothesis relevant to biological origins formed the subject of British paleontologist and Cambridge professor Simon Conway Morris' book, Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. In his book, Morris traces an apparent scheme in evolutionary history which seems to converge inevitably on the human species, challenging the claims made by biologists like John Maynard Smith, Mayr and Hitchens' much admired Stephen J. Gould of Cambrian Explosion fame. 49 The animal kingdom is filled with commonalities, which, in tum, implies an inclination of the evolutionary process 48 - See: Stephen Meyer, Signature in the Cell, Harper-Collins (2009) 49 - John Maynard Smith: "If one was able to replay the whole evolution of animals, starting at the bottom of the Cambrian, there is no guarantee- indeed no likelihood- that the result would be the same. There might be no conquest of land, no emergence of mammals, and certainly no human beings."- New York Review, June 14th 1990.

132 ILWGICAL ATHEISM to produce a certain type of creature. Morris' words on page 196 of his book sum up his thesis quite concisely:

"If brains can get big independently and provide a neural machine capable of handling a highly complex environment, then perhaps there are other parallels, other convergences that drive some groups towards complexity. Could the story ofsensory perception be one clue that, given time, evolution will inevitably lead not only to the emergence of such properties as intelligence, but also to other complexities, such as, say, agriculture and culture, that we tend to regard as the prerogative of the human? We may be unique, but paradoxically those properties that define our uniqueness can still be inherent in the evolutionary process. In other words, ifwe humans had not evolved then something more-or-less identical to us should have emerged sooner or later."50

This seems to me to be a thesis irreconcilable with the premise of pure chance on which Darwinian orthodoxy depends. Whilst none of this necessarily implies that Darwin's theory is perishing, it does suggest that it at least might have to be reworked at some point in the future. This is a prospect which scientific materialists are bound to approach with extreme caution. And rightly so.

50 - Simon Conway Morris, Life s Solutions: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, Cambridge University Press (2004) p. 196.

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With that all in mind, let us grant Dawkins the full materialist account of life's origins, even to the extent of abiogenesis. Notwithstanding that we are affording the atheist territory which extends well beyond what science has thus far established, it is not to be thought improbable. At least, it is not improbable to me. Once the science is exhausted, we may well determine that life seems to someway arrange itself from water molecules, stardust and other chemical compounds. There certainly has been scientific experimentation which has yielded some fruit in this regard, going as far back as the Miller­ Urey experiment of 1952. However, as I say that, I cannot help but sense it slightly mystifying that random elements subjected to the laws of physics and chemistry alone should arrange themselves into double helixes comprising incomprehensible volumes of information, eventually transmutating their way to macro-organismic life as we know it in what might be considered a relatively short space of time. What I want to know is why anyone would think this story lends the slightest credibility to atheism? It seems to me that the atheist is assuming that his world would be one likely to contain the natural laws capable of producing life from non-life. I just fail to see why that should be the case at all.

Evolution describes a process of adjustment of

134 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM organic life to the presented environment, based on the two golden rules: random mutation and natural selection. The actual origins of life itself were never purported to be explained by Darwin's theory, much less the cosmic origins of the entire universe as we know it. It has merely been expanded by the likes of Dawkins in a fit of professional vanity to encapsulate such explanations, when there is absolutely no scientific basis for doing so. At some point, on both the theistic and atheistic account, life had to have arisen from non-life anyway, whether God was responsible for it or not. The real question is; could such an eventuality have come about purely as a result of random atomic collisions? That does not seem to me a question that science is apt to answer.

In a universe where scientific law is contingent, there is no materialistically sufficient reason why life should have followed any course at all, let alone the Darwinian course, and the formation of impossibly complex life is a phenomenon very poorly explained as a conjuring trick by random chaos, even assuming the cosmic ocean of possibility, and leaving aside the fact that the background probabilities themselves are incalculable. In a sense, therefore, Darwin made it only slightly more possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, and not necessarily a less credible theist.

All of this, however, does beg an important question.

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Just what, exactly, are the scientific findings in life's origins that would satisfy Richard Dawkins of the theist's point of view? To make the leap from a present understanding of evolutionary theory to atheism is one that can only be made through careful philosophical deliberation. By now I should hope the penny has long dropped on Richard Dawkins and the whole notion of careful philosophical deliberation. We all know that evolution is a natural process. That is not the issue in dispute. What is in dispute is whether or not the unfolding of incredibly complex life could have come about devoid of any form of Guiding Precedent.

Even taken to its empirical limits, that is a burden which evolutionary theory could not possibly sustain.

My contention is that the atheistic account of natural evolution would give a hopelessly unmerited level of credit to what the true metaphysical implications of chaos actually are - a place in which science simply could not be done, let alone the propagation of life fulfilled. There seems to be no hard-and-fast scientific basis upon which to state with absolute confidence that life on Earth could have emerged from chance or necessity alone, and the evidence to the contrary of the atheistic Darwinian view is slowly mounting the more complex life appears on the microcellular level. So ... what is the fuss really about?

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Well, the problem is more theological than meets the eye, and has a lot less to do with evolutionary theory than the system is seeks to explain. As the old saying goes; "Nature red in tooth and claw."

The maternal irresponsibility of the cuckoo bird, the suicidal mating habits of the praying mantis or the infanticidal practices of the salt water crocodile do not paint a flattering picture of their benevolent Creator. It is hard to deny the powerful sense that we ought to live in a world where there is no such thing as pain; no such thing as evil. Common sense seems to dictate that that is the sort of world any reasonable God should want for his beloved creatures, yet we see only blind, pitiless indifference that seems to accord more with a story in which death is the hero of the plot. Thus, the problem becomes an evolutionary spinoff of that age-old Epicurean Paradox:

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

Nature is cruel. Of this there can be little doubt. But that this unkind fact is essentially irreconcilable with justice and benevolence seems at once a fleeting

137 ILWGICAL ATHEISM judgment that no person is apt to make, at least until it has been determined with some certainty what justice and benevolence really are. As far as I can recall, the jury is still out.

Outraged though we may be by the cuckoo and the crocodile, one must ask oneself whether it is rationally justifiable to demand virtue of birds and reptiles, or to anthroproject ones own experience of suffering onto creatures quite unlike ourselves - to assume that what the ant's feels the instant before it is squashed is quite the same as what goes on in the mind of the man standing on 1 the gallows with his head in a noose. 5

We may elicit any number of inferences from even the most egregious acts in nature. There is an argument to be made fact that the savagery in nature should be as a guide to us of that which we are not, and that which we should strive to be more than. Maybe some animals are pitiless and indifferent to one another's pain. Is that our personal view of the human race? Is this the view of Richard Dawkins? If the world is inherently pitiless and indifferent, why, then, do we so incessantly strive for things such as justice, equality and morality, which are patently unevulotionary notions as near as one can tell. Another accident, no doubt.

51 See: Michael Murray, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Oxford University Press (2011)

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There does not appear to be any thoroughgoing reason why a world immersed in pain should be the necessary correlative of an atheist world view, but I do find it telling that the ones most apt to make the argument from pain and suffering typically have precious little experience of either.

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9.2 Evolutionary Determinism

Freedom of the will repudiates the dominance of the gene over the mind, and suggests that evolution is a process which in many ways ceases to apply once it reaches the level of the great ape. This is not to say that human beings stop evolving over time, but whilst the rest of the nature goes on dancing to the music of natural selection, the miracle ofliberty born in the human skull would imply that nature's unfettered dominance is effectively terminated, at least with regard to us.

Emancipated from the Nature God of naturalism, the human will, in the ultimate act of blasphemy, asserts itself. After all, if humans could wield matter, rather than be wielded by it, it would mean that we ourselves are something more than matter - subsisting selves with the ability to guide our own destiny. And what could be more repugnant to the Darwinist?

The largest premise behind modem atheism has been "liberation from the tyranny of religion!" only to result in the most totalitarian image of servitude one could possibly conceive. "Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic. In fact, it has increased my feelings offreedom!" declares Sam Harris, in a familiarly stupendous display of logical self-contradiction. The atheist consequently finds himself committed to the same vein oflogical contradiction

141 ILWGICAL ATHEISM that punctuates all his thoughts: that he is free, except there is no such thing as freedom; that all men are basically good, though moral goodness itself is a useful fiction; that life has meaning though reality itself does not.

Are we machines of nature, pre-programmed for the exclusive purpose of gene proliferation? To even suggest a positive response to the question is dismiss the very logic whereby the answer was given, since it would mean that that answer was determined, and therefore has no more rhyme or rhythm to it than to the ultimate purpose of reality.

British theoretical physicist John Polkinghome, in his book Science and Theology could not have phrased the problem any better:

"In the opinion of many thinkers, human freedom is closely connected with human rationality. If we were deterministic beings, what would validate the claim that our utterance constituted rational discourse? Would not the sounds issuing from mouths, or the marks issuing on paper, be simply the actions ofautomata? All proponents ofdeterministic theories, whether social and economic (Marx), sexual (Freud), or genetic (Dawkins and E. 0. Wilson), need a covert disclaimer on their own behalf, excepting their own contribution from reductive dismissal. "52

52 - John Polkinghome, Science and Theology: An Introduction, Fortress Press (1998) p. 58, cited in; John Lennox, God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design is it Anywcry? Lion (2011)

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9.3 Created Gods and the Fallacy of Complexity

On page 109 of his book, Dawkins makes the following pronouncement:

"There is a much more powerful argument, which does not depend upon subjective judgment, and it is the argument from improbability. It really does transport us dramatically away from 50 per cent agnosticism, far towards the extreme oftheism in the view of many theists, far towards the extreme ofatheism in my view. I have alluded to it several times already. The whole argument turns on the familiar question 'Who made God? "'53

I could not help but notice, when I had first read these words, that Dawkins' "powerful thesis" is one that I myself had conceived when I was about five years old, and one which, admittedly, I had not given much consideration since. It did occur to me, however, that an argument which a young child is apt to make is not likely to be very powerful.

The simplest answer to the mundane question is that it cuts both ways. The atheist, committed to the belief

53 - Sam Harris reiterates the same Argument in Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 72-73

143 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM that he is the end result of physical forces in a material universe, is no more absolved of the duty of explaining who created his creator, to which he might answer "nothing and no one". But, then, one fails to understand how and why this answer is good for the atheist goose, but not the theist gander. If all philosophical problems could be eliminated simply by positing an unanswerable question, I daresay there would be no need for philosophy. There is a second logical incongruity, namely that the truth in one explanation does not demand a further explanation. That the sky was bright blue one a summer morning is best explained by the proposition that the Earth turned on its axes, causing the sun to rise, but the forces that cause the Earth to spin are superfluous, at least to the extent of explaining why the sun rises. That the further fact cannot be explained does nothing to negate the first explanation. And at some point the buck has to stop.

There is another aspect ofthe Created God objection, drawing from Dawkins' utterly baseless presumption that an entity as complex as a deity should have been subject to the same rules of Darwinian evolution as every other being, since Darwinian evolution is the only process we know of that is capable of creating complex minds. I should point out that Dawkins emphatically declares this to be the central argument in his book:

"I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly:

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'there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us '. This book will advocate an alternative view: 'any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution '."54

That may be true of one complex intelligence - ours. And since the central principle of the natural sciences is repeatability, I hardly think this satisfies the threshold of evidence Dawkins would demand for most theories. But the more profound logical problem with this argument is the very nature of the hypothesis it seeks to refute. Darwinian evolution is a process that applies exclusively to material beings in a material universe, and since the Creator must himself be, by definition, immaterial, it would follow that the rules of evolution are irrelevant. Dawkins himself refers to God as a "supernatural intelligence", yet seems to have conveniently forgotten evolution is a quintessentially natural process. In virtue ofhis own very clumsy choice of words, he consigns his own argument to incoherence.

This argument is taken a step further to the claim that complex explanations for existing things are almost certainly non-existent explanations, by which I am to

54- Dawkins, God Delusion, p.31

145 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM conclude that I myself do not exist, given that I am a far too complex explanation for the book you are reading right now. That an argument so patently ridiculous could find itself at the focus of a bestselling book by an Oxford Professor is as much a cause for disenchantment with our most prestigious universities as it is for hilarity.

If there is one thing at all that science has taught us it is that the universe is anything but simple. Whether God exists or not, we can be certain that the explanation for why we are here is not a simple explanation. All of these evolutionary fallacies are clearly constructed on a vision of reality, warped by a kind of occupational psychosis, around the narrow paradigm of the evolutionary model­ a simplification so fatuous it really is disturbing, bearing in mind the repute of its most vociferous exponents.

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Chapter 10 The Pluralistic Fallacy

"I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further. "55 Richard Dawkins

An amusing strategy, indeed. Unfortunately, however, it is one that is frequently advocated with all seriousness by passionate Dawkinites.

The argument from pluralism seeks to suggest that since multiple representations of the same thing might be proposed, it follows that the very thing itself, therefore, does not exist. Referring back to the allegory of the ancient nomads and the unicorn, the inexistence of the unicorn would not have been proven by the mere fact that any number of bizarre versions of the unicorn could be proposed. The ignorance of the overall philosophical problem comes to us part and parcel with the "atheism is

55 - Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 53

147 ILWGICAL ATHEISM not a faith" platitude.

The Dawkinite atheist is under the serious assumption that one can simply dismiss the entire notion of God as a needless appendage, unaware that to do so is to completely invert the ultimate image of reality - all this from the simple maneuver of"going one god further".

There is no real logical conclusion that follows from the postulating of many other gods to the non-existence of a God. As if Greek and Norse mythology were bad enough, Hinduism recognizes over 330 million gods. But does the proposition of the multitude does not deter in any way from the existence of the One. To deny the existence Amon-Ra is rather more frivolous now than it would have been in Pharaoh's time, when no other theistic concept was available to the Egyptian.

There is a crucial difference between denying particular descriptions of something 'A' and denying the existence of 'A' altogether. That there are multiple philosophical interpretations of the laws of quantum mechanics does not for a minute suggest than an ultimate objective description of quantum mechanics does not exist. To deny most contemporary and historical religious descriptions of God, whether it be Allah or Brahman or Yahweh or the Nazarene, would bring us no nearer to atheism than an acceptance of all four would make one more a theist. The supposed problem could be extended even further

148 ILWGICAL ATHEISM when one considers that every single individual has their own personal theology which, upon closer scrutiny, always emerges to differ from everybody else's. This is, after all, an inevitable consequence of being human. All adherents of all theistic religions may well have a horribly imprecise image of the Object of their worship, but this should only bother us insofar as there is no such thing as an absolute understanding of anything short of pure mathematical description.

It would stand to reason that if there is such a being as God that brought everything into existence, then just as it is impossible to provide anything more than a vague reflection of love, beauty or truth, it should be equally if not more impossible to give an accurate description of the One without whom those same concepts would degenerate into platitudes. The reality of a titan hurling thunderbolts from the peak of Mount Olympus may be deemed as falsified as the unicorn, but the probable existence of a Final Cause of all reality remains as viable with Brahman as it does with Jesus Christ. And our understanding of God is liable to change again in the near or distant future with very minimal ontological effect.

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BOOK III

FAITH

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Chapter 11

The Faith Delusion

"The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards, " as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men offaith-perfect faith, as it turns out-and this, it must.finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be." Sam Harris

The same Oxford English Dictionary which defines faith as "complete trust or confidence in someone or something" also provides a secondary definition, which, I would venture, was a recent addition, and consolidates the whole hullabaloo about this "faith" business:

"A strong belief in the doctrines ofa religion, based on spiritual conviction, rather than proof"

The popular usage of the term has therefore twisted its slightly more sophisticated philosophical meaning. Rather; its true meaning. Contrast the description given in the layman's dictionary with that of, say the Kantian glossary of philosophical terms:

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"Faith: A rational attitude towards a potential object ofknowledge which arises when we are subjectively certain it is true even though we are unable to gain theoretical or objective certainty."

As one can imagine, the New Atheists have reveled in the shroud of this semantic discrepancy, and by appealing to the general ignorance oftheir discipleship, have created a barrier to reason comparable to clinical insanity. With the entire notion of faith conveniently ascribed in its entirety to the category religion (from which they isolate themselves), the inference that has been drawn and fervently advanced is that atheism, by definition, is not a faith because, as the story goes, atheism is not a religion. This claim demonstrates a monumental ignorance of the notion of belief asymmetry.

In Chapter 4 we saw that contemporary atheism possesses all of the essential features of any other organized religion, limiting ourselves to socio-cultural specifics. In this book, I intend to delve deeper, by unpacking a few of the more crucial beliefs inseparable from any viable atheist worldview. Bearing in mind the unexamined disparity within the atheist community itself, this will require a lot of preliminary untangling. Quite distressingly, most mainstream atheists will insist that atheism entails no belief content at all, only to later unravel a long list of personally maintained philosophies

154 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM and non-provable theories under cross-examination, and the fact that these creeds and philosophies can vary from individual to individual has often allowed the atheist to get away with a status of immunity from critique, citing that his beliefs are not beliefs and therefore that his non­ belief can not possibly be open to scrutiny.

It is high time this tiresome old cliche was blown out of the water.

In the upcoming thesis we shall see that any atheistic worldview leads necessarily to beliefs which are not only incompatible with the best evidence from experience, but which are a proiori rationally untenable. Once we have laid out a working definition of faith to which the any layman would agree, and any reasonable person should agree, we shall then proceed to determine exactly why atheism is a philosophy comprising not just one, but an entire set of positive assertions about existence ofwhich there is little evidence in support and vast evidence to the contrary. To say that atheism is believed would be an insult to the very notion, for even the most indiscriminate forms offideism at least begin with the logical possibility of truth. Hopefully in the following discourse, the reader will come to appreciate that the essential philosophies of mere atheism, taken collectively, render it utterly untenable, and necessarily false.

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Chapter 12 The Default Position

"What I want to examine is the contention that the debate about the existence of God should properly begin from the presumption of atheism, that the onus ofproof must lie upon the theist." Sir Antony Flew

The default position, alternatively; the "presupposition of atheism" is one of the cornerstone New Atheist folklores and lies at the foundation of the entire modem­ day non-faith view. This idea often finds itself grounded either in a philosophical incongruity or a myth of popular psychology.

Philosophically, the presupposition of atheism is a spinoff of logical positivism or verificationism; the view that any proposition must be empirically verifiable - hence, scientifically proven - if it is to be meaningful. Thus, one should presume atheism until theism has been proven, in the same way we do not presume the existence of any other entity until the empirical evidence is forthcoming. 56

Psychologically, the notion has been pushed in the 56 - Verificationism

156 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM form of the supposed outcome of an absurd thought experiment; that if one were to raise a child in a completely irreligious environment, then that child, unburdened by lies and misinformation - the necessary correlative of religious education - would grow up to be the proud owner of a developed, unspoiled atheistic temperament, no more liable to be convinced of God than tooth fairies or Jolly Old Saint Nick. The psychological presumption made on behalf of atheism is thus that people only come to religious belief because they are forced to, and that if these cultural pressures were to be withdrawn, the outcome would be a full-fledged and intellectually untainted atheist.

We shall start with the psychological edition of this "automatic atheist" delusion first, and proceed to the fallacious philosophical presumption of atheism second. In a Eurobarometer poll carried out in 2010, it was determined that nearly 80% of Europeans either believe in God or "some kind of spirit or life force". 57 Interestingly, the more belief in God dwindles, the more belief in the undefined "Higher Power" rises. Even in Sweden, Estonia and the Czech Republic, probably the most reputedly irreligious nations in the world, nearly half of the people surveyed said they believed in this Higher Power, 18-20% were willing to call that Higher

57 - EC; Special Eurobarometer 341 Report, "Biotechnology" (2010) p. 204

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8 Power God and 30% said they believed in neither. 5

Now, to assume that 50% of Swedes, Estonians and Czechs citing belief in some supernatural force are atheists in the proper sense of the word would be to either misrepresent their beliefs, or the beliefs of atheists. In fact the drafters of the European Commission's report themselves acknowledged the distinction. 59 \\tnat we really find in secular Europe, therefore, is not a dramatic leap toward the godless worldview, but rather a slow drift away from the traditional notion of God, specifically the God of the Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran churches. The veer toward atheism in Europe, like the rest of the Western World, has been due mostly to a willful disassociation with the Christian religion, of which the name of God is uncomfortably reminiscent. Even though the Judeo-Christian God has been ushered out of the European population during the last half century or so, some idea of God subsists in even the most irreligious regions of the European continent, long after the effective collapse of religious authority.

Even within domains unexposed to traditional religion, the overwhelming majority of people in the world today maintain at least some form of belief in God, to say nothing of the billions upon billions of those so-called "primitive" and "unenlightened" human beings that 58- Ibid. 59 - Ibid. p. 203

158 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM have preceded us over the centuries, almost all of whom maintained worldviews of some theistic description. All of this, however, turns out to be quite irrelevant for Richard Dawkins, who claims that even prominent scientific figures like Newton, Kepler and Faraday could only have subscribed to Christianity on the basis of irresistible social pressure, a delirious conjecture no doubt spurred on in the minds of his readership by the illusion of the "oppressed infidel" (he thought to include these theories under a chapter in his book, ludicrously entitled "Arguments from Religious Scientists").60

On this mythos, if the relentless indoctrination and imposition of religious beliefs in society were to be brought to a sudden stop, people would be left free to drift off toward the belief to which they are naturally inclined as rational beings. Atheism. A thought experiment has even been proposed: If a group of infants left to fend for themselves on a deserted island somehow managed to survive to adulthood, provided that they possess a level of intelligence which would place them in the upper 5% of our species, and afforded access to everything one can presently know about reality, the end result could only possibly be a community of atheists, and soon to be quite likely the greatest civilization to ever grace the human race. Suddenly, the fact that human history is replete with the presence of deities goes completely unnoticed. 60- Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 97-103

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It is also worth noting that a state of affairs where hundreds of millions of people over the course of a century born, raised and educated exclusively within the walls of an atheistic worldview is an experiment which has already been tried. And the results are in. No more than three decades since the collapse of the most anti-theistic regimes in recent history, Christianity has resurged all across the former Soviet bloc and is today exploding in Communist China. Although, no doubt, the New Atheists would have us believe this resurgence to be the symptom of some form of cultural, educational or economic deprivation.

If the evidence from sociology is not powerful enough, we now have recent studies from the field of psychology which certify the ridiculousness of the psychological pre-disposition to atheism. Paul Bloom, one of the foremost professors of developmental psychology and cognitive science at Yale University (and an agnostic) had the following to say with regard to religious belief in children:

"Would a group ofchildren raised in isolation spontaneously create their own religious beliefs? I think the answer is yes."61

61 -Michael Brooks, Natural Born Believers, New Scientist; Vol. 201, Iss. 2694, 4 February 2009, p. 30-33

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The phenomenon of the Natural Born Believer prompted a number of books by Oxford Professor of Psychology Justin Barrett on this very topic. 62 Todd Tremlin, author of Minds and Gods, has drawn the same general conclusion; that theistic belief is the ultimate result of powerful epistemic processes inscribed in the foundations of human psychology - not indoctrination or child abuse. What John Calvin referred to as the "sensus divinitatis" seems to have found its neurological underpinnings in these latest studies.63 All this yields no more proof of the existence of God than Dawkins' and Dennett's variations of the Freudian Explanation. It is nevertheless significant that the best psychological and sociological data indicates that belief in God is something that emerges from the inside out, not something which is imposed from the outside in. It is a bit more than slightly confusing that after supposedly following all theistic belief back to some evolutionary anomaly, the New Atheists go on to claim that a belief in God is really the result of having been mercilessly forced upon the mind in its most formative years, all in lieu of the ongoing quest for global subjugation to the yolk of the Church. Whether or not the masterminding efforts of the incumbent pope are baring any fruit, there is plainly some contradiction

62 - See; Justin L. Barrett; Why Would Anyone Believe in God? AltaMira (2004); Born Believers: Science ofChildhood Religion, Free Press (20 12) 63 -Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, Oxford University Press (2000) p. 171-173

161 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM between these two purported origins of belief, yet both are energetically and often simultaneously advanced at every New Atheist congregation.

We should mention that the whole philosophical presumption of atheism, which has become so popular today, was an idea ushered into modem atheist culture by none other than the late-in-life apostate Sir Antony Flew, who wrote:

"If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be either that of the negative atheist or the agnostic."64

The strange manner in which Flew framed his conclusion would lead one to believe that newborn children and animals are also atheists, since they believe nothing of God either, or anything, for that matter, that can be properly called evidence-based faith. We should say rocks and trees are atheists too, since they are equally neutral on the subject ofGod. One might maintain, in rather similar fashion, that the plunge into the atheist worldview should be withheld until further evidence is garnered to support it, bearing in mind the lack of evidential or logical precedent that an ordered, life-bearing something can

64- Antony Flew, God, Freedom and Immorality: A Critical Analysis, "The Presumption of Atheism", Prometheus (1984)

162 ILWGICAL ATHEISM arise from a chaotic mess of nothing.

Rightly, at this point, the Dawkinite atheist may accuse me of personal incredulity. How is it, then, that when the theist submits the same manner of defense, it is considered on par with beliefs in leprechauns and unicorns?

There is not much that need be said about the philosophical presumption of atheism which has not already been indirectly elaborated upon. In our discussion of the Fallacy from Russell's Teapot in Book II, we had pinpointed the concealed logic behind this presumption. It all falls back on that same metaphysical misconception of the origin of all existence - that God is, to the best of our knowledge, just one possibility in a range of infinite explanations, none of which are more justifiable than the former until such time as the evidence presents itself. This illustration does not capture the essence of the problem. Atheism depends on a materially sufficient explanation from Alpha to Omega, and therefore cannot conceivably be a philosophical neutral. Hence; the true default position is non-existent, because the true default position is not a position at all.

"Is it true God exists? Truth is a disposition; one ofbeing true to someone or something. One cannot believe in nothing, and thus avoid the belief altogether, simply because one cannot have no disposition toward

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the world, that being in itself a disposition, "65

I had briefly referenced the non-position of the agnostic in the opening chapters and I now would like to expand on this notion, if only slightly, for what little room for expansion it affords. And here I do believe we have come to one of those awkward moments of common sentiment between myself and the few devoted atheist readers who with much exertion have chanced to follow me up until this point, after what they would no doubt regard as upwards of a hundred pages of berating humbug.

Agnosticism cannot even nse to the privilege of atheistic incoherence, since illogicality presumes an argument is being made; a position held. Agnosticism does neither. Obviously, by the non-existence of agnosticism I do not mean to express some obstinate denial of the fact that there exist people in the world who sincerely self-identify as agnostics. Rather, we are here talking about a particular epistemic disposition with regard to belief in God. And it is this episteme, in which the feet of the agnostic are firmly planted, that turns out to be a mental vacuum.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that all philosophy is a byproduct of misunderstanding language. I think this observation could not fit any more perfectly than 65 - lain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary, p. 170

164 ILWGICAL ATHEISM id does with the definitional hotchpotch created by the New Atheist movement, but if it could, Thomas Henry Huxley's coining of the word "agnostic" back in 1869 would be the strongest contender. Since Huxley, agnosticism has become somewhat of a household name in a 21st century western world seeking to isolate itself from all baggage of alignment with religious and political groups of all descriptions.

Agnosticism, as Huxley defined it, is a "withholding of belief', which is to say that one simply does not or cannot know any true answer pertaining to the question. And the question need not necessarily pertain to God either. The problem with this position is instantly recognizable to anyone who has taken the opportunity to reflect upon it for more than five minutes. For when asked the question "does one believe such-and-such?", the appropriate answer could not possibly be that he "does not know", unless we are dealing with someone who does not or cannot make sense of the question, or is unaware of the only two appropriate answers: "yes" or "no". And that really does lie at the heart of the whole agnostic problem. It is either a state of complete confusion or an epistemic vacuum - insanity or ignorance, though in the majority of cases it is ignorance, and quite often self-induced.

If the average Mursi tribesman in Ethiopia were to be asked whether or not he believed in the existence of

165 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM bosons or electrons, his answer would be the same as one would expect from the inmate in the lunatic asylum when asked ifhe believed in the existence ofhimself, if he were capable of forming a cogent answer. And the answer in both cases would be the same as that of the agnostic. Assuming that one is both sane and knowledgeable to some extent of what it is we are speaking of- and it is safe to say there is no Subject more ubiquitous - then there is no conceivable manner in which one may reason their way to the empty state of non-belief. To say that one believes nothing regarding any particular question is as useful as silence, for the subject of the statement itself is nothing - which does not exist.

About anything of which we are aware, we have beliefs whether we like it or not. If those beliefs concern the physical or metaphysical existence of some thing 'X', then those beliefs can either be positive or negative. We can affirm their truth or we deny it- on faith, not on certainty. Upon careful reflection, we find ourselves inclined to a positive or negative response to any question, provided it is important enough to shake us out of our apathetic stupor. Atheism and theism are thus asymmetrical responses to the same question. Although a state of total uncertainty might be real in purely psychological terms, in reality there is no absolute middle. To accede to the truth of one proposition is to repudiate the other. One can no more withhold belief on a subject of which he is

166 ILWGICAL ATHEISM even vaguely familiar than one can withhold experience of reality. Agnosticism is a fabrication from nothing, that makes claims about nothing, and can therefore say nothing, and is consequently useless for just about everything.

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Chapter 13 Faith: An Appraisal

"Such is today the academic, fashionable atheism of existentialism; such is the revolutionary atheism of dialectical materialism. The latter is of special interest to us, because it has succeeded in getting a considerable number of men to accept wholeheartedly this new kind offaith, and to give themselves sincerely and unquestionably to it."

Jacques Maritain

Voltaire almost had a perfect description of faith, if 66 it were not for but the last word in his famous dictum , for faith does not consist in believing what is beyond the power of reason to believe, but what is beyond the power of reason to know. And the mental gymnastics which have to be performed in order to undo this New Atheist Gordian knot is quite something:

66 - "Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe."

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Premise 1: Faith is tantamount to the belief in a proposition without reason or evidence.

Premise 2: God is a proposition unsupported by reason or evidence.

Premise 3: Therefore, belief in God is a faith

Premise 4: Atheism is the simple rejection of belief in God.

Conclusion: Atheism is not a faith.

Now, the first and second premises in this line oflogic are completely false, but, naturally, trying to explain that to a convinced New Atheist will not get one far given the unwavering conviction with which they are believed. For this reason, we shall have to explain the entire notion of faith in what would otherwise be gratuitous detail.

I can think of no more concise a definition of faith than this; that state of mind which fills in the residual gaps of uncertainty left by the necessary incompleteness of one's beliefs.

Whilst few philosophers today tend toward the sort of methodological skepticism advocated by Descartes, his point still stands. The gaps of uncertainty in human knowledge are everywhere. If we were to commit

169 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM ourselves to the utterly impractical modus operandum of disposing beliefs on the basis that they are maintained on faith, the task of getting out ofbed in the morning to make one's merry way to work would prove quite impossible for fear of tripping up in one's sheets and breaking his head open, or consuming a breakfast that might be poisoned, or accidentally driving into an oncoming truck on the way to his office. Every morning we wake up and make a faith-based commitment that the worst tragedies imaginable - tragedies that happen every day to millions of people all over the world - will not happen to us, and with very little by way of rational thought preceding the commitment. In a similar vein, the New Atheists have consigned the term "faith" to the narrow definition of what one would usually call "blind faith", encompassing not only beliefs that are merely uncertain, but which are held for absolutely no reason.

Very well. One can hardly argue with the meanings people choose to assign to their words. I do not doubt for a moment that there are vast contingents of religious believers in the world who have never considered the reasonableness of their faith, which is unfortunate. But to come to the all-too-popular conclusion that therefore belief in God is objectively unreasonable would have been a conclusion reached on the basis of a subliminal ad hominem, and I do strongly suspect that the rise of atheism in the North United States has much to do with

170 ILWGICAL ATHEISM a political separation from the South, and a stereotypical caricature of Bible Belt America - but that is, perhaps, for another time and another book.

It goes without saying that no amount of argumentation will suffice to persuade a convinced atheist that belief in God is rational. Suffice to say there have been entire libraries of written apologetic work by some of the most renowned thinkers who have come to pass purporting to establish the one fact that theism is, in fact, completely rational. A staunch presuppositional refusal to accept that simply renders the non-faith view of atheism an impenetrable fortress of willful ignorance and for that reason, there is really no sense arguing with anyone committed to the blatant fabrication of Premise 2.

Moving on to Premise 4, and one of the leading contenders for the biggest farce in all atheist doctrine, it is true that atheism by itself implies nothing more or less than the belief that there is no God. But what few people realize (and atheists least of all) is that the central creed of atheism effectively operates as a kind of Trojan Horse. Appearing prima facie as a simple, neat rejection of a single positive belief, it goes on to smuggle in a whole set of other beliefs in a completely diametrically opposed materialistic worldview: beliefs like multiverses, utopianism, violation of the principle of sufficient reason, ex nihilo creation, pantheism and so the list goes on. The

171 ILWGICAL ATHEISM new and unsuspecting baptismal candidate only comes to realize that he has taken these beliefs on somewhere down the line, long after the central vow that God does not exist has been taken. It is this dogged refusal to entertain any proposition that conflicts with atheist dogma which led Richard Dawkins to famously suggest he believed aliens were responsible for the origins of life on Earth.67 Of course, when pressed on the question as to where the "designer aliens" themselves came from, Mr. Dawkins is unable to give an answer. Yet this belief does not only lack the slightest bit of evidence, but is completely ineffective as an ultimate explanation, succeeding only, as most atheist explanations do, in pushing the problem another step back. Not only that, but it is actually a tacit, backhanded admission on Dawkins' part that life had to have been designed - this, after devoting an entire repertoire of literature staunchly opposed to the entire designer hypothesis.

It is palpable that the problem being faced by atheist

67 - Richard Dawkins interview with Ben Stein in the mockumentary; Intelligence Expelled: "It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind ofDarwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form oflife that they seeded onto, perhaps, this planet. Now, that is a possibility; and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it :S possible that you might find evidence for that ifyou look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature ofsome sort of designer."

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"evolutionists" is not with a designer at all, but rather with a very particular Kind of Designer. And the atheist, convinced that she is without need to justify her position, will accept these beliefs quite freely. Dawkins is not the only one spearheading this view either. Sam Harris has endorsed the non-faith motion in his own manifesto, writing:

""Atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identifY himselfas a "non­ astrologer" or a "non-alchemist. " ... Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. "68

It is a harbinger of ignorance on an unprecedented level when the belief that one's beliefs are not beliefs is perpetuated on a mass scale. In locking themselves in this tall tower, a monument to that enduring ignorance, the New Atheists have scarcely left themselves slits from whence the fiery spears of reason can reach them.

Faith also tends to pinch hit for more other extra­ epistemological connotations like hope, trust or fealty toward Providence, none of which sits any better with the New Atheists than the philosophical concept. I would like to therefore, reiterate that we are dealing with faith in its pure epistemological sense; which is the acceptance of a proposition or a set of propositions of which one 68- Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

173 ILWGICAL ATHEISM cannot be absolutely certain. By "Atheist Faith" I do not mean to imply some kind of hope for how one would like things to be, even though I do not believe for a moment that the atheist does not avail himself of a similar hope promised by his own unique eschatology, as expressed in the words of the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some ofthe most intelligent and well- informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that!"69

Christopher Hitchens, no less, had made it very clear on a number of occasions prior to his death that he did not want there to be any such person as God and that he thought it a far more optimistic to be an atheist.

To some extent, atheism has been marketed as the faith for the divine rebel; a valiant submission to the doom and gloom of ultimate reality, 70 although we often find the modem rebel is far more concerned with keeping every ounce of his precious liberties, which he defines as the right to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, as often as he wants and to define his own laws as to how he

69- Thomas Nagel, The Last Word, Oxford University Press (1997) 70- Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 1, 49, 104

174 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM lives his life so long as he can justify it by not thwarting the aspirations his neighbor. Lest we forget that this was the incentive of the very first divine rebel.

That said, people should be allowed to express their beliefs for themselves. It is not my intention to argue with the reasons people have for believing what they do, only whether or not such beliefs are true. So, what is the epistemological faith of atheism? A short list of the beliefs and philosophies which have been absorbed into the mainstream atheist culture of the present day would include, among others:

The "universe from nothing" concept and the denial of the principle of sufficient reason. 71

A self-sufficient, necessary and eternal umverse (Steady-State Theory).

The 'Many Worlds' hypotheses m all their forms (Multiverse Theory).

The assembly of complex intelligent life from non­ life given chance + energy + time.

71 - Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason: • For every entity X, if X exists, then there is a sufficient explanation for why X exists. • For every event E, if E occurs, then there is a sufficient explanation for why E occurs. • For every proposition P, if Pis true, then there is a sufficient explanation for why P is true.

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Universal Darwinism and cosmic evolution.

Pantheism, or the belief that the universe is God.

Pan-psychism, the belief the universal is itself consciOus.

Epiphenomenalism, the belief that consciOusness itself is an illusion.

The reliability of"rational" beliefs ultimately arising from chaotic and unguided reductionistic processes geared specifically toward survival and not truth.

The belief in the reliability of unprovable axioms, like the axiom; "I exist".

The belief that there is no such thing as absolute truth, except the truth that there is no absolute truth.

The objective purposelessness and meaninglessness of life and existence in general in the absence of a final and transcendent cause.

An eventual materialistically sufficient explanation for every single aspect of human experience. 72

All the implications of the philosophy of materialistic determinism including, but not exclusive to, the renunciation of free will.

72- There is no materialistic locus of beauty, truth or love

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The negation of objective morality (discussed at length in Book IV).

Ancillary beliefs like Dawkins' theory of the Alien Designers, Dennett and Krauss' "ultimate bootstrap act"73 and many others.

And, finally and most crucially;

The positive assertion that there is no God.

In practice, the New Atheist is so mortified at the prospect of making a positive claim about anything that he will not even pay homage to his central creed, often conveniently sidestepping the claim with some fallacious equivocation of his own position to that of the nebulous agnostic. We can illustrate the problem with an allegory:

Suppose three young men; John, Tom and Mark, are walking through a large pasture at dawn, when they suddenly stumble across a mysterious and elaborate crop circle about the size of a football field not far away from their home. They had walked through those same parts the previous day just before nightfall and the crop circle was not there. They remembered having seen bright lights flashing over the meadow in the middle of the previous night from their home, but there was not a living soul for miles of where they were.

73 - Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell

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Now, assume the proposition "aliens exist" as an explanatory hypothesis for the crop circle. Assume that John believes it, Tom does not and Mark says he does not know and he does not care. It is clear that the Tom's epistemic disposition to the existence of aliens is not the same as Mark's. Tom might well say that he does not have sufficient evidence to believe that aliens exist and therefore does not believe it. But despite all of Tom's scruples toward the aliens, that is not going to make the problem of the crop circle go away. Fear not only compels him to deny the existence of extra-terrestrials, but to seek out the argumentative power of Mark, who holds a position which cannot be disputed because it is not really a position at all, for if one were to press Mark on what he truly believed, roused from indifference toward the question, one would find that he is actually inclined to believe something about what really happened, whether or not it involves the alien hypothesis.

This notion is explicitly rejected by the majority of even the foremost contemporary atheists, only to be indirectly and tacitly conceded when they start talking about ultimate bootstrap tricks and multiverses. Ergo, as of lately, it seems to have fallen exclusively upon the theist to prove that God exists, whilst the atheist has effectively been given carte blanche to hold to just about any belief he wants without proof or justification. This leads to the promulgation of all sorts of wildly varying

178 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM worldviews, and all of these worldviews imply positive beliefs, at the core of which there is always the belief that there is no God, whether it is asserted positively or negatively (there being no real difference at the heart of the distinction).

A worldview is what the word itself describes. It is our way of looking at ourselves and our place in the world which engulfs us, imposes itself on us every second of the day, conditioning our choices and, ultimately, the way we live our lives. All of us, at this very moment, possess our own unique worldview, parts of which we share with others, parts of which we do not and all of which is quite unique to us. And all of these worldviews have one thing in common: They all necessarily imply beliefs about ourselves and our place in the world. Our worldviews comprise every single one of the beliefs that we have about humanity, nature, where it all came from, why we are here and where we are going. Furthermore, it cannot be helped. It cannot be escaped.

Having deviated from the moral rubric of religion, secular creeds have been afforded immense advantages. The atheist might just as well endorse abolition of slavery as the abolition of Jewry, and he will not suffer much for his religious convictions in either case, for in the free society it is the more permissive religion which can always be assured of the kind of popular support which

179 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM their more dogmatic counterparts will not. The influx of more flaccid westernized forms of Eastern spiritualities can be reduced to similar premises. There is also a certain useful evasiveness which comes with vagary. Christians and Muslims, as members of long-standing, clearly defined, relatively concrete traditions could make no secrets of the claims made on their behalf even if they wanted to, whether those claims are historical, philosophical or moral. Atheism, by comparison is determined only by whatever Cult of Fashion happens to hold the public conscience at any particular time, and the appeal of this prospect to a western culture steeped in postmodern relativism should appear quite obvious.

What we find on closer inspection is that the atheistic creed is a gateway belief into a whole variety of popular worldviews. Sam Harris, for example, is an eastern spiritual of a western neo-Buddhist tradition; a recent and fast-growing trend in atheist culture. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are both naturalists, an atheist church not quite as trendy as it once was. Carl Sagan was sympathized with pantheism and pan-psychism - the ascription of mind to physical reality, which seems to veer rather dangerously close to theism as near as I can tell. Furthermore, these worldviews articulate different forms of atheology. Sam Harris, for instance, believes in the determination of objective moral values through the scientific method. Richard Dawkins and

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Daniel Dennett do not acknowledge the existence of moral values at all (a belief which they are quick forfeit when the moral shortcomings of organized religion are at issue). Some ofthese atheistic worldviews even differ on metaphysical matters such as the existence of the soul and the afterlife. Carl Sagan, for instance, expressed a belief in the plausibility of reincarnation in his book

Demon-Haunted World:

"At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study: ... (3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any way other than reincarnation. I pick these claims ... as examples ofcontentions that might be true. m.,

That there is a continually expanding preponderance of ideas and beliefs in the numerous strands of atheistic faith, and an ever-growing number of worldviews constructed on the core belief in non-transcendence, renders the whole "irreligion" view of atheism nothing short of fatuous. Indeed the offshoots from the two principal branches of our most profound existential questions have now found themselves somewhat intertwined, giving birth to the New Age Spiritualities.

74- Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Random House (1995) p.302

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The Humanist, the Pantheist and the Nihilist may not bicker half as much as the Shiite, the Protestant and the Mormon, but there is just as much - or just as little - to separate either in their ideas.

Moving on from theology to doctrine, and doctrine to politics, which is ultimately what most people find so distasteful about religion, we now come to the history of the modern atheist religion, and its three founding documents, drafted and signed separately over the course of seven decades.

The Humanist Manifestos: HM-1 1933, HM-11 1973 and HM-111 2003.

Taken together, these three credos enunciate all of the commonly accepted atheistic creeds of what had fittingly been designated by the atheist and humanist John J. Dunphy as "the Religion for the New Age". And I quote Mr. Dunphy on the aim which the Humanist Manifestos set out to achieve:

"I am convinced that the battle for humankind sfuture must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity [my emphasis] that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call "divinity" in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless

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dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level-preschool, daycare, or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new­ the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism [my emphasis], resplendent with its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of "love thy neighbor" will .finally be achieved.

Then perhaps we will be able to say with Tom Paine that "the world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion. " It will undoubtedly be a long, arduous struggle replete with much sorrow and many tears, but humanism will emerge triumphant. It must if the family ofhumankind is to survive. "75

There were other ancillary covenants as well, like the Secular Humanist Manifesto 1980 and the Amsterdam Declaration 2002, each openly professing to be driven by the same ultimate cause: the spread of the naturalist worldview in the form ofa new Humanist Religion. This is not a label ofmy coining. That was the adopted namesake for the first militant atheist movement throughout all 75- James J. Dunphy, A Religion for a New Age, The Humanist, January/February (1983) p. 26

183 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM fifteen points of their first constitution. The precursors of 20th century atheism were not in any way ashamed of that designation, unlike the contemporary heirs to their global undertaking. It is quite clear that the original atheist worldview was to be marketed across the Western World as a wholeheartedly religious worldview, vying to compete with other religions. But it must have emerged at some point that the identification of any movement as a "religious movement" would spell disaster for any organization seeking to gain political leverage and make state policy out of its doctrines, as all movements do - as the secular humanist movement was, and still is, trying to do.

These were the implications of landmark judgments such as Everson v. Board ofEducation 1947 and Torcasco v Watkins (1961). The laws relating to religious freedom made it clear very early on: Neither a state nor the Federal Government could pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another in any aspect of political life.76 That is the legal clause which the atheist religion of secular humanism sought to escape.

The Torcasco v Watkins case recognized the early humanist movement as a religion by its own admission and so, the new religion of Secular Humanism began its slow. stealthy descent into irreligion. 76- Arch R. Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing, et al.67 S. Ct. 504; 91 L. Ed. 711; 1947 (1947)

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Thus, HM-II redefined Secular Humanism such that it no longer bore the religious connotations of its precursor. By the time HM-III came along, Secular Humanists were fervidly resisting religious classification outright - quite odd for an organization that began as a self-confessed religious order. And this became the platform of deception used by atheistic organizations as a means of spreading their faith ever since.

Here are a just few of the express doctrines that have been advocated by the three Humanist Manifestos since 1933:

Atheism, naturally (HM-I, II & III): "There is no place in the Humanist worldview for either immortality or God in the valid meanings ofthose terms. Humanism contends that instead ofthe gods creating the cosmos, the cosmos, in the individualized form of human beings giving rein to their imagination, created the gods."77

Darwinism (HM I, II & III): "Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change ."78 (HM-II eased its promotion of Darwinism in the twilight of the Jewish Holocaust.)

77- Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism, (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982) p. 145 78 - Humanist Manifesto III (2003)

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Scientism (HM-I, II & III): 79 "Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis. Humanists find that science is the best method for determining this knowledge as well as for solving problems and developing beneficial technologies."

Anti-Theism (Anti-Religion): "Reasonable and "manly" attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking." [my emphasis]

Utopianism: "Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond. "80

The Rejection of Objective Values: "Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe as depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural guarantees of human values".

Marxism (1933 Manifesto I & II): "Existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itsel{to be inadequate ... A socialized and cooperative 79 - Paul Kurtz, Humanist Manifesto 2000: A Call for a New Planetary Humanism, Prometheus (2000) p. 24 80 - Humanist Manifesto III

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economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible. "81 (This clause handily done away with somewhere during the height of the Soviet Union, when Marxism very quickly fell out of fashion.)

Libertarianism - including the endorsement of the right to abort unborn children, stem cell research, cloning and genetic engineering. Laws against such rights were seen as restraints on human progress.

The Secular Humanist movement was and still 1s strongly committed to its original evangelical mission and the ousting of theistic faith, all the while parading behind its fraudulent frock of "non-faith". It is worth noting, also, that these Manifestos have been subscribed to and endorsed by all Four Horsemen ofthe New Atheist movement. To add insult to injury, the drafters of HM­ III, denying that Secular Humanism is a religion, went on to blame this false association on "fundamentalist right-wing Christians" when that is the designation which the movement itself had adopted for over three decades. 82 There was no reason to forfeit it then, and with a growing trend of fundamentalism, there is even less reason to forfeit it now.

81 -Humanist Manifesto I (1933) 82 - See: J. Budziszewski, The Humanist Manifestos, Issue Archive, March 2000

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Chapter 14 The Day With No Yesterday

"Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause"

The KaHim Cosmological Argument

We now come to discuss the content of atheist belief, beginning with the small matter of cosmic origins and the core philosophy of the mutakallim, one of the oldest arguments for the existence of God, which received a new lease on life with the Big Bang during the early half of the last century and has been a gangrenous thorn in the side of the atheist community ever since.

In recent years the Cosmological Argument has been championed mainly by the philosopher William Lane Craig and, given the powerful simplicity of its logic and the even more powerful implications of its conclusion, it has predictably suffered relentless bombardment from both atheistic scientists and philosophers alike, even at the expense of resorting to sheer pseudo-science and - worse still -pseudo-philosophy.

Unsurprisingly, the New Atheist figureheads have had their say as well.

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I do not wish to belabor the merits of the argument itself, partly because it has been discussed by individuals far more competent than I, and partly because it would deviate from the scope of this book. But I would like to examine the attacks brought against the principle of a First Cause, for the attacks themselves are counter­ hypotheses, and a counter-hypothesis implies a counter­ belief, otherwise it would not be proposed. And I would like to discuss why these hypotheses fail, starting with the recent hubbub about the elusive metaphysical concept of "nothing".

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14.1 Premise 1: What Rocks Dream Of

"I never asserted such an absurd proposition as that anything might arise without a cause."

DavidHume

We are now going to talk about nothing. And from the very phrasing of that sentence, the more thoughtful reader might appreciate the difficulty.

To even attempt to define "nothing" is a philosophical minefield which just about every philosopher in history has proven unable to traverse without tripping the wire of a logical self-contradiction, for by even acknowledging the existence of nothing one instantly makes it something.

Nothing is no less precarious a term than 'God' in philosophy. With that said; nothing is exactly what atheism is committed to as an explanation for ultimate reality, which is probably why it is so easily confused with agnosticism, difference being that whilst agnosticism is merely a state of epistemic nothingness, atheism is committed to the hopeless endeavor of attributing causative properties to nothing. One requires nothing as an explanation and the other is nothing by definition.

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Confused yet?

Good. You now understand the serious philosophical implications of erratically throwing around the word "nothing". This same difficulty prompted the formulation of a well-known gag-syllogism in philosophy which befits our discussion: Premise 1 : The Devil is greater than nothing.

Premise 2: Nothing is greater than God.

Conclusion: Therefore, the Devil is greater than God.

This little logical parody exhibits not only the great difficulty of dealing with nothing, but also the severe danger that can result from misusing nebulous terms in philosophical discourse.

Despite the problems posed by this conundrum to even the most brilliant philosophical minds in history, you will still get many atheist scientists shamelessly abusing nothingness as though it were just that, treading all over the proverbial minefield in the process, much to the ill-concealed chortles of their bumbling colleagues in the nearby philosophy faculties. My personal favorite of these faux pas' was one uttered by a rising star of theNew Atheist movement; the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, at an Atheist Alliance International convention in 2009, headed by none other than Mr. Dawkins himself,

191 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM where he risibly proclaimed; "By nothing, I don Ymean nothing; I mean NOTHING!"

Quite ...

Of course, all of these "scientific" definitions fail for the same reason: If we had to pick out the single most fundamental feature of nothing, it would be non­ existence. There is a little known philosophical tale that makes this point quite wonderfully, one which I cannot resist but relate:

As the story goes, a philosophy professor sauntered into his lecture hall. Without so much as a greeting, he grabbed a chair and placed it right in the middle of his lecturing platform before a full class of three hundred philosophers strong, took a chalk piece and proceeded to write across his blackboard:

QUESTION: WHAT PROOF IS THERE FOR THE NON-EXISTENCE OF THE CHAIR?

The Professor turns to his class and says;

"There are only two rules: One; I expect your response to be no longer than five thousand words. Two; this is a written test, so you are not allowed to leave your papers blank as though to make some quaint little philosophical point."

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With an encouraging smile, the Professor glimpses at his watch.

"You have exactly two hours. You may begin."

Immediately, all of the Professor's pupils begin drafting arguments which they had planned for weeks. It turns out they have known the about the Professor's task long in advance and spent all the time since preparing. One student, however, had not got wind of the Professor's task, and does very little except gaze at the empty chair sitting on the lecture platform, whilst all the other students around him go on writing.

The second hour finally expires. The Professor calls an end to his task and no sooner than he does so, he notices the student, who had done nothing throughout, takes up his pen, very quickly scribbles something out on a piece of paper and then hands it

Ill.

The following week, the entire class is eagerly gathered in the hall once again. The Professor appears before them. To his students' surprise, however, he is not carrying any of their papers. He stands upon his podium and simply announces their results aloud:

"One of you scored an A+," he declares, and then

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points out the very student who had remained still for most of the previous week's task to the amazement and half-hearted ovation of everyone else in the hall.

The Professor adds:

"Everyone else failed."

Immediately, the entire class erupts into a furious chatter among themselves until eventually they direct their irritation from the student to the Professor, and demand to know what the student had written. So, once again, the Professor takes his chalk piece to his blackboard, still bearing the task from the previous week. When the Professor finished writing he put his chalk down and the blackboard reads anew:

QUESTION: WHAT PROOF IS THERE FOR THE NON-EXISTENCE OF THE CHAIR?

ANSWER: WHAT CHAIR?

This little anecdote makes a vital point about nothingness (if not a minor suggestion of the exasperating methods of philosophical tutelage). As soon as "nothing" or the "non-existence of something" is acknowledged in any scientific sense whatsoever, it automatically ceases to be nothing. Yet, we find that all these elaborate scientific re-evaluations of nothing tacitly repudiating that precise feature of what nothing is (or is not). Just

194 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM like most contemporary atheist arguments for the non­ existence of God, contemporary atheist arguments for the actual existence of nothing are reducible to mere word games and semantic misattributions, or as Krauss quite adequately put; "nothing is not nothing anymore."

I hardly wish to overplay the subject of nothing. That said, hopefully the point has been made that, at least in philosophical terms, it is not true that science has redefined what philosophers have always assumed by "nothing", another myth perpetrated by New Atheists like Krauss and Stenger, as much for religious reasons as their vested financial interests in selling pop-science books. For centuries, philosophers have grappled with the metaphysical notion of nothing. Aristotle himself, at a loss to construct a working definition, once said "nothing is that which rocks dream about." That was more than two thousand years ago. Since Aristotle, there has not been a single philosopher of reasonable repute that has seriously proposed that nothing is simply empty space or a quantum state of potential energy. Isaac Newton, no less, devoid of any knowledge of the laws of quantum mechanics, did not view either time or empty space as nothing, but rather as real omnipresent entities with their own manner of existence. 83

83- Robert Rynasiewicz, "Newton's Views on Space, Time, and Motion", The Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

195 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

Having at least briefly touched upon the oddly elaborate subject of nothing, even though we cannot truly come to terms with what it is, we can at least exclude the definition afforded to us by the New Atheists and state with full confidence; ex nihilo nihil. From nothing, nothing comes, and nothing is likely to change that. The scientist who repudiates the Parmenidean maxim with the "something from nothing" concept cannot therefore be referring to the actual thing that existed prior to the beginning of the universe. The volumes of written material in scientific journals alone suffice as evidence that the vacuum state is clearly not nothing, but admits of a whole range of properties including weight, pressure and fluctuations of energy. If it were indeed the case that the vacuum is really nothing at all, there would be no physical laws to describe it. 84 The space vacuum is, to some degree, even palpable. In fact the scope of the 'ELI project', one of the latest endeavors of Big Science, is to create a laser powerful enough to tear the very fabric of the space vacuum apart. 85 And finally, whilst asking for the cause of nothing is a flagrantly nonsensical question, the same is not also true of the quantum vacuum.

84 - See; Astrid Lambrecht, "Observing Mechanical Dissipation in the Quantum Vacuum" in Laser Physics At the Limits, ed. Hartmut Figger, Dieter Meschede, Claus Zimmermann, Springer (2002) p. 197, Walter Dittrich & Holger Gies, Probing the quantum vacuum: perturbative effective action approach, Springer (2000), 85- Richard Gray, Worlds most Powerful Laser to Tear apart the Vacuum ofSpace, Telegraph (October, 2011)

196 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

It should appear clear at this point that what we are actually dealing with is not a "something out of nothing" hypothesis at all, but the usual matter of extrapolating space time and mass energy beyond the point of the space time beginning. In other words, we are dealing with a desperately resuscitated sequel of the long-abandoned naturalist doctrine of Steady-State Theory. The question is therefore not whether the quantum vacuum is nothing, which it is not, but whether it, like nothing, can subsist without a cause as the necessary precursor to all physical existence, and thereby pose a problem for the second premise of the cosmological argument.

The most widely accepted answer to that question ... 1s no.

It is no secret of scientific history that around the time Father Georges Lemaitre appeared on the scene with the theory commonly misattributed to Edwin Hubble, the idea that the universe began with a Bang was hardly welcomed with open arms by the higher echelons of the science academy, dominated then, as they are today, by the worldview of scientific materialism. This atheistic dominance of the scientific world even prompted a notorious 1989 article "Down with the Big Bang" by one widely acclaimed science writer Sir John Maddox, who deemed Lemaitre's theory, as most of the scientific establishment did, "philosophically unacceptable". The

197 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM irony is that whilst Maddox (who was no pariah in the scientific academy) made a clear attack against one of the most well-established facts of cosmology on the basis of his atheistic pretensions, and though there has been scarcely a whisper of concern with regard to Maddox's article since the day of its publication, there has been no shortage of pop-scientists the likes of Krauss and Dawkins who have indulged in public harangues against Intelligent Design Advocates on the premise of religious bias. This unequivocal double-standard was phrased quite explicitly by the quantum cosmologist Christopher Isham:

"Perhaps the best argument in favor ofthe thesis that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas, such as continuous creation or an oscillating universe, being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire ofa theorist to support his/her theory."86

Those same tenacious psychological forces are exactly

86- R.J. Russell, W.R. Stoeger and G.V. Coyne (eds), Physics, Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding; (1988) Christopher Isham, "Creation of the Universe as a Quantum Process" (375-408) p. 378

198 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM what we are seeing in the ideas being pressed by the New Atheist movement, although this reluctance to accept the notion of a space-time beginning did not itself begin with the New Atheists. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, one of the foremost astrophysicists, and a contemporary of Lemaitre, made this telling statement in 1931, around the time Lemaitre first proposed his theory:

"Philosophically, the notion ofa beginning ofthe present order of nature is repugnant for me. "87

This was not just some idle comment Sir Eddington made in passing to one of his colleagues at Cambridge, but at an Address to the British Mathematical Association, to a group of listeners undoubtedly partial his sentiment. Even decades after Lemaitre's theory had come to be generally accepted by Einstein himself as "the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which he had ever listened', Eddington, like many others went on insisting that, as a "scientist", one simply cannot believe the universe has a beginning.88

Make no mistake about it, this deep-seated

87- Simon Apolloni, "Repugnant," "Not Repugnant at All": How the Respective Epistemic Attitudes of Georges Lemaitre and Sir Arthur Eddington Influenced How Each Approached the Idea of a Beginning ofthe Universe, IBSUSJ (20 11) 5(1 ): 19-44 p. 25; citing Kragh 2004 p. 105 88- Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, Philosophy of Physical Science, 1958 p. 59

199 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM psychological resistance to any scientific inference which might give leverage to a theistic worldview is not merely present in the scientific community, but predominant. Commitment to the unwritten convention of methodological naturalism has transcended beyond a scientific methodology and has itselfbecome a world view which has borne the kind of suicidal intellectual arrogance that causes pronouncements like "philosophy is dead", "logic doesn't work" and "God and science don't mix"; all the noises of religiously-motivated denial.

The shoe, it appears, is very much on the other foot.

The very best evidence for a definitive space-time­ boundary reveals itself to the scientific layman in the recent influx of various Multiverse hypotheses, which are quickly becoming a valuable flagship in the contemporary atheist worldview, even though multiverses never really seemed to receive serious sanction by the scientific community before the scientific facts of cosmology betrayed them.

There are a number of common physical laws which render the notion of an eternal past philosophically implausible, not least among which is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which portrays an image of our universe as a petrol-driven machine slowly but surely depleting its limited energy reserves. It is from this law

200 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM the scientists deduce that one day, approximately 10 100 years in the distant future, our universe will run out of fuel and perish in a gigantic heat death. Apart from being a rather morbid thought, it would be most suspicious, if an eternity had come to pass, that this event had not already happened.

However, perhaps the single major development in the field of cosmology which has galvanized the theory of an absolute cosmic beginning from nothing- literally nothing- is a much-cited theorem in theistic apologetics jointly attributed to the cosmologists Arvind Borde, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin, 89 which demonstrated, in short, that so long as any possible universe has an average rate of cosmic expansion (Hubble Constant) greater than zero, as our universe does, then it cannot be eternal in the past. Borde, Guth and Vilenkin write:

"Our argument shows that null and timelike geodesics are, in general, past-incomplete in inflationary models, whether or not energy conditions hold, provided only that the averaged expansion

condition H a,v > 0 holds along these past-directed geodesics. This is a stronger conclusion than the one arrived at in previous work in that we have shown under reasonable assumptions that almost all causal 89 - Arvind Borde, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin, Inflationary space-times are not past-complete, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90 151301 (2003)

201 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

geodesics, when extended to the past ofan arbitrary point, reach the boundary ofthe inflating region of spacetime in a finite proper time. "90

The power of this theorem lies not only in the fact that it is so well-supported by the empirical data, but that it only requires one condition in order for the implication of a past space time boundary to be unavoidable. This problem is negotiated with nothing short of willful ignorance by scientific naturalists like Krauss, whose only defence to the implications of inflationary theory so far has been that that "nowhere in Borde, Guth and Vilenkin spaper is the word 'God' ever mentioned!", which is true enough. But that, of course, would assume that a scientist would have had need to make a proposition so completely superfluous to the theorem. And, as we shall see in the subsequent chapter, he would have far more powerful interests not to.

Vilenkin, furthermore, has not been in any way ambiguous about the implications of his theorem, making statements to the following effects at a conference held in honor of Stephen Hawking's 70'h birthday in a lecture provocatively entitled "Why Physicists Cannot Avoid a Creation":

"It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning. "91 90 - Ibid. p. 3 91- Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One Hill and Wang

202 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

Hawking himself has now, at least verbally, acknowledged the transcendental implications of inflationary theory, admitting that "many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention." Even though it is doubtful that Hawking presently subscribes to a theistic hypothesis, it is clear that his grounds for doing so are probably not scientific. 92

It is true, as the New Atheists have so gleefully pointed out, that Vilenkin does not acknowledge the theistic implications of his own theory. In his book Many Worlds in One, Vilenkin says:

"Theologians have often welcomed any evidence for the beginning ofthe universe, regarding it as evidence for the existence ofGod ... so what do we make ofthe proof that the beginning is unavoidable? Is it a proof for the existence of God? This view would be too simplistic. Anyone who attempts to understand the origin ofthe universe should be prepared to address its logical paradoxes [my emphasis]. In this regard, the theorem I proved with my colleagues does not give much ofan advantage of a theologian over a

(2006), p.l76 92- See; Henry F. Schaefer, The Big Bang, Stephen Hawkin and God, Konferencja Chrzescijanskiego Forum Pracownik6w Nauki Nauka- Etyka- Wiara 2005

203 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

scientist. "93

Understandably, this has become a much-cited quote within the atheist community, eager to avoid the problems posed by a space time beginning. Vilenkin's inclination toward a naturalistic view of the universe goes without question. Alan Guth has made similar indications.94

That being said, Vilenkin's statement requires some qualification, for even though this is a statement being made by a scientist, I also notice that it is not itself a scientific statement. It is also worth pointing out that atheist philosophers do not share Vilenkin's opinion on the matter, neither do they care to cite his assessment of the scientific facts for support of their case. "Logical paradoxes", to use Vilenkin's own words, just don't fly with philosophers. And this telling admission really just reinforces the thesis I have been presenting thus far. Vilenkin might be of the philosophical opinion that his theorem does not give the theist any advantage, but that philosophical opinion is plainly false, as best evidenced by the attempts of atheist philosophers like Daniel Dennett to wring loopholes out of its implications.

If the only alternative left to the atheist is a logical paradox, which has not and cannot reasonably be proven by science, since science cannot conceivably investigate 93- Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, p. 176-177. 94 - See; Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe: A New Quest for Cosmic Origins, Basic (1998)

204 ILWGICAL ATHEISM the causal properties of nothingness, then in assenting to an idea which is infinitely worse than belief in unicorns and Flying Spaghetti Monsters, the atheist is forever doomed to silence on matters of blind faith. What's more, that there is no avoiding a transcendental cause is an evaluation to which Vilenkin himself tacitly complies, since in the same text wherein he presents that philosophical assessment of the facts, he builds a case around a naturalistic alternative to God which has been snatched up and milked by the atheist community for all its worth.

205 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

14.2 So Many Worlds, So Little Time

Thus we come to the Multiverse, a subject which we need not belabor for three important reasons:

First; the Multiverse Hypothesis is, for all intents and purposes, just as abstract and metaphysical as God.

Secondly; there is not a scintilla of evidence supporting its existence. The only recognition given to the possibility of multiple universes offered by modem science is a small and venerated selection of physical theories which have not even yet been firmly established, and even if they were they would have nothing to say about whether such worlds actually exist, only that they are plausible.

Thirdly and most damningly of all, however; even if a Multiverse did exist, it would only succeed in pushing the problem back another 10500 steps.

It would be beyond the scope of this work, and literal light-years beyond my academic capacity, to delve too deeply into hazy science of plank time. However, it suffices to realize that as far as the atheist cause is concerned, the Multiverse would, at most, only succeed in giving added weight to the Argument from Insignificance. The Multiverse does not escape the

206 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

problem of a First Cause, which remains one that can only be avoided on pain of accepting a logical paradox.

So, if the Multiverse Hypothesis does not avoid an absolute cosmic beginning, why has it been so ragingly endorsed by the atheist community?

Well, very simply, it takes some of the sting away from a second major weapon in the theistic arsenal, namely the delicately tuned universal constants in the initial conditions of the early universe, which place it in the life-permitting range. This is an entire issue unto itself which bodes to create all kinds of problems for Universal Darwinism combined with the whole "something from nothing" concept. The vigorous support from the New Atheist community for the Multiverse has, largely, stemmed from a kind of backhanded accession to the arguments from universal fine-tuning, pointing to the very thing most contemptibly despised by atheists the world over: Design. This is the rationale behind the famous "Anthropic Principle" proposed by mainstream atheists as a means of circumventing the arguments from universal teleology. 95

And so the tangled web ofbelief comprising the atheist worldview continues to be discretely woven behind the curtains of so-called "non-faith".

Universal fine-tuning is a theistic apologetic talking- 95- Teleology- The account of final causes in nature.

207 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM point which has come to the fore with relatively recent development in astrophysics. Stanford Professor Andrei Linde, one of the world's foremost theoretical physicists phrased it quite candidly:

"We have a lot ofreally, really strange coincidences, and all ofthese coincidences are such that they make life possible."96

When one truly begins to reflect on the full spectrum ofthe scientific data in this field, even Linde's description of "really, really strange" appears an infinitely gross understatement.

I notice that Dawkins only sparingly touches on the matter of these finely-tuned universal constants in his book. 97 This hardly comes as a shock. If he had even given the slightest indication towards the inconceivable numbers implied by these anomalies, it is safe to assume no one would have taken his Universal Darwinist worldview seriously.

Take the "low entropy" condition as one of the more frequently cited examples:

In a nutshell, the low entropy state in the initial conditions of the Big Bang is what stopped our universe from scattering to the ends of the cosmos in a mess 96 -Andrei Linde, Science :S Alternatives to an Intelligent Creator, Discover Magazine (1 O'h December 2008) 97- Dawkins, God Delusion, p 147

208 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM of celestial debris. It is just one of the vital physical constants required in order to produce the sort universe that is able to sustain any sort of life, whether carbon­ based or otherwise. The odds of this low entropy condition arising from pure chance in the early stages Big Bang is expressed by the so-called "Penrose 98 Number" , of which its proponent, Sir Roger Penrose (the mathematical counterpart to Hawking on M-Theory) writes the following:

"[The low entropy condition] now tells how precise the Creators aim must have been, namely to an accuracy ofone part in 10 to the 1 0123'dpower. This is an extraordinary figure. One could not possibly even write the number down in full in the ordinary denary notation: it would be 1 followed by 10123 successive 0 's. "

This is a number so stupidly large and understated by the critics of fine-tuning proponents, that I simply cannot resist but give a fuller illustration of just how immense the odds against pure chance creating our universe actually are:

98 Roger Penrose, The Emperors New Mind, Penguin (1989) p. 339-345

209 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

1

1O,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,00 O,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,O 00,000,000, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000' 000,000' 000,000' 000' 000' 000,000' 000, 000,000 '00 O,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,O 00,000,000,000,000, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,000,000 '000, 000' 000' 000,000' 000,000' 000' 000, 00 O,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,O OO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,000,000,000,000,000 ,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OO 0,000, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,O 00 '000' 000,000,000' 000,000' 000,000' 000' 000' 000,000 ,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OO 0,000,000,000, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,O OO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,000 ,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OO O,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,O OO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO ,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,000,000,000,000,00 O,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,O 00,000, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,000,000,00 O,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,O 00,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

210 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,00 O,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,O OO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO , OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OO O,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,000,000,000,000,0 OO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,000, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OO 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,0 OO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO, 00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000' 000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0

211 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 , 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 , 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

212 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0

213 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

00,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 , 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000 ...

Add another 9,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,99 9,999,999,999,999,999,999,999, 999,999,999,999,999, 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 ,999,999,999,999,999,998,546 zeroes to the end of that denominator and you would have the precise estimate of just one of the exquisitely tuned physical constants, the slightest deviation from which would be utterly disastrous to the prospect of cosmic order, let alone biological life. If the actual number had to be written out in full in twelve-point font, every copy of The God Delusion ever printed would not be able to contain it. In fact all of the libraries in the entire history of the world would not be able to contain it. When one considers that the odds have to further be combined and effectively multiplied by all the other essential physical constants in theuniverse, the penny slowly begins to drop on the whole Anthropic Principle. These kinds of statistics are not escapable by any viable model for a Multiverse

214 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

either known or knowable, and the fact that scientists work with different hypothetical values for the universal laws and constants all the time is proof that the initial conditions of our universe are contingent, which is to say, simply, that things did not have to be this way ... And yet they are.

With all other possible alternatives ruled out, there are yet those who find the most logical explanation the most intolerable. As the facts stand, the probability of our universe having come into existence as a result of chance is almost as miniscule as the possibility of a past-eternal spacetime and an ex nihilo spontaneous self­ creation. This reckoning of the facts has been yielded to even by the most eminent scientific opponents to the theistic worldview. Arno Allan Penzias, Nobel laureate in Physics quite appropriately remarked in 1978:

"The best data we have concerning the Big Bang are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books ofMoses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole. "99

Fred Hoyle, astronomer and pioneer in the field of stellar nucleosynthesis wrote:

"A common sense interpretation ofthe facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are 99- Penzias' remarks to the New York Times on March 12th 1978

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no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. "100

George Ellis, A collaborator of Hawking on Singularity theorem no less, stated:

"Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this possible. Realization of the complexity ofwhat is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word 'miraculous 'without taking a stand as to the ontological status ofthe word. " 101

When it comes to the subject of our cosmic beginnings, the scientific world really does seem to be divided between those that have expressed wonder and astonishment and those who have demonstrated extreme discomfort at a cosmic image which, as the cosmologists Avishai Dekel and ldit Zehavi rightly point out, is in apparent conflict with "common wisdom". 102

100- Fred Hoyle, The Universe: Past and Present Reflections, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics (1982) 101 -George Ellis, The Anthropic Principle: Laws and Environments, "The Anthropic Principle", ed. F. Bertola and U.Curi, Cambridge University Press (1993) p. 30 102- Idit Zehavi & Avishai Dekel. 1999. Evidence for a positive cosmological constant from flows ofgalaxies and distant supernovae, Nature 401 (1999) 252-254.

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Every proposed model designed to avoid the inferences from the absolute universal beginning and the orchestral harmony of all the universal constants can only be taken seriously by people who are either unable to understand their philosophical implications, or refuse to. The New Atheists have claimed that recent history of religion has been marked by a relentless battering from the developments of modem science. I would like to extend that evaluation of recent history to cover the atheist religion, forced to cower into the minute nook of uncertainty that lies in that 1Q-4 3 seconds prior to plank time whence the atheist has tried to squeeze out all the mysteries of nothingness and eternity in order to afford itself a barely stable platform from which to plead its cause.

In keeping with the apologetic tradition on this subject of the theistic implications of contemporary cosmology, I conclude with the famous image ofthe plight of modem scientist given by the late Robert Jastrow, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies: "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power ofreason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who ___.:...:h::::.av.:....:e::....=been sitting there for centuries. " 103 103 -Robert Jastrow, God And The Astronomers (1978)

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Chapter 15 The New Jihad

"A little science estranges a man from God. A lot of science brings him back." Francis Bacon

Second only to the huge emphasis on the continuing horrors of religious fundamentalism in the Middle-East, a major marketing point for the New Atheist movement has been the infamous war which they especially have concerned themselves to monger. I am of course talking about the war between God and Science. To pledge allegiance to one has become tantamount to high treason against the other, and the only penalty fitting for treachery against the State of Science is banishment from the Halls of Reason and the Dominion of Good Sense. Through the redefinition of religion as all things Deity, the New Atheists have eluded the rivers of intellectual blood - a marvelous piece of underhanded evangelization, steering the individual most prone to believing that she is so terribly wise into the New Atheist conclave for fear of being branded as one of the shameful - the irrational ... the unscientific.

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By now I hope to have demonstrated that there is nothing at all to exclude atheism from the broad description of religion, neither in the cultural sense nor the philosophical. You will recall that scientism is the epistemological view that the scientific method is the only true path to knowledge, an epistemology which effectively excludes God, and consequently sits as comfortably with atheism as it does with the methodology of science. That, coupled with a historical portrayal of western Christendom as the bitter enemy of the sciences has consolidated the idea of a conflict which is, in reality, superficial, and a conflict whose preservation has been sought for far less laudatory reasons than the advancement of scientific knowledge. We shall therefore tackle this piece of new atheistic warmongering on the historical front first, before proceeding to the conceptual quandary. The historical treatment of science and God falls under 3 broad categories: 1. Independence 2. Interdependence 3. Conflict I am sure the reader can guess which of those three the New Atheists have tried to emphasize. Now, I would like to first point out that there are very

219 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM few historians who support the Conflict-view of scientific history. The majority are in agreement that Christianity, far from being corrosive to the advancement of science, was the fertile seedbed in which it took root. 104 There is a very good reason why modern science is a phenomenon unique to the Western World, as Colin A. Russell, Cambridge Emeritus Professor of History of Science writes: "The history ofscience has often been regarded as a series of conflicts between science and religion (usually religion) of which the cases ofGalileo and Charles Darwin are the most celebrated examples. There is usually the assumption, implicit or explicit, that the outcome ofsuch conflict will always and inevitably be the victory ofscience, even if only in the 105 long term ••• The conflict thesis, at least in its simple form is now widely perceived as a wholly inadequate framework within which to construct a sensible and 106 realistic historiography to Western science. " The only academics endorsing the conflict-view of the history of science and religion are in fact atheistic scientists, who often demonstrate with spectacular clarity that they are not historians. The most celebrated

104- See:Gary B. Femgren, Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction, John Hopkins University Press (2002) p.7-10 105- Ibid. p.4 106- Ibid. p.7

220 ILWGICAL ATHEISM exponent of this view for the New Atheist cause has been the astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and a historical assessment he gave in a recorded lecture at 107 a 2006 conference entitled "Beyond Belief' , widely regarded as the historio-analytical equivalent of the theory that extra-terrestrials constructed the pyramids of Giza. Tyson's theories on scientific history, which are now unfortunately widely reiterated in the New Atheist community, consist, among other things, in taking the divine, spiritual admiration that some ofhistory's greatest scientists had expressed toward the universe, and twisting those convictions into a contrived assumption. It turns out Isaac Newton, the very man Tyson considers the "greatest genius to ever walk this Earth", was somehow not quite intelligent enough to distinguish between the exercise of his science and his religious devotion. He took the following quote from Newton's Principia as his illustration: "Ten moons are revolved about the Earth, Jupiter and Saturn, in circles concentric with them, with the same direction ofmotion, and nearly in the planes ofthe orbits ofthose planets,· but it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions, since the comets rage over all the parts ofthe heavens in very eccentric orbits ... This

107- Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Beyond Belief Science, Reason, Religion & Survival, Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA (November 2006)

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most beautiful system ofthe sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. " 108 Yet we find this beautiful expression of one genius' admiration for what he saw as the work of a personal God presented by Tyson as an act of laziness, after which God is invoked to fill in the gaps of ignorance left in the aftermath of the scientifically incapacitating effects of his religious convictions. A conjecture that ludicrous cannot be excused on grounds of poor literary analysis. We can just as well make the same conclusions about any great scientist in history, bearing in mind that the majority of them were in fact theists. And who is to say that we cannot make precisely the same assertions about the atheistic influence on science? The biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's famous bulldog, remarked in 1869 that "the cell is a simple homogenous globule of plasma", an assessment demonstrating little appreciation for the infinitely delicate complexity and majesty of cellular life. On the basis of Tyson's own hermeneutic, one would be led to believe that the eventual discovery of DNA and the language oflife might have been discovered sooner had science not been encumbered by those same materialist convictions expressed in T. H. Huxley and shared by many ardent Darwinists, as though an atheist biologist could never have assumed that the fabric of

108 -Newton, Principia, "General Scholium"

222 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM reality could be so exquisitely complex, thwarted by the commitment to his own dogma. It goes without saying that that conclusion is complete nonsense - and that is just the point. As professor Russell predicts, the New Atheist launch­ pad for the myth of the religious suppression of science has principally been built on the events surrounding Darwin's theory of evolution and the Galilean overthrow of the geocentric model. We shall appraise the historical detail of these accounts soon enough. One must appreciate that whilst these theories were, and still are, ill-received by some religious circles, it was not because of the facts that they presented, but because of the theological portrayals by their most famous proponents. We should be inclined to distinguish between, for instance, evolution as a scientific theory of life's origins and the process of its unfolding, and Darwinism as a philosophy which states that the process itself is random and purposeless. Clearly those two terms do not describe the same thing. The fact that the science of evolution has been saddled with all its atheistic baggage is no small part of the reason why it inspires discomfort in religious adherents, and rebellion in the likes of the precarious agnostic, neither of whom, at the best of times, know anything about evolution. This is what happens when a worldview attempts to monopolize science, and

223 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM that is why the person who insists on propagating this fictitious conflict does science an immense disservice. Getting people to feel as though they cannot explore the universe because it is a Pandora's Box of dark and terrifying truths ready to leap out and bring upon them the unassailable vision of a meaningless universe and a race doomed to despair, should appear like a demented obsession to any normal, moral human being. Yet, New Atheists like Dawkins and Harris have invested most of their energy into propagating this very idea. During the times of Galileo and Darwin, the events which unfolded were quite along the lines of this cultural phenomenon, and they were resisted for precisely the same reason. Galileo and Darwin's enforcers had one thing in common: They were outspoken against Church doctrine. That is a fact that most tend to overlook. When the average person visualizes the great historical event that was the discovery of evolution, it is fraught with ideas of scientific representatives of the Anglican Church berating Darwin the moment his utterly revolutionary theory reared its ugly head. In reality the theory of evolution did not even begin with Darwin. Evolutionary accounts of the origins of life are scattered all over scientific history. Take, for instance, a scientific piece written by the French mathematician, Pierre­ Louis Maupertius, called the Venus Physique, where Maupertius wrote:

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"Could we not explain in this manner (fortunate change) how the multiplication ofthe most dissimilar species could have sprung from just two individuals? They would owe their origin to some fortuitous productions in which the elementary parts deviated from the order maintained in the parents. Each degree oferror would have created a new species, and as a result ofrepeated deviations the infinite diversity of animals that we see today would have come about. " 109 This proto-Darwinian account was published in 1743, more than a century before Darwin's Origin of Species. 110 There are forms of evolutionary theory that go as far back as the ancient world, most famously Saint Augustine, who wrote an exegesis on Genesis that portrayed creation as a process of unfolding over a length of time he daren't have conjectured.lll So, we can easily rule out that evolution was violently opposed by the Church because of its conflict with a literal interpretation of the 6-day Biblical creation story, 112 a false inference drawn by a retroactive fallacy of composition, reasoning from a culture of misguided fundamentalist conservatism in the

109- Pierre-Louis Maupertius: System de Ia Nature, 2:164 110 - As a side-note, Maupertius had been a devout Christian throughout his life. 111 -Miller, Walter M., Jr. (1959) A Canticle for Leibowitz, p. 209 112 - Gregor Mendel, the first exponent of Mendelian Inheritence, was an Austrian Augustinian monk. Mendelian Interitence became one of the most important uming-points in neo-darwinian evolution during the 1930s

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American Deep South. Objection to the literal truth of Judaic scripture was seldom grounds for condemnation as a heretic, even in the ancient world; at least not in the case of the Genesis accounts. The reason evolution became globally popularized by Darwin is that he was the first to cement the mechanism of natural selection and random variation as the core principles of evolutionary theory, thereby creating a direct point of challenge for the role of Providence in the origins of humankind. It was a project which Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's own grandfather, had pioneered at least half a century before his grandson. Along with the efforts of his good friend T.H Huxley, Darwin's theory became fixed as the new and pivotal founding block of metaphysical naturalism, as it remains to this very day. 113 There is no evidence to indicate that Darwin's theory ever daunted the Church in Rome, although it is quite clear that it had caused somewhat of a stir within the Church of England. But that hadn't quite as much to do with Darwin's theory as it did with Huxley's political agenda against religious authority in British education. Yes, Darwin was an atheist for much of his adult life, as Dawkins is ever so eager to point out. 114 However, he eludes the well-known fact that Darwin became an atheist right after his daughter Annie 113- Gregory W. Graffin & William B. Povine, Evolution, Religion and Free Will, American Scientist (August 2007) p. 294 114 - Dawkins, God Delusion p.98

226 ILWGICAL ATHEISM died in 1851, eight years before the first publication of The Origin of Species. 115 Charles Darwin's atheism had nothing to do with evolutionary theory, and evolutionary theory, furthermore, never had much to do with atheism until the reins were taken over by T.H Huxley. Religious criticism in the academic world flourished during Darwin's era, as it continued to do in the crucial century after his death, when the most influential atheistic theories started to emerge across the major academic fields and represented in some the most prominent intellectual figures of the day - Nietzsche (philosophy), Marx (political theory) and Freud (psychology)- perpetuating a power-struggle between the institutions of science and the institutions of religion in which Darwinian theory was not merely incidental. The political struggle goes on today. And when one considers the long list of scientific revolutions that have so altered the lives of humankind - from modem medicine to the combustion engine - the question rightly arises as why a theory so utterly useless and largely irrelevant to human lives has been so much more vehemently defended. It would seem, therefore, that Darwinian Theory does not consist of something that scientists believe it is quite important for people to know, but rather something that they know is extremely important that people believe.

115 -See; John van Wyhe, Charles Darwin: The Story of the Man and His Theories ofEvolution, Andre Deutsch (2008)

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Galileo's story follows a strikingly similar pattern to Darwin's. The heliocentric theory was popularized by Galileo, but it was not his discovery. The theory first proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus (hence; the Copernican Revolution), became popularized by Galileo and reevaluated as a challenge to mainstream Catholic theology. Prior to that, heliocentric theory was not suppressed - at least not by the Roman Church. Copernicus even dedicated his primary work on the subject, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, to Pope Paul III, and was well-supported by many scientific associates of the Church, many of whom were clergymen who were also at the forefront of scientific discovery in Europe at the time. The Catholic Church, at least, was doing the very opposite of stultifying scientific and artistic advancement before, during and after the Renaissance. It was leading the way. 116 The notion that scientific history is purely a narrative of God's obstruction of scientific affairs is one that instantly dissipates, accorded the fact that two largest historical contributors to the sciences are the Christian and Islamic worlds. One need not cheaply segue into a namedropping recital that is largely common wisdom, as Dawkins himself acknowledges.

116- See; Thomas E. Woods Jr., How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilisation, "The Church and the University", "The Church and Science" Regenery (2005)

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Where, then, does the conflict really lie? The conceptual discord between science and God is best expressed in a question: are empirical facts tantamount to absolute truth? You can be sure that all of these speculative historiographical mythologies are the spinoffs of a dogmatic commitment to the episteme that answers this question in the affirmative. The conceptual point of impasse between God and this disjointed view of science does not require much by way of philosophical deliberation. It is not science that is in conflict with God, but the spirit of naturalism which dominates the contemporary scientific community - the view that anything that goes beyond its scope is, by definition, inexistent. This philosophy, combined with the misdefinition of the word "faith" creates the psychologically impenetrable force-field of an idea that theism is anti-scientific. The cultural phenomenon is not helped by the fact that many of the forerunners of contemporary science, directly or indirectly, enforce this view, and furthermore perceive any challenge to it as an attack on science itself. For obvious reasons, that perception has been stimulated by the New Atheists. On that point, it is interesting to note that at one point in its history, scientism too had been famously established as a secular "Religion of Humanity" in the same manner as secular

229 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM humanism, by one of its fiercest supporters; the French philosopher August Comte, a philosophical predecessor of Karl Marx. 117 Comte's religion was, if you like, a fuller and more explicit atheist religion than the one promulgated by the secular humanist manifesto of 193 3. It comprised a complete system of belief and ritual with liturgy, sacrament - even priesthood and pontiff - all organized around the public veneration of Humanity, referred to as the Nouveau Grand-Etre Supreme (New Supreme Great Being). This was later to be supplemented in a positivist trinity by the Grand Fetish (the Earth) and the Grand Milieu (Cosmic Space). 118 Thomas Henry Huxley once famously described this atheist religion as "Catholicism without the Christianity". 119 Apart from further corroborating the case made in earlier chapters, this embarrassing little blotch in atheistic history quite vividly represents the nature of the kind of ideological conflict we are witnessing between modem science and religion. There is a much more profound danger at the heart of this ideological battle, vividly represented in the words of the French biologist Jacques Monod, when he wrote:

117 - Ian Hutchinson, Monopolizing Knowledge, Flash publishing (2011) 118- John Drakakis, The New Critical Idiom, "Humanism" by Tony Davies, Routledge (1997) p 28-29 119- Rollin Chambliss, Social Thought From Hammurabi to Comte, Dryden (1954) p.424

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"The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective. In other words, the systematic denial that true knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms affinal causes- that is to say, of "purpose"120 In short, what this presumption implies is that everything must be assumed purposeless in order for science to be done. Mr. Monod did not go into tremendous detail as to why this should be the case, and yet in spite of this purposeless, foundationless view of reality, it is most often the scientists who subscribe to his words that so passionately protest the moral depravity of religion, though not nearly as passionately as they argue for the general pointlessness oflife. Why this is, one can only guess. As Alfred North Whitehead bluntly put: "Scientists animated by the purpose ofproving themselves purposeless makes an interesting subject for study."

120- Jacques Monod: Chance and Neccessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy ofModern Biology (1972)

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Chapter 16 Why Atheism is Necessarily False

"Sufficient Reason, in virtue ofwhich we can consider that no fact can be real or actual, and no proposition true without there being a sufficient reason for its being so and not otherwise, although most often these reasons just cannot be known by us. " 121 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The following chapter constitutes a cumulative case for the central thesis of this discourse and the definitive rationale as to why the atheistic worldview is consigned to self-refutation. As I have consistently reiterated, atheism is committed to the proposition that the reality as a whole is necessary, self-sufficient and requiring no ultimate explanation beyond itself. That, in turn, implies that the universe either had to have come into existence from nothing or that it never properly came into existence at all. There is not a serious atheist on this planet that could- though he might - deny that commitment.

121 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy, Sec. 44, 196

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Bertrand Russell summarized the atheistic cosmological disposition quite appropriately:

"The universe is just there, and that :S all. " 122 Most atheists either explicitly or tacitly agree with this assessment. Daniel Dennett, for instance, believes that the universe created itself, 123 Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking believe the world was created out of nothing, Peter Atkins believes the universe itself is nothing, and Richard Dawkins is willing to subscribe to all of the above and any other imaginable hypothesis that fits the New Atheist agenda. Let us therefore assume that this view of reality where true and that the universe is without sufficient reason for being. The next question zeroes in on us: what implications would this have on our ability to maintain beliefs about the reality of which we, presumably, form a part?

The Principle of Sufficient Reason, commonly attributed to the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, states, in its shortest possible logical format:

122 -Bertrand Russell & F.C. Copleston, The Existence of God, ed John Hick, Problems of Philosophy Series (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1964), p. 175 123- Dennett, Darwin s Dangerous Idea (1995) p. 185: "The universe creates itself ex nihilo, or at any rate out ofsomething that is well-nigh indistinguishable from nothing at all."

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For any proposition, subject or event there must be an explanation. Anything we can possibly know about B, we know in virtue of our ultimate point of reference, A. In terms of existing entities standing in causal relations, the sufficient reason for proposition B, "I exist", might be one of several other propositions; the existence of my parents and the laws of biology to mention but two. The sufficient reason for the sun's shine, likewise, might just as well be explained by the time of the day as the laws of thermonuclear fusion. All statements about reality trace back to axioms; unprovable statements taken for granted in determining the truth of further propositions. Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein phrased it: "If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do. "' Now, suppose B encapsulates the totality of reality, including ourselves and our beliefs. Even if we know nothing at all about A beyond the fact that it exists, there is one thing we can know for certain. It is not B.

So, how does this translate with regard to the ultimate cause of the universe? If A is not the same thing as the universe, or anything we might chance to find in it, then we should be able

234 ILWGICAL ATHEISM to conclude at least five features about the First Cause, by inferring from its effect, the first being that the cause transcends the universe, and the latter four following from it. Ergo: The universe is physical: Therefore, the cause is non­ physical. The universe exists in time: Therefore, the cause exists outside oftime. The universe exists in space: Therefore, the cause exists outside of space. The universe is contingent: Therefore, the cause must be necessary. Purely on the admission of a universal cause, we are led toward the existence of an entity uncaused, immaterial, existing beyond space and time. The point is conceded every time a different explanation is proposed in violation of Lebniz's principle. The atheist is thus faced with a single alternative: that the universe has no sufficient reason, or as Carl Sagan would have put it: B is all that is, was, or ever will be. On paper this proposition appears fairly harmless. In reality, however, it is nightmare of quite eternal proportions. For are not the beliefs produced in human brains part of the same cosmic paradox, bereft of any supervening purpose - any ultimate guarantee that they can be trusted? Against

235 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM what standard of absolute truth might the imaginings of the mind be judged if it was never properly made to come to know things, specifically? At this point, the typical atheist rejoinder is that truth is what comes of science. After all, if something that can be shown to be repeatable, how can it possibly be denied? That gravity is a force of attraction between two celestial bodies, or that two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen will give you a pint of water is irrefutable fact. That is truth . .. . Is it? Well, perhaps to the extent that beliefs are derived from an inductive method, itself a function of a set of senses and brains that sprung from the same chaotic mess, some observation might well be true. But the key word there is "observation". For the man in the sanatorium convinced that he receives word from the ghost of Gilgamesh every Wednesday afternoon, the consistency ofhis experience, I think it is fair to say, would not constitute much by way truth for his psychiatrists. Why, then, should ours? Commonality, after all, can be no justification of truth, as illustrated by Orwell's Oceania. Truth judgments might only be inferred from the mere fact that they can be observed to happen again and again and again and again, but only insofar as we can all be certain that we are not the man in the insane asylum. And since the same

236 ILWGICAL ATHEISM mindless process that made us also made him, that does not seem to be a guarantee. It may well turn out that our senses are giving us a representation of reality that is not at all what objective reality is really like. A fly, for instance, perceives and understands the universe radically different from the way we do, as does any other creature. It is not clear that the common bacterium perceives the universe at all and yet it thrives far more successfully than any macro-species, which begs the question as to why life bothered to evolve at all. By what measure are we to claim that our grasp on reality is worth more than that of the common bacterium when the same five-billion year process that produced it also produced us? But there are scores of beliefs which brief reflection proves cannot be justified empirically. We have made frequent references to knowledge claims of this kind: semantic judgments, moral judgments, aesthetic judgments, mathematical and logical deductions. Scientific facts alone cannot justify reason. Reason justifies science. But, then, what justifies reason? The reliability of reason, just as the existence of morality and beauty is simply taken for granted by the atheist on pragmatic grounds, left with no real sufficient ontic referent for its actual validity insofar as the purpose of acquiring truth, if indeed truth is meaningful concept.

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The narrow confines of his worldview simply do not allow it. Even if truth and value judgments might be supported by empirical observations ofwhose reliability we could be assured, in the final analysis they will always require a judgment from a personal agent. And unless that judgment is made on the basis of an objective standard it becomes swallowed in the same nihilistic vacuum left in the wake of the death of God. If human minds are the only personal agents in existence, it follows that all truth judgments are completely relative and reason is a conjuring trick of random chaos, yet as we speak, there are atheists the world over insisting that atheism is a conclusion which intelligent people come to on the basis of reason. If the very possibility of maintaining a true judgment instantly evaporates, then the belief in atheism evaporates also, because in order to prove the truth of any statement one might make, one can only possibly refer back to oneself, completing the vicious circle. Effectively, the individual subject becomes her own fundamental axiom. The entire notion of truth disappears, and the very belief in atheism itself gets caught in the middle of the paradox. The argument for the illogicality of atheism thus boils down to two a priori observations: that whilst theism reasons to and from an objective standard of ultimate truth grounded in an absolute Mind which gives validity

238 ILWGICAL ATHEISM to rational beliefs (ie. God), atheism reasons to and from a completely subjective standard that cannot give validity to any belief (ie. You). All this, incidentally, is nothing new. The postmodem child of 20th century existentialist philosophy was a direct descendant of atheist thinking; the school commonly attributed to figures like Heidegger, Sartre and, later, Derrida and Foucault, summed up as the view that all truth is relative - an illusory convention among a community of relatively advanced primates. Although it was a philosophical concept which really rose to prominence only within the last few decades, it had been recognized and appreciated a lot earlier than that, most famously by Friedrich Nietzsche, arguably the most influential atheist philosopher in all history. Nietzsche's "Parable ofthe Madman", one of the most famous anecdotes in all philosophy, captured the essence of the atheistic paradox in achingly poetic fashion: "Have you not heard ofthat madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -­ As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?-- Thus they

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yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet ofthe noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet ofthe divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." Morbid and fanciful though Nietzsche's parable might be, it brings into stark perspective the nihilistic conclusion that follows logically and inevitably from eliminating God from the final equation of reality. As soon as God goes, everything else goes with Him. What is true for one is true for all, even if those truths are

240 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM logically irreconcilable. The only thing that matters at the end is which truth can triumph over the other, not by rational means, since reason requires truth, but by the brute laws of matter and energy as the sole ultimate adjudicator of all things. All together now: WARISPEACE! FREEDOMISSLAVERY! IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH! The pathetic irony of Nietzsche's nihilism, combined with his philosophy of the Obermensch and the Will to 12 Power • is that it would go on to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, forming the essential foundations of the single bloodiest era in all of human history. Indeed, on the logic which follows necessarily from the atheistic paradox, if the Nazis had conquered the world, then everything we recognize as humanity's greatest shame would be at once transformed into our greatest triumph. There would be no disputing the historical splendor of the Holocaust or the great glory of the prodigious massacres carried out on behalf of our Aryan heritage. Despite all of this, there have still been some contemporary atheist philosophers, like Al Rosenberg, who have advocated metaphysical, epistemological and even moral nihilism. Whilst it might be possible for

124- See; Nietszche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883)

241 ILWGICAL ATHEISM reality in general to be ultimately absurd, in practice one sees far too much evidence of humanity not really taking that idea seriously. C.S. Lewis put it wonderfully: "Atheism turns out to be too simple. Ifthe whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that is has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. " 125 On a more poetic level, I believe h captured the essence of the atheist problem. Without God, there would be no such thing as a proof for the truth of atheism any more than there would be such a thing as truth itself. There is no sufficient reason why atheism should be true, since to acquiesce to the one repudiates the other. But the mire runs deeper still. For the sake of further argument, let us ignore all of the above and assume that an atheist worldview allowed for the possibility of truth. Would the human mind be apt to apprehend it? "A man can do what he wants, but not what he wants," says Schopenhauer. His remark may or may not have been made in jest, but his words captured another inevitability of the worldview to which he subscribed. Whilst there have been attempts to reconcile the

125 - C.S Lewis, Mere Christianity

242 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM materialist view with the logically opposed notion of human free will, these attempts have, for the most part, proven futile. Free will is incompatible with atheism for the reason that nondeterministic action would imply that there is something primary over matter and energy. Any naturalistic worldview would necessitate that human beings are an inextricable part of the same natural laws which created them. If atheism is true, then everything we are and, furthermore, everything that we believe has to be the end product of a series of material causes and stimuli as mechanical as gravity, and human thought thus no different from human flatulence. To acquiesce to free will automatically implies the existence of an immaterial, enduring self, which is guiding the body and is therefore primary over it. And if consciousness is itself fundamental as opposed to the simple waste product of determined neurological processes, that would in turn imply that it had to have come from somewhere, something or (perish the thought) Someone beyond mere matter and energy. Obviously the transcendental implications of this line of reasoning are anything but atheistic. Dennett, Harris and Dawkins, are all determinists. But what does this worldview say about our beliefs? Are not beliefs themselves the same result of this determined process - smoke rising from the proverbial fire? After all, the possibility of having beliefs that are true or

243 ILWGICAL ATHEISM false necessitates that they are freely chosen. But if all human action is determined, that would include the act of forming beliefs itself. But if beliefs are determined, then what value do they have?

The problem finds itself expressed in Darwin's own notorious doubt:

"But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions ofman :S mind, which has been developed from the mind ofthe lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey :S mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"126 The atheistic view of all biological life as a random unguided process that is geared toward end of survival does not paint a picture of a mind specifically interested in producing a preponderance of true beliefs- an authentic, or true, representation of objective reality. 127 128 As Darwin observed, true beliefs and adaptive behavior are not necessarily interconnected. In fact, on the atheist view there is at least one false belief that seems to favor survival: Belief in God. But if survivability can favor beliefs which are false, then what does that say about

126- Charles Darwin's letter to William Graham (July, 1881) 127- Beilby & Plantinga, Naturalism Defeated? Cornell (2002) 128- Alvin Plantinga, Michael Tooley, Knowledge of God, Blackwell (2008) p. 31-51

244 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM every other belief that we maintain? If it is true that evolution is not being guided by any higher scope other than gene replication, then all of the faculties which we rely on for producing truth have absolutely no value whatsoever. And if the faculties we use to produce truth are unreliable, then all of the beliefs produced by those faculties are unreliable. However, I believe it is a lot more helpful to assert the argument in reverse. Assuming that human beings have a powerful set of intellectual faculties, this would be something very poorly explained by the atheist hypothesis. This inverted perspective proceeds from what we assume we can already know. The words of Eugene Wigner in his 1960s article on "the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" might better illustrate the point: "A possible explanation ofthe physicists use of mathematics to formulate the laws ofnature is that he is a somewhat irresponsible person. As a result, when he finds a connection between two quantities that resembles a connection well-known .from mathematics, he will jump to the conclusion that the connection is the one discussed in mathematics ... It is important to point out that the mathematical formulation ofthe physicists often crude experience leads in an uncanny number ofcases to an

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amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena." 129 Wigner, like many scientists before and after him, recognized that human intelligence goes well above and beyond evolutionary sufficiency, bearing in mind its sole purpose for being was no different from that of the fungus. More than being merely superfluous to basic survival, human intelligence might be said to be quite anti-evolutionary and, as a consequence, quite anti­ atheistic.

129 - Paul Cockshott, Lewis Mackenzie, Greg Michaelson, Computation and its Limits, Oxford (2012) p. 10 citing; Eugene Wigner, The Unreasonable effectiveness ofMathematics in the Natural Sciences, Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, no. I (February 1960)

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Chapter 17 Imagination and The God-Shaped Void

"There is nothing to prevent an atheist from having self-transcending experiences"

Sam Harris

With the release of his latest book, Waking Up, the very much awake Mr. Harris has fast become the most celebrated promoter of a concept which makes as much sense as his views on just about everything else. Since Harris himself acknowledges spirituality as self­ transcending, there should be little difficulty in revealing the charade of atheist spirituality, which ends as quickly as it begins, with the following question: Where, to what or to whom, exactly, is the atheist hoping to transcend? What new and unexplored plateaus of experience are accessible to a material mind occupying an equally material universe existing for no superseding purpose whatsoever is beyond my own comprehension, yet there is a growing trend in the atheist community toward the

248 ILWGICAL ATHEISM belief that some kind of truly transcendental experience is available within a framework which denies the whole notion of transcendence. Unless one were to acquiesce to some novel and nauseatingly familiar New Atheist redefinition of "spirituality", it is hard to see this as anything more than what it is: a cleverly designed placebo designed to take the sting out of inevitable nihilism. Harris himself would assent that authentic spiritual life consists, at least in some vague sense, of a rapport of mind and body, yet on his view the two are one and the same thing, and since he has also subscribed to the image of a race bound by the shackles of causality, how could this transcendence be willed, if it were even possible? To the atheist, whose spiritual experiences she deems as real as that of the saints, there is no way to come off as anything other than offensive on this matter. Humans, after all, have as much need of earthly bread as heavenly bread. The urge toward spiritual experiences is part of who we are. No one is denying that, least of all theists. The difference is that theists can have full confidence in where that urge comes from. I am reminded of the words ofC.S Lewis, so often uttered by apologists: "If I find myself with a desire which nothing in this world can satisfY, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." But after the euphoria of the divine rebellion fades

249 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM away, one cannot help but realizes that all she is left with is an empty shell of humanity. But the economic factors that have contributed to the growth of Shopping­ Mall Spirituality do not interest me as much as the havoc which the materialist revolution has wreaked on art and literature. For creativity is itself a spirit, and art as equally useless for all purposes of pragmatism. It is my belief, as it was of artists like C.S. Lewis and Tolkein, that God, as the ultimate transcendent entity, is a notion very poorly understood in terms pure logic. Thus, the imagination can be somewhat vaguely understood as a path to understanding God, and a lack thereof could likewise be problematic. I vividly recall a conversation I had once had with an atheist friend, of which there have been many. However, this particular one had been probably the most sincere, and definitely the most significant for me personally. Even in the more agnostic phases of my life, I always knew that if there even were such a thing as God then the secret to understanding what that could possibly mean lay only marginally within the grasp of reason. It is an odd admission, I know. Even odder when one considers that the sentiment has hardly changed even today. In fact, I am more convinced of it than ever. As I write this, I am well aware that the infallibly left-brained reader would snicker at the suggestion that

250 ILWGICAL ATHEISM imagination is liable to prove anything in reality. Sure enough, it had been the immediate response of my dearly loved atheist interlocutor when I had first suggested it to her:

"You can't imagine God into existence!" said she.

But of course she, like many others before and after her, had missed the wood for the trees. Because, it is not so much that the imagination conjures God into existence, even though that is the way in which we conceive of the whole business of "imagining". It is rather more the case that imagination lays down a map, and that lack of it, conversely, steals that route away, leaving us blind, wandering about aimlessly until frustration sets in and the search is simply given up, as she herself had given up.

It is difficult, I know. But perhaps a small glimpse of the notion might be gleamed by the series of questions I had put:

"Tell me," I said, "what do you make of Heaven?" She was caught off guard by the question, but her answer was elementarily atheistic:

"I don't think anything of Heaven. It is a meaningless word. I don't think it exists."

"Even so, surely you can imagine your life somehow being better or worse off?"

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She was very suspicious of where I was going with this. "I suppose," she said. "So, then, you have an idea of what it means to be really happy and really unhappy?" "Yes." "Well, suppose that Heaven is the happiest place that you could imagine. Imagine that Heaven is nothing more and nothing less than being completely and utterly happy. Tell me: what would that be?" She quietly deliberated the question, and, as any other human being would, first thought to answer the question by listing all of the precious wants that need satisfying, along with a whole host of other earthly luxuries layered on top. But after this exercise quickly degenerated into laughter, and laughter reduced further still into a prolonged and melancholy silence, it dawned on her, as it does everyone else, that nothing she could even conceive of would be able to sustain her joy for more than a few years, let alone an eternity. "You know," she said, finally, "I can't even imagine what a place like that would be like. I can't really see happiness ever really lasting indefinitely, let alone for eternity. I suppose at the end of the day, it always

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has to come back full circle ... But then I guess that would have never been true happiness in the first place. It wouldn't have been any different from ... good sex or a tasty meal." She was very shrewd, remarkably candid, and quite correct. "Tell me," I said "do you believe that true, lasting happiness exists?" I asked her the question, knowing full well that she was every bit the hopeless optimist that I was not. "Well, I wouldn't dream of denying it, put it that way." "Even though you can't even imagine what it is?" "That's the deal," she said. "There are plenty of people who don't believe in true happiness at all." "And why do you suppose that is?" "Probably the same reason you just said. Because they can't imagine what it might be ... " We didn't speak about it again after that, although I have only recently come to understand that she has begun to consider the question with more sincerity than any logical argument would have ever achieved in all the years before or after.

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You see, the real question lying at the bottom of it all is not "Does God exist?", but rather; "If there really were such a being as God; what sort of thing would He be, really?" A theologian would tell you God is benevolent, God is all-powerful and aU-good ... possibly all-loving. A philosopher might tell you that God is "metaphysically necessary" or the "greatest conceivable Being". A scientist, in a wild moment of rebellion to his party line, might profess that God is the one that breathes fire into the equations of the universe. Yet all of these statements tell you everything and nothing. In a sense, God's response to Moses was the most appropriate he could have given. He is that He is. His definition is that he cannot be defined. The God that can be defined is not God, because the God that can be defined is as finite and as ultimately tasteless and humdrum as matter itself. G .K Chesterton once wrote that the poet is the man who asks to get his head into the heavens whilst the logician tries to get the heavens into his head - and it is his head that splits. There is a deeper truth that lying behind those words which had struck me long before the rediscovery of this retro notion of theistic religion. Consider geniuses like C.S Lewis, Tolkein, Milton, T.S. Elliot, Dostoyevsky, even Nietzsche. Their beliefs seemed to flow outward into their prose in ways that are sometimes beautiful, sometimes shocking - but never dull. I do not think this is by accident. Creativity demands self-transcendence.

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Novelties do not come from mere abstractions of matter. There is a good reason why art has largely degenerated into the capricious gobbledygook we see today. Art, like morality, says Chesterton, consists in drawing the line somewhere. And with no guiding principle, aesthetics is no more real than ethics. Creativity, by its very nature, necessitates freedom. But if freedom does not exist then the imagination does not exist either, for who could conceive of a thing ofless worth than an imagination that is not free? But the philosophical implications of atheism do more than undercut artistic expression. For, you see, the same pattern works in reverse; and this, I believe, sits at the foundations of the intellectual problem. Rejection of the supernatural does not only impede the mind's ability to transcend itself. The mind's inability to transcend itself impedes it from knowing anything besides itself. God is a word, as are all spoken words, and all words are just the shadows of a world that exists in our own mind, which is yet still just our own personal impression - a pale imitation of the real, filtered through a set of finite and fickle senses; a world which we can only hope to grasp. And if there exists such a world that we know of out there, which we cannot nearly access with our senses and the limits of human logic, it follows that all we are left with is the imagination. It is what moves knowledge forward, because imagination is what moves man beyond

255 ILWGICAL ATHEISM what senses and analytical logic alone cannot do by themselves. Einstein knew that for knowledge to burst beyond its boundaries, going by what one can intuit and observe alone will not get the scientist very far. Assuming God exists; then God is also a destination; except He is, by definition, the biggest and most unattainable destination imaginable (or, rather, unimaginable). It is not about imagining God into existence so much as it is about imagination being the primary point of reference. In a culture where physical laws and mathematical logic have become the epitaph of all wisdom, and where imagination, like faith, has been thrown into the cesspool of naivete, we look for truth instead in the total dissection of reality, thinking it will help in understanding things better, when it is just the opposite. It would be like trying to understand a novel by analyzing each word in isolation. So the imagination reads into the nature of things and makes something more of them, permitting us to rise above what we know and what we are. Without God, imagination does not exist. Without imagination, God, if he existed, could not be known. Without God there is no ultimate good, no prospect of ultimate progress, for there is nowhere to go. Atheism markets itself as the hallmark of human progression, simultaneously denying it as even a logical possibility.

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BOOK IV

MORALITY

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Chapter 18 A Brief Introduction to Morality

"Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them." Sam Harris

I am no more interested in advocating the moral superiority of any religious ethos than I am in dragging convinced atheists kicking and screaming into the Christian kingdom or the Dar al-Islam. I should also add that I do not believe that a general lack of moral sense is a necessary correlative of being an atheist, so very often caricatured as the view of the self-superior, proselytizing and generally backward Bible-thumper - and what a backward view it is. Still, my view does nothing to alter the historical reality I intend to explore later in this part; realities which cannot be put in language more courteous or plain than to say that atheism has been the single most deplorable framework for morality and political organization in all places and of all time, albeit the reasons as to why that has been and always will be the case can be deemed separate, if in part, from the fact that there exist more than a few atheist who would put

260 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM my own moral senses to shame. Fact: In the last century alone, the amount of death and destruction wrought and the oceans of blood shed by regimes devoted, in no small part, to some form of doctrinaire materialism and an eradication of God outweighs that of the combined efforts of every single religion throughout history. And the manner in which the blood-soaked story of absolute secularization has been so cheaply glossed over by the New Atheist evangelists is both a moral and intellectual crime which merits much castigation. Before setting the record straight, however, we must discuss a few of the more prominent philosophical aspects of moral theory. The project of moral philosophy leading back to Immanuel Kant has been to find an adequate secular framework for categorical moral imperatives; a project which continues to thwart even the most optimistic philosophers today. Interestingly, it was Kant's contemporary, David Hume, who denied the possibility of deriving moral values from a purely naturalistic and atheistic framework, 130 hence the famous Is-Ought Problem, a hurdle which Sam Harris attempted to negotiate with an argument he put forward in his 2009 book The Moral Landscape. Folks like Bill Maher are prone to confuse all the intricacies of moral theory with the blatant obviousness of right and wrong readily available to your man in the 130 -Hume, Treatise ofHuman Nature, Book III, P. I, S. I

261 ILWGICAL ATHEISM street; knowledge which may be considered, for all practical purposes, "common sense". Like Bill Maher, the people inclined to this presumption demonstrate they have as much need of common sense as they do a history lesson. The ultimate reason as to why something is really right or wrong is very different from knowing either, and the point which even the most secular moral theorists have stumbled over for centuries is that, on the view of secular morality, there is no ultimate foundation for moral values. 131 Most atheists, including Dawkins, have acknowledged the sabotaging implications of atheism on morality; an admission whose candor is matched only by the haste with which it is retracted when it comes to the religious violations of the generally accepted social mores. The scope of this fourth thesis shall be to demonstrate that the majority of New Atheist attempts to ground atheist morality have been nothing short of a high-pitched shriek at western moral intuitions, which even the most refined rhetorical verbiage cannot divorce from the long Christian tradition that has shaped them.

131- "There are no objective values."- The introductory words to J.L. Mackie's famous treatise: Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong ( 1977). Russell expressed similar skepticism about atheist morality.

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Chapter 19 Morality, Immorality and Amorality

"Christianity has functioned for the normative self­ understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object ofcontinual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in the light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk. " 132 Jiirgen Habermas

132- Jiirgen Habermas, Time oftransitions, "Conversation about God and the World.", Polity Press (2006) p. 150-151

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The last pillar in the New Atheist Pantheon of Reason is the view of theistic religion as the definitive source of all moral depravity throughout history. Naturally, their contingent of Anglo-American devotees has taken this harangue against western Christianity which, being the most dominant religion in their midst, is also the most despised, and recent scandals in the Catholic Church and a growing association of Christian doctrine with sexual intolerance have bolstered the effort to portray the religious adherent as ideologically inclined to a generally sexist, repressive and prudish temperament as he is to irrationality. Even though all New Atheist affiliates are adamant that religion is an abominable tumor that must be extracted from the moral sense of western civilization, I would like the reader to entertain the probability that the exact opposite is true. One of the principal drives in the New Atheist gospel has been a reevaluation of western culture as a legacy of so called "secular values" which, truth be told, I had never heard of before, and seemed to me immediately to be something as fabricated as the agnostic. The secular apologist Christopher Hitchens was probably one of the strongest proponents of this assessment of post-Enlightenment western history, as though the Revolution in France that marked its beginning were a shining beacon prophesying a long line of later secular successes. The fact that secularism has become

265 ILWGICAL ATHEISM coterminous with atheism, in itself, has led to a whole set of other problems. Even if the properly constructed secular framework were capable of manufacturing moral beings like some socio-political production line, it would have absolutely no bearing on the moral implications of an atheistic worldview. The powerful liberal resolve that one does not need God to be a good person might be all well and good in terms of a limited pragmatism, so long as the belief is held by people who find themselves in relatively comfortable circumstances where they can be given reasonable assurance that the people around them have some sense of this obscure thing called "morality". In purely philosophical terms, however, this view is just another platitude. Even the most atheistic moral philosophers can attest to the difficulty in framing cogent moral systems which do not degenerate into hot air for want of an essential transcendent anchor point- a function which a divine being serves rather nicely. This ignorance has not been helped by the displeasing representation of God as a kind of"Big Brother"133 figure in the sky, who would otherwise remove from the true significance of our moral decisions by his looming omnipresence over our every thought. Add to that an already strong western resistance to the would-be autocracy of the Christian institutions, along with the well-documented moral deficiencies of

133 -An image hampered by Mr. Hitchens

266 ILWGICAL ATHEISM their clergy, and one can plainly see that the allure of a "secular morality" and the readiness with which it would be received no matter how wafer-thin its logic It is therefore best if we started from the ground up, beginning with a simple expose on the relevant strands of moral philosophy, then proceeding to understand the fatal deficiency of secularized morality which Sam Harris attempts to surmount in The Moral Landscape. When criticism is leveled against the atheistic interpretation of moral values and duties, the distinction between moral ontology and epistemology is always at the heart of the negative backlash. Moral epistemology, or moral knowledge, describes any and all beliefs about what constitutes right and wrong. To murder in cold blood is wrong: that is a declaration of moral knowledge. The rape and torture of other human beings is also wrong, as is the infanticide of ill or disabled children. Those are negative moral duties. Positive moral obligations are far less spoken of, being of themselves active duties as opposed to the passiveness of moral "ought-nots": help the poor, the sick and dying, repay your debts and so forth. Moral ontology or objective morality, on the other hand, refers to the existence of actual moral evils and goods that exist in fact, independent of our personal sentiments, and which human beings can come to know.

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Moral ontology is the objective standard against which all moral beliefs are weighed and in virtue of which we are entitled to say that some behavior is really right or really wrong. On the level of the child, we should say the notion of "being a good boy" is very much determined by the standard of his parents and their commands, which may or may not have been set by higher powers. This rule does not cease to apply on the level of the adult. For centuries, human beings have believed in an absolute moral system grounded in an overarching Deity, and I struggle to recall any moral contribution on the part of the secular humanist in the last century, aside from her avocation of the destruction of the unborn child, the dignity of suicide and the mercy of euthanasia, so long they can be justified by a potential strain on the state treasury. Whilst moral epistemology changes over time, moral ontology does not. So long as the socially accepted customs of what constitutes being a "good old fellow" are subject to continual adjustment, our beliefs about what is right and wrong, for better or worse- and it is generally worse - are simply the collective expressions of personal taste. And the final and inexorable problem with the atheist worldview is that it completely obliterates moral ontology and reduces moral sense to the sort of proclivity that inclines one to meat over minestrone.

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Now, the most popular naturalistic vindication has been the same evolutionary explicator invoked for most of everything else. 134 But, if moral preferences are just the spinoffs of biological evolution, then surely the expression of maternal love of a human mother toward her children is as arbitrary as the preference of the crocodile to eat hers. Nazi Germany stands forever in the annals of history as a testament that even the worst human evils could be justified on the basis of some claptrap Darwinian excuse, and I am happy to report that this is one of the few points on which Richard Dawkins and I are in agreement: "No self-respecting person would want to live in a society that operates according to Darwinian laws. I am a passionate Darwinist, when it involves explaining the development oflife. However, I am a passionate anti-Darwinist when it involves the kind of society in which we want to live. A Darwinian state would be a Fascist state. " 135 The whole project of bringing people to a true knowledge of moral rights and wrongs becomes reduced to a desperate appeal to the low-hanging fruit of the generally accepted moral customs, which may as well be completely morally abhorrent by any present standard, much like the scenario that would have emerged in a 134- Dawkins, God Delusion, Chap. 6 135- Richard Dawkins interview in Die Presse (July 30'h 2005)

269 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM complete German overthrow of the European Continent in WWII. But the problems don't stop there, for we have yet to consider the fact that human agents lack the freedom to make moral choices at all. And if all actions are pre-determined, as the materialist presumes, then one really does find it hard to see how he accounts for moral responsibility. The central creeds of New Atheist philosophy are thus about as soluble in moral experience as oil in water. One cannot make moral agents from a process of scientific materialistic reductionism any more than he can get a universe from nothing. All of the empirical statements that can possibly be made about killing a man, and all the minutest social or ecological ripple-effects proceeding from his death will not bring you an inch closer to calling it a murder, at least insofar as his murder might have been an inconvenience for some, beneficial for others and a tragedy for a handful. At several points of the delicate ethical formula, we are compelled to make the leap into the realm of moral reasoning. But ifthere is no absolute basis from which to make the leap - if there is no transcendent foundational scope to human life - there is no platform from whence the leap can be made and we remain, as Chesterton would say, with our feet are firmly planted in mid-air. It is beyond all comprehension as to how anyone could be

270 ILWGICAL ATHEISM wishful enough to assume that rationalism alone could salvage any notion of morality from a presumption of nihilism. 136 The New Atheists have not even a pulpit from which to preach the righteous judgment they are so inclined to preach. It is not that the reference to atheism as immoral is pejorative so much as it is incorrect. Immorality presumes knowledge of right and wrong. But we should not be led to believe for a minute that immorality is less desirable than amorality, for the immoral man, who knows that he is immoral, at least begins with some notion of moral goods. As C.S. Lewis wisely pointed out; the rich history of human evils is not quite a story of evil people trying to do evil things so much as it is a story of normal people trying to do good things. And even after plans which had been laid with the noblest of wishes eventually culminate into the most repugnant of fruitions, somewhere along the line you will invariably find that it had been rationally justified by human beings according to some principle which they could not place anywhere other than their own "common sense".

136 - See Alex Rosenberg, An Atheists Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions- The synopsis of Rosenberg's book: "His bracing and ultimately upbeat book takes physics seriously as the complete description ofreality and accepts all its consequences. He shows how physics makes Darwinian natural selection the only way life can emerge, and how that deprives nature ofpurpose, and human action ofmeaning, while it exposes conscious illusions such as free will and the self"

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Whether it be utilitarianism, consequentialism, contractarianism or rational egoism, moral theory has never quite seemed able to adequately traverse the closed labyrinth of a completely secularized world view without having to resort to the high-pitched screams from within the secular maze, out to some lingering moral sense, ever-dwindling within the human consciousness. Hume acknowledged it. Russell ignored it. Sartre repudiated it. Nietzsche embraced it. And yet, sections of the contemporary atheist tradition, most notably the Stephen Pinker and Peter Singer- occasional collaborators of the New Atheists- have decided to have another go. In the desperate search of the crucial moral piece to the great atheist puzzle, it should come as little surprise that intellectuals like Singer, Pinker and Grayling have been roped into the New Atheist project, whilst the less morally optimistic unbelievers like Nagel, Ruse and Rosenberg have been quietly ostracized. 137

137- Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on History, Philosophy and Religious Implications, "Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics", Routledge (1993) p. 262-269 "The position of the modern evolutionist," writes Dr. Ruse, "is that humans have an awareness of morality because such awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than hands and feet. Considered as a justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory."

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"We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view," writes Kai Nielsen, "or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn't decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me. Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge ofthe facts, will not take you to morality. "138 The last word today remains with Fyodor Dostoyevsky no less than it did over a century ago. If God does not exist, everything is permitted, 139 and all the denigrations brought forth by the New Atheist in his case for the moral depravity of the religious turns out to be the vain babbles of steadily depleting moral intuitions put in place by the very same Object of their enduring onslaught.

138 - Kai Nielsen, Why Should I Be Moral? American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984 ): p. 90 139- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

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Chapter 20 The Amoral Landscape

"I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. To my surprise, The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me! It should change it for philosophers too. Philosophers of mind have already discovered that they can 't duck the study of neuroscience, and the best of them have raised their game as a result. Sam Harris shows that the same should be true of moral philosophers, and it will turn their world exhilaratingly upside down." Richard Dawkins.

After decades of insisting that objective morality was as hallucinatory as belief in God, Richard Dawkins happily decided that he could be a moralist again, exactly four years ago - a decision inspired by Sam Harris' bestselling contribution to the newly established field of moral science. Harris' Moral Landscape theory has long since been cast upon the dunghill of failed academia, yet despite its generally negative reception from moral theorists of all religious and non-religious descriptions,

274 ILWGICAL ATHEISM the theory has drawn-out its dying breaths among the atheist community. 140 Since the utilitarian argument premised on human happiness is one which is frequently employed in some shape or form to justify the secular moral framework, in that broader context, Harris' thesis is certainly one worth considering. A reader unthwarted by his own prejudice will notice two things within very brief perusal of the opening chapters to Harris' book. First, it is clear that he had little intention of tackling the main philosophical difficulty of bridging Hume's is-ought gap, opting instead to obscure the problem with his newfound license to engage in a litany of neuroscientific mumbo-jumbo. Secondly, his book seems to be nowhere near as interested in actually answering our deepest and most troubling moral questions as it is in perpetuating the continuing pattern of berating and slating theistic religion - an obsession

140- See; Russell Blackford, Book Review: Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape, JE&T VoL 21 Iss. 2 (December 2010) p.53-62; John Horgan, Be wary of the righteous rationalist: We should reject Sam Harris' claim that science can be a good moral guidepost, Scientific American (20 10) via http://www.scientificamerican.com/ blog/post.cfm?id=be-wary-of-the-righteous-rationalis-20 10-10-11; Peter Foster, Sam Harris' Brave New World, National Post (October 9'h 2010); Jules Evans, The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris- Review, The Observer[Guardian] (Sunday 15'h April2012); Joseph Bingham, The Science ofBad Philosophy, University of Chicago Conservative Quarterly via; http://counterpoint.uchicago. edu/morals.html; Ophelia Benson, Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape, Philosopher's Magazine iss. 53.

275 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM which, as one reviewer wrote, has become vicious to the point of derangement. 141 Still, once we sift through the surfeit of pop-science and psudo-logic, the reader strikes upon something that vaguely resembles a kind of neuroscientific utilitarianism: Premise 1: Objective morality is concerned with the well-being of conscious creatures. Premise 2: Facts about the well-being of conscious creatures are open to scientific discovery. Conclusion: Science can tell us facts about objective morality. Thus, according to Harris's theory, neuroscientific progress will one day be able to find the peaks of conscious well-being across a metaphorical landscape which can only be traversed through moral behavior. The identity crisis (and philosophers will appreciate the pun) in this line of reasoning requires a quick philosophy lesson to spy out. The law of identity in classical logic dictates, in brief: If A= B, then A and B must be exactly the same thing. Applying the same rule of logic to the Harris' Moral Landscape, his entire argument hinges on the idea that

141- Peter Foster, Sam Harris' Brave New World, National Post (October 9'h 201 0)

276 ILWGICAL ATHEISM the paths along the continuum of conscious happiness are identical with moral behavior. If they are not, then that would mean that the territories of conscious well­ being and morality are a bit like the nations of Palestine and Israel: whilst they might bear some semblance of one another to the ignorant observer, they are nonetheless exclusive, and in most cases conflicting. In order for Harris' thesis to succeed, the peaks of conscious well-being across the moral landscape should only be accessible through objective moral goodness, by which we are also to infer that anything conducive to the well-being of conscious creatures is, by definition, moral. In a 2011 debate at the University ofNotre Dame, Harris made gave rather dismissive answer to the crucial question put to him by his interlocutor. And the answer to the question struck upon the major deficiency of his own argument more than the question itself:

What does human well-being actually mean? 142 And it would indeed be a stupid question if there was even the slightest indication that what has to be for the well-being of one is necessarily equivalent across the Moral Landscape. Well-being is a value judgment, not a scientific judgment - a fact which excludes science from the very premises of the Harriss ian thesis. I dare say that if utter happiness were such a straightforward thing, 142- Craig v Harris, Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural, University ofNotre Dame, Indiana (April2011)

277 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM the vast majority of the developed world would not be fumbling about trying to figure out what it could possibly be. But the way Harris sidetracks this problem is not by attempting to define things he knows absolutely to be for the well-being of conscious life. Instead, he plays on more a more macabre emotional chord, appealing to states of absolute misery which only an utter fool would try to portray as affording some kind of silver-lining of contentment. Hence, if such states of conscious torment might be deemed the proverbial troughs of the Moral Landscape, then the peaks of conscious well-being would seem to logically follow. Even though the little thought experiment doesn't really tell us anything about what conscious well-being really is other than what it might not be, I cannot help but note the subtle suggestion that conscious misery is more within the reaches of our intuitions than conscious well-being. For the purposes of what I would like to argue, it is important to remember that on this view, moral behavior must be necessarily and inextricably linked to the end of being happy, and that happiness must be, by implication, an epiphenomenon- a material state of the brain. As true as it is that states of happiness and misery are conscious states - which is as useful as the assertion cogito ergo sum- that moral behavior is, at the best of times, directly conducive to my own well-being would be a considerable stretch of logic, especially considering the vast number

278 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM of factors completely independent of both one's mental states and one's morality, not to mention that the very conscious satisfaction derived from a moral act for the sheer fact that it is a moral act presumes the correctness ofthe morality by which that same satisfaction had been gleamed. For it would be a strange kind of morality which was only ever conducive to conscious pain, but not nearly as strange as a morality that always results in conscious euphoria. Now, there are two immediate problems. The first is that there are strong philosophical reasons to believe that science can never conceivably penetrate the barrier which definitively reveals that some particular neural event is equal to human happiness, as though some neuroscientist would, in the not-too-distant future, find himself tracing the line of some straggling synapse across his radiographic rendition of a human cerebrum, crying out "Hark! There goes happiness!"143 Still, let us assume that conscious well-being is a subject which shall one day afford complete scientific description. It seems to me that that confronts us with a further problem. And the problem is this: that if science will one day determine all patterns of conscious well-being, it also follows that moral behavior would cease to be a matter of much importance. assuming that as much as states of well- 143- Highly Reccommend; David Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness. Oxford University Press. (2010); also see work by J.P. Moreland

279 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM being are observable, they are also accessible, and thus liable to manipulation. In other words, if material processes are synonymous with human happiness, then it should one day be possible for the end of happiness itself to be as achievable by delicate material adjustments as it would by moral behavior. It is not nearly absurd as it should be, on Harris' vision, to imagine a world where humans felt nothing but conscious ecstasy as they tore one another limb from limb. It might even be their greatest pleasure, so long as they were determined to think so by some careful neural re-modification. To have ethics effectively rendered redundant by this sort of human intervention not only negates the necessary correlation between morality and happiness, but should also cause us to ponder as to which alternative future man would be more likely to select if he were indeed given the choice: to eradicate all his woes with some mind-altering drug, or to confront them, which is itself a moral question. I might add that this is not entirely science-fiction. Now, the moral optimist might say: "Ah, but that isn't really happiness!" to which my reply would be that we have come right back to the philosophical bedrock with the shovel of the same stupid question: What does happiness really amount to? Whatever the answer; if the same scientific method

280 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM is apt to understand happiness, is it not also apt to manufacture it? The illustration raises a further problem for the person wishing to argue, as I would, that it would be morally reprehensible to afford a mass murderer the benefit of some drug that would dull all the pain of guilt and remorse, assuming he had any. But, to that extent, what could Harris possibly argue? That it would be an insult to the grieving families of his victims? We should say they might be extended the same drug. That it would be an insult to the victims themselves? We should say they are dead, and care not one whit for the insults of the living. But there is a far more damning blow to the Moral Landscape thesis, and the most recurrent of all the philosophical objections brought against it. On page 190 of his book, Harris makes an extremely telling admission: "It is also conceivable that a science of human flourishing could be possible, and yet people could be made equally happy by very different "moral" impulses. Perhaps there is no connection between being good and feeling good-and, therefore, no connection between moral behavior (as generally conceived) and subjective well-being. In this case, rapists, liars, and thieves would experience the same depth ofhappiness as the saints. This scenario stands the greatest

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chance of being true, while still seeming quite far­ fetched. Neuroimaging work already suggests what has long been obvious through introspection: human cooperation is rewarding. However, if evil turned out to be as reliable a path to happiness as goodness is, my argument about the moral landscape would still stand, as would the likely utility of neuroscience for investigating it. It would no longer be an especially "moral" landscape; rather it would be a continuum of well-being, upon which saints and sinners would occupy equivalent peaks. " 144 The flippancy of his concluding sentence almost makes it seem as if he does not believe the scenario poses a problem for his thesis at all. I should point out, as others have already pointed out, that the scenario that Harris himself describes, if true, falsifies his theory quite irrevocably, unless he himself were to conduct his own careful search for some silver lining of conscious misery in the mind of the vicious rapist who takes such pleasure in his work. I might add that there is very little far­ fetched about it, as Harris himself admits in the earlier pages of the same book: "As a personality disorder, psychopathy has been so sensationalized in the media that it is difficult to research it without feeling that one is pandering, 144- Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape. Free Press (2010), Kindle Locations p.l90

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either to oneself or to ones audience. However, there is no question that psychopaths exist, and many of them speak openly about the pleasure they take in terrorizing and torturing innocent people. The extreme examples, which include serial killers and sexual sadists, seem to defy any sympathetic understanding on our parts. Indeed, if you immerse yourself in this literature, each case begins to seem more horrible and incomprehensible than the last. " 145 If the multiple incongruities between those two excerpts do not leap out at the reader, they should. It has been estimated that around three million people in the USA alone are psychopathic, 146 which is to say that those three million people are either indifferent to the suffering they inflict on others, or revel in it. (Incidentally, another generally accepted feature of the psychopath is a natural propensity toward amoralism, 147 a point worth noting in light ofthe previous chapter.) One needn't even appeal to such extremes. One need only observe, or recall, the social dynamics of schoolchildren and the enormous joy they derive from preying on the 145 - Ibid. Kindle Locations p. 97 146- Estimation of Dr. Robert Hare, one of the principal authorities on criminal psychology in North America 147- Michael Koenigs, Michael Kruepke, Joshua Zeier and Joseph P. Newman, Utilitarian Moral Judgment in Psychopathy, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access (July 2011) via; http://k:oenigslab.psychiatry.wisc.edu/pdfs/Koenigs%20 SCAN%20psychopathy%20moral%20judgment.pdf, p. 1

283 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM defenseless, often resulting in irreparable psychological damage on the part of the victim which, provided his persecutors escape the wrath of their schoolmasters, does not seem to cause them any discernible long-term . . conscwus pam. Incidentally, this phenomenon also applies to moral goods. Is it really not to be conceived that the metaphorical valleys of conscious suffering on the moral landscape can be occupied by morally good people? This seems to me to be not only plausible but obvious. We can conceive of a man who would readily put his life in manifest jeopardy in order to save the lives of his comrades with no guarantee of long-term happiness for his actions. Moral behavior is not, at the best of times, conducive to the benefit of the moral agent. Indeed, righteousness itself depends on it, and many theologians have argued this as the reason for the divine veil. If it is the case, as it seems to be, that the peaks of conscious well-being on the Moral Landscape can be occupied by the most morally reprehensible among us, then the laws of good and evil in Harris' fictitious world of happy do-gooders are just that; a fantasy. The Moral Landscape becomes just another hedonistic terrain of whatever arbitrary actions are conducive to the satisfaction of the agent. At this point, one might usher in the utilitarian element

284 ILWGICAL ATHEISM to try and salvage the thesis, such that it is the collective peaks of well-being of conscious creatures that is to be taken is the end of morality, in which case there is little to distinguish Harris' argument from the most standard utilitarian theories, which do not function on an atheistic worldview at any rate. For there is absolutely no sufficient reason whatsoever for the atheist to value the well-being of others, at least insofar as it effects his own well-being. And to insist that he does, which he might, would be as arbitrary and contrived as his taking up the practice of self-flagellation for the purposes of proving the facetious point that atheists can do it too. But once his point has been made, in the end he will realize that his pains were in fact quite pointless. Thus we are left with what most of us already knew; that morality is not quite as simple as a set of empirical statements about which action is conducive to overall happiness. Of course this is not to say moral inquiry cannot or should not be informed by science. And it is not to be assumed that pointing out the banality that science cannot give us the ultimate foundations for this most crucial of existential questions is in any way anti­ scientific. I would like to add that none of the arguments I have presented, nor the claims I have made, delve into the very definition of human well-being, itself a philosophical burden of herculean proportions.

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Chapter 21 Secular Skeletons: Setting the Bloody Record Straight

"It has appeared to a good many intelligent and well-informed people quite as probable that the experience of the savages has been that ofa decline from civilization. Most of those who criticize this view do not seem to have any very clear notion of what a decline from civilization would be like. Heaven help them, it is likely enough they will soon find out ... "

G .K. Chesterton

In the 20th century novel When it Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy, Guy Thorne tells the tale of an aristocratic Jew named Constantine Schaub and his cunning plan to destroy Christianity by staging the discovery of Christ's body in a Middle-Eastern tomb. As the story goes; once the news spreads, darkness descends over the world and humankind is left in complete disarray, plunged into a crisis unprecedented in history. Needless to say, Christopher Hitchens never cited Thorne's novel to demonstrate what life without God would be like, but

286 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM to give his audiences leave to reflect on the absurdity of the notion. And, to the mind of the middle-class western man, the idea would indeed seem absurd. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great chronicler of the Soviet Union, understood that a decline of religiosity does not result in the dismantling of a people overnight. In Soviet Russia it took decades of active, systematic sabotage of Orthodox Christianity and the institution of the state-centered religion - at its core an atheistic religion - before Marxism could culminate into the butchery of more than twenty million of its citizens. And the fate of dozens of nations that followed the same discernible pattern across the previous century is so evident that to attempt to deny it is to cross the threshold of intellectual dishonesty into the sort of blatant lies and deception which gives much weight to the whole idea of the daemonic. In that regard, the New Atheists have become the main contenders of the Holocaust Denial Lobby for the most unapologetic rewriters of history in recent years. Consider virtually every single one of the most murderous regimes in recent history: Revolutionary France, TheCallesregimeinMexico, Stalin and the USSR, Mao and the PRC, Pol Pot and the Khamer Rouge, Kim Il Sung and the DPRK, Ceausescu in Romania, Hoxha in Albania, Milosevic in Bosnia and Srebrenica and so

287 ILWGICAL ATHEISM the list goes on. Is a common denominator among these scarlet blotches on mankind's recent history really not to be deduced? Is it sheer coincidence that the primary objective of every single one of the most contemptible tyrants in the last century has been a thoroughgoing commitment to the expulsion of God? It is a shame that we must be brought to the point of dignifying the inexcusable and religiously-motivated obliviousness to this bloody period in our relatively recent past for the sake of crimes committed centuries before. "Stalin was an atheist," writes Mr. Dawkins, "and Hitler probably wasn't; but even if he was, the bottom line ofthe Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism. " 148 This sad argument sums up the New Atheist absolution of the blood-sodden history of complete social secularization. In the very next sentence, Dawkins goes on to blame all of Hitler and Stalin's crimes on a "dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism" (leaving aside that Hitler was actually viciously opposed to Marxian 149 socialism, Marx himself being a Jew. ). It seems he is as oblivious to Marxian theory as he is to everything 148- Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 378 149- George Sylvester Vierek interviews Adolf Hitler (October 3'd 1923), republished in Liberty magazine 1932

288 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM else. The death of God was as about as attendant to Marx's ideology as sugar to a sweet dessert. But then this supreme display of ignorance should come as little surprise given that Dawkins knows as much about history and political theory as he does about philosophy. Marx did not merely regard religion as a sort of useless nonsense - the preserve of the unenlightened. The word he used was "opiate". That word was carefully chosen. Stalin, Hitler and Mao, like Marx viewed religion as a pestilence, and a fundamental obstacle to social and political progress which, at all costs, had to be eliminated ... Does all this sound very familiar? This New Atheist folklore has cut in the other direction as well. Christopher Hitchens, in particular, has been more than happy to portray the end of tyranny, the emergence of free societies and all the emergent virtues of the recent centuries: equality, freedom and the inviolability ofhuman rights, as the political offshoots of a secularist revolution, as though we owe gratitude for the fundamental tenets of western civilization to a long tradition of benign atheists. Yet it is through the frivolous use of the word "freedom" - frequently a tool in the hands of the modem rebel - that all the other tenets have been steadily sabotaged - principles that were equally fundamental, and virtually all of which were the preserve of traditional religion. It really does seem that since the abolition of God, the ongoing

289 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM plight of secular social theorist has been to reconcile all of his elaborate philosophies with the secretly venerated wisdoms of an ancient Jewish woodworker. The true meaning of secularity in public affairs was and still is a separation of all forms of religious belief from the halls of political power, effectively placing sovereignty in a state of political agnosticism. In the context a free, democratic society, religious belief should then be allowed to flow freely through the state and, eventually, and if it is the will of the masses, up to the seats of political rule. It is popular wisdom that the decline of religiosity in the west is the inevitable consequence of the decline of religious authority. But, that is to underhandedly put the cart before the horse. Secularity in Europe came long before the decline of religion. Religion was not abandoned so much as replaced by the new-and-improved philosophies that have filled the agnostic vacuum left in the wake of secularization. It would be a gross and even dangerous misconception to confuse secularity, properly understood, with the weaving of a holistically atheistic/naturalistic belief system into the fabric of society, which is precisely 1 was what all of the most illustrious autocrats of the 20 h century attempted to do. We can agree that politically imposing any one belief-system on society is always wrong; however, never before in history has this exercise proven as apocalyptic as the project of state atheism.

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21.1 Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite ... Sang

"Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name ... "

Madame Roland, as she was led to the guillotine.

Late 18th century Revolutionary France marked the introduction of an all-new and all-bloody utopian pattern which would repeat itself again and again during the two succeeding centuries, and the fervent commitment to the complete dechristianisation of France was about no mere historical appendage to the Revolution. 150 The driving force behind the French Elite who sanctioned the guillotining, bludgeoning, imprisonment and torture of the tens of thousands was "reason replacing religion", 151 and it might even be said that birth of modern atheism itself was solemnized by the mass bloodshed of the French Revolution. The very word 150- David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, Christopher R. Guidry, Peter F. Crossing, World Christian Trends, "AD 30-AD 2200, p. 230-246 via; http://www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/documents/ WCT_Martyrs_Extract.pdf 151- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Hackett (1987) p. 33-38

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"atheism" was coined in late 16th century France, and it was in the years immediately preceding the revolution that the Baron Pierre d'Holbach published his famous treatise System de !a Nature, regarded by many as the first "Atheist Bible" on scientific materialism for the modem western world. 152 Baron d'Holbach met his end a few short months prior to the storming of Bastille. In the five years succeeding, one of the leading lights behind the height of the mass culling in 1793-94 was the infamous Hebert-Cloots atheist faction; the 'Cult of Reason'; which had remained the primary state religious authority long enough to sanction the genocides of about one hundred and seventy thousand peasants and clerics in the Vendee; 153 pegged by some historians as the very first genocide of the modem era. The Vendee had been the most deeply Christian region in France at the time, and the strong adherence of its people to the Catholic religion had kept it largely isolated from the bloodbath of the revolution right up until the Cult of Reason ascended to power shortly after the September Massacres in which some 300 clerics were slaughtered in the streets of Paris. 154 This brief era of absolute state 152- Baron d'Holbach advocated the philosophy of scientific materialism and determinism, among other new atheist toward the fear-induced 'poison' of religion. 153- Alister E. McGrath, The Twilight ofAtheism, Random House (2006) p. 45; 154- The 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, Wars ofthe Vendee available at; http://www.l911 encyclopedia.org/Wars_Of_ The_

293 ILWGICAL ATHEISM atheism in France coincided with the infamous year-long period of the revolution known as the Reign of Terror and the extravagant death tolls for that abysmal year alone are between forty and fifty times larger than what the Spanish Inquisition had managed over the course of about four centuries. One of the more intriguing individuals around that horrific interlude was a devotee ofMonsieur Robespierre, the notorious anti-theist and military commandant, Jean-Baptiste Carrier- a man reported to have relished in the brutal execution of clergymen and the religious devout. 155 Carrier had also made a name for himself across France for systematized execution; particularly the Vendee POWs in Nantes, as one historian writing from post-revolutionary France reports: "Carrier had at first instituted a revolutionary commission for trying the Vendeans and the Nantese. He caused the Vendeans to be shot, and the Nantese to be guillotined. He soon found this formality too tedious, and the expedient of shooting was attended with inconveniences. This form of execution was too slow; it was troublesome to bury the bodies. They were frequently left on the scene of carnage... The Loire, which runs through Nantes, suggested a horrible idea

Vendee 155- Marie Joseph L. Adolphe Thiers, The History ofthe French Revolution, tr. Frederick Shoberl Vol. III (1836) p. 425-426

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to Carrier, namely to rid himself of the prisoners by drowning them in that river. He made a.first trial, loaded a barge with 90 priests, upon pretext of transporting them to some other place, and ordered it to be sunk at some distance from the city. Having devised this expedient, he resolved to employ it on a large scale. He no longer employed the mock formality of sending the prisoners before a commission; he ordered them to be taken in the night out of the prisons in parties of one and two hundreds, and put into boats. By these boats, they were carried to small vessels prepared for this horrible purpose. The miserable wretches were thrown into the hold; the hatches were nailed down; the avenues to the deck were closed with planks; the executioners then got into the boats, and carpenters cut holes with hatches in the sides ofvessels and sunk them. In this frightful manner, four or five thousand persons were destroyed... Carrier drowned not only men, but a great number of children and women also. When the Vendean families were dispersed, after the catastrophe ofSavenai, a great number ofNantese had taken children of theirs, with the intention of bringing them up. "They are wolfwhelps" said Carrier. Most ofthese unfortunate children were drowned. " 156 This was not some remote instance marking the low-point of a new and secularized France either. 156- Ibid. p. 428-429

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Unfortunately, there are enough of these repulsive anecdotes to fill five volumes of Madame Thiers' work, which I recommend to anyone who would like to know the precise secular menage in which atheistic child of the Enlightenment was reared. Political atheism had been the overture to the bloodiest period of the revolution which set the new wave of "secular values" washing over continental Europe. Oh but fret not; for even the thousands upon thousands of corpses that littered the streets of the Vendee are but an aperitif to what was to unfold in the atheist name just over a century later.

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21.2 Los Cristeros

In the bigger scheme of things, I suppose one might call the Cristeros a brief interlude at best.

One of the most overlooked tyrants of the early 2Q1h century was former Mexican President and military commander Plutarco Elias Calles; a militant atheist and anti-cleric whose fierce opposition to Christianity during the Mexican Revolution sparked the widely forgotten 157 Cristero Rebellion , the subject of Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory. Calles' attempts at dechristianisation gently eased into the assassination of clerics after he stripped them of all their most basic rights, requisitioned all Church property, sabotaged Church education and, of course, instituted a violently-enforced materialist philosophy in its place. 158

Calles' political maneuvers were not too dissimilar from what the world might have expected from a 1933 Secular Humanist agenda. In public schools no classroom was allowed to display religious symbols, or to make any reference to Christianity, and on pain of imprisonment and possible summary execution, teachers were also made to

157- Anthony James Joes, Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counter-Insurgency, KUP (2006) p. 68- 158- Ibid.; Wilfrid Parsons, Mexican Martyrdom, McMillan (1936) p. 231-233

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"I declare that I am an atheist, an irreconcilable enemy ofthe Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion, that I will endeavor to destroy it, detaching consciences from the bonds ofany religious worship and that I am ready to fight the clergy anywhere and wherever it will be necessary" 159

But Calles went to much greater lengths to scare his people into the adoption of Marxist ideology, especially those living in Mexico's most deeply religious districts. There is a notorious photograph which was taken just off the railway line in Jalisco, along the entire length of which the bodies of executed Christians had been strung up on telephone poles as a warning to anyone who dared to fight for the conservation of "primitive superstition" .160

Death tolls during the Calles autocracy were as high as 90,000, about a third of which were Cristero rebels. Several clerics and religious affiliates had been executed in cold blood by Calles activists, and the persecution didn't stop at the end of the rebellion either. After the end of Calles official tenure in Mexican office, the Church was reduced to less than a quarter of its original size. Most Mexican clerics had either been exiled or assassinated. 159- Wilfrid Parsons, Mexican Martyrdom, McMillan (1936) p. 233 160- Museo Nacional Cristero, Cristeros colgados de pastes de luz en Jalisco (1927)

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Despite all this, the Cristero's story remains a forgotten article of history, largely overshadowed by all the other ruthless regimes budding at the time; virtually all of which emerged from the same anti-theistic political subsoil as the Calles regime.

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21.3 The G-4

"Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number ofold people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that s why all this has happened. " Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes ofmy own toward the effort ofclearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to say: "Men have forgotten God; that s why all this has happened. "161

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

Mikhail Bulgakov wrote his famous satire The Master and Margarita, just as complete state atheism had been instituted along with the rise of a Soviet order, and it is interesting how the sorcerer, Woland - Bulgakov's incognito human manifestation of Satan- goes about his 161- Edward E. Ericson Jr., Solzhenitsyn- Voice from the Gulag, Eternity (October 1985) p. 23-24

302 ILWGICAL ATHEISM work eliciting all the vice in the hearts of the Moscovian bourgeoisie. 162 For Bulgakov, the Devil seemed to work with frightening ease on the consciousness of a people blinded to his looming presence, a hauntingly prophetic image of what was to befall his people a few short decades after his death. So vigorous was the anti­ theist enforcement in Soviet Russia that Bulgakov's masterpiece was only published in 1967, some three decades after it was written. We needn't indulge in an act so gratuitous as to recount the various methodical genocides across mid- 20th century Eastern Europe, many of which were committed with purely anti-religious scope. 163 We must be responsible enough to assume that the widespread atheistic dominance of political rule in the most shattered and desolated regions of the world were no fortuitous event. First came Mao in China, then Kim il-Sung in North Korea, and finally the butcher of the Cambodian killing fields, Pol Pot, whom, along with Stalin, would go on to form the big-four of Marxist's legacy of a new and godless state; combining to form a mortality statistic so prodigious that every death ever perpetrated under the banner of all of the Crusades combined over all two­ hundred years, amounts to about an average month in the 162 - Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trns. Michael Karpelson, Wordsworth Classics (20 11) 163- I highly recommend; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Harper & Row, (1973)

303 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM history of the USSR and their counterparts in the political pool of state atheism. 164 This is not to mention other minor atheist regimes; like the Enver Hoxha's regime in Albania during the 60s and 70s. 165 Article 37 of the 1976 Albanian state constitution under Hoxha read as every other political agenda of its kind: "The state recognizes no religion, and supports atheistic propaganda in order to implant a scientific materialistic world outlook in our people." One conservative author sums up the New Atheist disposition to these stark historical particulars as well as anybody might: "Apparently it was just an amazing coincidence that every Communist of historical note publicly declared his atheism ... The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined. The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182, 716 times worse on an annual basis

164- See; Dimitry Pospielovsky, A History ofMarxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Antireligious Policies, Palgrave Macmillan (1987) 165 - See; James S. O'Donnell, A Coming ofAge: Albania under Enver Hoxha, New York (1999)

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than Christianity :S worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition. It is not only Stalin and Mao who were so murderously inclined, they were merely the worst of the whole Hell-bound lot. For every Pol Pot whose infamous name is still spoken with horror today, there was a Mengistu, a Bierut, and a Choibalsan, godless men whose names are nowforgotten everywhere but in the lands they once ruled with a red hand. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, butfifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks ofcausation. " 166

It is shameful that we must be driven to molesting the tragic stories of those unfortunate religious recluses of old Soviet society, slaughtered by the millions, either actively or through systematic starvation, their putrefying and mutilated corpses allowed to deteriorate in labor camps; and many of them for their rejection of a proto­ Dawkjns Soyjet credo of militant atheism. 167 It would 166- Vox Day, The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Holy Trinity ofDawkins, Harris and Hitchens, BenBella Books (2008) p. 163- 164 167- John Anderson, Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States, Cambridge University Press (1994)p. 72-73 (The Story ofNikolai Khmara)

305 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM be helpful to note all this in light of the words of Sam Harris, with which we opened this fourth book. It has been said by the New Atheists that Soviet atheism could not possibly be classified as religion, since it had no institutional presence, yet we find that in 1963 the Soviet Party's Ideological Commission under Khrushchev established, among other organizations, the 168 so-called "Institute for Scientific Atheism" - a kind

1 of mid-20 h century Soviet Project Reason if you will. Atheism was not only institutionalized in the USSR, it was brutally prescribed. This, incidentally, happens to have been the case all across the Eastern Sphere. What was going through the heads of these so-called "non­ astrologers" and "non-alchemists" whose lack-of-belief could drive them to such revolting ends in the name of so-called "non-faith"? The atheist state of China under Mao Zedhong during the 60s Cultural Revolution followed the same pattern, beginning with the tearing down of thousands ofBuddhist and Taoists temples, easing into the usual business of oppression, harassment, abduction, incarceration, torture and murder of religious practitioners. Tibetan clergy were made to destroy their own monasteries on pain of execution at the suit of the atheist state. 169 Many of them 168 - Ibid. p. 39 169 - Dan Smyer Yu, Delayed contention with the Chinese Marxist scapegoat complex: re-membering Tibetan Buddhism in the PRC, The Tibet Journal 32.1 (2007)

306 ILWGICAL ATHEISM perished for their refusal to do so. North Korea followed a more or less congruent chronology, as did every other regime instituting systematized atheism around the same period. The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot was particularly merciless in its hasty dispatch of those seen engaging in religious practice. 170 Of the 3 million estimated to have been wiped out in the Cambodian killing fields, you might assume that none were given special treatment for religious affiliation. As one political commentator relates: "One estimate is that out of 40,000 to 60,000 monks only 800 to 1, 000 survived to carry on their religion. We do know that of 2, 680 monks in eight monasteries, merely seventy were alive in 1979. As for the Buddhist temples that populated the landscape of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge destroyed 95 percent of them, and turned the few remaining into warehouses or allocated them for some other degrading use. Amazingly, in the very short span of a year or so, the small gang of Khmer Rouge wiped out the center of Cambodian culture, its spiritual incarnation, its institutions .... As part of a planned genocide campaign, the Khmer Rouge sought out and killed other minorities, such as the Moslem Cham. In the district of Kompong Xiem, for example, they demolished jive Cham hamlets and

170 - Patrick Raszelenberg, ( 1999), The Khmers Rouges and the Final Solution, History & Memory (1999) Vol. 11 iss. 2, p. 62

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reportedly massacred 20,000 that lived there; in the district of Koong Neas only four Cham apparently survived out of some 20, 000. The Cham Grand Mufti was thrown into boiling water and then hit on the head with an iron bar; the First Mufti was beaten to death and thrown into a ditch; the Second Mufti was tortured and disemboweled; and the chairman of the Islamic Association ofKampuchea died ofstarvation in prison. In total, nearly half- about 125,000- ofall the Cham in the country were murdered. " 171 These regimes were united in their common goal of creating an imperious society with sufficient grit to go above and beyond themselves, to substitute the opium of religion for the steroid of a doctrinaire materialism. There has since been no greater contributor to all of humanity's woes than the worldview which, by some grave and completely incidental misfortune, has managed to find itself at the bottom of every one of our most grotesque displays of inhumanity.

171 - R.J. Rummel, Death By Government, Transaction (2009) p. 187-188

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309 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

21.4 Hitler, Mussolini and other "Christians"

"It is not desirable that the whole of humanity should be stultified- and the only way ofgetting rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little. A movement like ours mustn't let itself be drawn into metaphysical digressions... I especially wouldn't want our movement to acquire a religious character and institute a form ofworship. It would be appalling for me. " 172 Adolf Hitler, the "Christian"

A surefire symptom ofN ew Atheist indoctrination is the increasingly pervasive belief that the Nazi campaign was somehow spurred on and even motivated by Christianity, and sanctioned by the Catholic Church. This twisted interpretation of history has been pressed most brazenly in the gospel according to Christopher Hitchens, 173 and has come in part due to the Vatican's apparent silence through the atrocities of WWII, supposedly out of some psychotic anti-Semitic agenda. 172- Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed, Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944. Trans. N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens (3rd ed.). Engima Books (2000) p. 61 173- Hitchens, God is Not Great, "Religion Kills", "Does Religion make People Behave better?"

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· Every time this theory is espoused, more than a few facts are eluded, and more still are fabricated. Whilst some misconceptions might be excusable on grounds of ignorance or misinformation, the fact that the Vatican had been located smack-bang in the heart of former fascist territory, not three blocks away from Mr. Mussolini, is no minor oversight. It seems to have gone completely unnoticed by the New Atheist historians that innocents were being butchered by the millions right on the Vatican's doorstep, and it is doubtful that Catholics would have been shown mercy if the Church had dared to oppose the fascist agenda. One would assume that an open proclamation against fascism would have been politically unwise for the Roman Pontiff to say the least. However, the embellished accusations against Roman Catholicism are nothing compared to the colossal abstractions deduced from a few splinters of religiosity scattered across the pages of history. Lest we forget that Hitler was, after all, vying to take hold of a nation comprising a sizeable contingent of German Christians, a superficial pledge to the religion of the people probably had more to do with convincing them that God was for him and his victory, rather than the other way around. The death of the Christian God was something the Nazis saw as a natural consequence once their grand scheme eventually reached its fruition. 174 Certainly,

17 4 -Supra (no. 55)

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Hitler believed in a god: a warrior god, an Aryan god - the god he thought to be the most appropriate object of worship for the relentless race he sought to rear from the intellectual cradle of the Nietzschean Superman, 175 and an image that would eventually merge with the Fuhrer himself. Hitler's mission was to become a deity, not to worship one. God was a means, not an end. And far from being essential to fascist ideology, Christianity was a kind poison - a dangerously pacifistic nonsense that threatened to undermine the militarist thrust behind the entire Nazi campaign. 176

"You see, it :S been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity, with its meekness andflabbiness ?" 177

It is overwhelmingly more plausible that a long-term Christian influence was never in the books for the Nazis, even thou~h there were some attempts to reevaluate 175 - See; Alan Bullock; Hitler, a Study in Tyranny; HarperPerennial Edition (1991) 176- Encyclopedia Britannica Online: Fascism- Identification with Christianity via http://www.britannica.com/EBcheckedl topic/20221 0/fascisrn/219389/Identification-wi th-Christianity 177 -Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Simon and Schuster p. 95

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Christianity to suit the Nazi ideal. 178 Any appeals to a Higher Power were made with the scope of political leverage, that their people that they might pledge their labors to the patronage of a militant divinity. 179 The most robust evaluation of the situation given by one historian is that: "For political considerations [Hitler] restrained his anti-clericalism, seeing clearly the dangers of strengthening the Church by persecution. Once the war was over he promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches. " 180 Let us not forget that the political dangers of any dictatorship opposing Christianity had been confirmed by the Calles regime. There is no doubt that Benito Mussolini was a staunchly affirmed atheist and anti-cleric, 181 yet even he made attempts to win the support of the Catholic Church in order to garner his steadily dwindling support toward the final years of his dictatorship. What ofthe Vatican's "support" offascist expansionism - a view of which Hitchens had been so steadfast in his many historically muddled oratories? First of all, the

178 - The Deutsche Christen Cult 179 - Supra (no. 58) 180- Supra (no. 59) p.291 181 -Despite Christopher Hitchens' blatant inaccuracies about Mussolini 's religious affiliations

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Catholic Church was no more a friend of Mussolini than he was of them; that is an easily discernible fact from any reading of a Mussolini biography. But as for this conspiracy-theoretical baloney that Hitler and the Pope were essentially two peas in a pod; that myth stems, largely, from a well-known piece of sensational journalism by a non-historian atheist and long-time anti-cleric named John Cornwell in his bestselling book entitled Hitler s Pope (1999). Hitchens' take on the role of the Church in WW-II gives the impression that all his information on the subject of Pope Pius' relationship with the fascists might well have come from Cornwell's book. So warped and convoluted was Cornwell's prejudiced and anti-historical account, it attracted a moving written response from a Jewish Rabbi (and actual historian) Prof. David G. Dalin: The Myth of Hitler s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis. Among Dalin's many accounts of the gratitude expressed by the Jewish community for the Church's clandestine aid of Jewish fugitives from the Nazi death camps was a 1945 address from Rabbi Herzog to Pope Pius: "The people ofIsrael will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles ofreligion, which form the very foundation of true civilization, are doing for our

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unfortunate brothers and sisters in this most tragic hour ofour history, which is living proof ofdivine providence in this world. " 182 Of course we find the Cornwell myth tapestried all across the world-wide-web by the only community of loonies ardent enough to support it, even when the negative critical reception of Cornwell's anti-historical work was so strong that the author himself felt compelled to publish a retraction in 2004 of the same case he had made five years earlier. 183 Even Einstein voiced his gratitude for the Church's attempts at intervention in Nazi affairs, 184 as did the chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, and the Israeli foreign minister, Golda Meir. 185 You would assume there would have been a more incensed outcry from Jewish circles if there were even a shadow 182- Rabbi David C. Dalin, The Myth ofHitler s Pope, Regnery (2005) 183- "The Papacy", The Economist, December 9, 2004, p. 82- 83; "I would now argue, in the light of the debates and evidence following 'Hitler s Pope', that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel ofMussolini and later occupied by the Germans ... But even if his prevarications and silences were performed with the best of intentions, he had an obligation in the postwar period to explain those actions." 184- Einstein's exact words: "Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and mora/liberty. " (Dalin, The Myth ofHitler s Pope) 185- Ibid.

315 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM of truth to the malicious lie circulated and promoted exclusively by the New Atheist heralds. The only other sub-culture that supports the mythos of Catholic Church anti-Semitic oppression are the same Neo-Nazi political cultists who deny the holocaust ever happened at all, the majority of whom, by some magical coincidence, happen to be affirmed anti-Christian atheists. Which ideology could possibly have had the most significant influence on an organization that sought to carry out the extermination of Non-Aryan' primates? Well, there are two contenders: On the one hand we have a belief system which, for all the inadequacies of its leaders, has advocated the eternal sanctity of human life for over four thousand years. On the other hand we have a worldview which postulates that human beings are animated biological machines, that some machines are naturally superior to others, and that the ultimate purpose of all biological machines is to triumph in the struggle for survival . . . and by any means necessary. The poignant words of psychiatrist Victor Frankl, a holocaust survivor, lay testament to the true ideological force behind the Nazi catastrophe: "The gas chambers ofAuschwitz were the ultimate consequence ofthe theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment- or as the Nazi liked to say, of 'blood and soil'. I am absolutely

316 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

convinced that the gas chambers ofAuschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls ofnihilistic scientists and philosophers. " 186 The last thing on Earth that any conscientious human being should do is to ignore a truth so grotesque in order to accommodate the presumptions of his worldview. True, there are atheists and theists alike that are guilty of this, but on the particular subject ofthe last one hundred years of human history, there can be no dispute as to what was merely periphery and what was absolutely central to the atrocities that resulted in the eradication of a quarter of a billion men, women and children. In light of what a few slivers of atheistic thought managed to achieve during its ephemeral dominance in the developed world, the deliberation as to which belief­ system truly poisons everything is not even a deliberation. And it is wicked to treat it as though it is. The residues of religious elements sprinkled across these testaments to the ideological dominance of nihilism should be of minimal concern to the thinking person. It is no more interesting a claim that Benito Mussolini was born a Catholic or that Josef Stalin had been a seminarian than that Richard Dawkins' father was an Anglican, or that 186- Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, (20 10)

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Christopher Hitchens' brother is devout Christian, or that Sam Harris' father is a Jewish Quaker, and to lean on these frugal suggestions in order to excuse unparalleled genocide is worse than wicked. All the death and devastation left after the turn of the millennium ultimately comes down to one incontrovertible judgment: The governing ideology behind every single one of the most malevolent tyrants who characterized the previous century involved the proposition that there was no power greater than their own. And humanity witnessed nothing more and nothing less than the logically inescapable consequence of that proposition. Within the context of an atheist worldview, these men and their entourage had nothing more reasonable to pursue than ultimate power over everything and everyone; because any otherwise "good" intention that may arise from an atheistic conviction is, at the last, completely capricious.

318 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

319 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM Conclusions

Suppose we were to assume that there exists a profound link between the abstract realm of human logic and the realm of the real, such that human behavior, both on the individual level and in the context of large societies intimately reflects the soundness of collectively held beliefs. Suppose we were to make a further assumption that false or illogical beliefs would translate into the sort of behavior in society which we can all agree is bad. We might even say that it inhibits survival or damages the overall wellbeing of conscious life. Atheists are inclined to agree that, on a macrocosmic scale, irrationality and false beliefs should have extremely negative implications on the ability for human beings to coexist harmoniously. If we were to combine those premises and corroborate them with the wretched melody of chaos delivered into the world exclusively by the only true and dogmatically atheistic states throughout history, then we are once again driven to the conclusion I have attempted to argue. I believe it is safe to assume that it is by no misfortunate happenstance that every time a completely secularized and distinctly Godless state of affairs crept into the equation of political order, we saw the same corollaries again and again, and with such swiftness that in a matter of a few years entire nations had been reduced to ruins.

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Contemplate on the observation that whenever we seriously maintain and consistently act upon logically absurd beliefs in any other aspect of our lives, it is almost always bound to lead to absolute disaster. I think it is both fatuous and optimistic to assume that this, the most fundamental of all possible beliefs, is the one exception to that rule. On the off chance that I have not completely ostracized one or two enraged stragglers from the atheist camp, I'd like to extend my sincerest gratitude and respect for following me until this point, and in return I would like to offer a few words of advice, as a long-time witness and former adherent to the secular tradition, from lecture halls to coffee tables. I would encourage you to follow the evidence where it leads, with an open mind and an open heart. Be wary of anyone who would beguile you into believing you have an enemy, and who would thwart your aspirations to search for the real truth. Make it a rule that anyone who promises intellectual fulfillment is likely to be full of a great many things, and intellect is certainly not one of them. Be universally skeptical, not selectively cynical. Embrace dissonance and make your hearts and minds malleable for modification, if it is really truth that you are after. And finally, if at the end of all that, you find yourself absolutely certain of what you think you know, then you haven't done it right. Go back and try again. Ifthere is anything I cannot stress enough,

321 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM it is the supreme value of doubt and all the evils of certainty. It is my firm belief that when assessed honestly, bereft of the effects of barren rhetoric, the inquiry cannot logically lead to an atheistic conclusion. If reason is the final arbiter of all knowledge, it is significant that it has rendered our experience fundamentally incompatible with a belief in atheism.

END

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323 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

324 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

Bibliography and Recommended Reading

Books, Journals & Articles

Alan Bullock; Hitler, a Study in Tyranny; HarperPerennial Edition ( 1991)

Alasdair Macintyre- Secularization and Modern Change (1967) Oxford University Press

Albert Einstein & Alice Ca1aprice- The Quotable Einstein (1996); Princeton University Press

Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality, trans. Jagdish Mehra, World Scientific Pub, First Edition (1999)

Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Simon and Schuster (1997)

Aleksandr So1zhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Harper & Row, (1973)

Alister E. McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism, Random House (2006)

Alvin Plantinga- Naturalism Defeated? (2002) Cornell University Press

Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification ofBelief in God, Cornell (1990)

325 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

Andrew Simms, Is Faith Delusion?: Why Religion is Good for You Continuum (2009)

Anthony Flew & Roy Abraham Varghese, There is a God: How the World :S Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (2007); HarperCollins

Anthony James Joes, Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics ofCounter-Insurgency, KUP (2006)

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Trans. Hugh C Lawson-Tancred, Penguin ( 1998)

Aristotle, Physics, Trans. Robin A. Waterfield, Oxford University Press (1999)

Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning ofGenesis (De Genesi ad litteram), trans. John Hammond Taylor (1982) Paulist Press

Bertrand Russell- Is there a God? (1952) Essay

Bertrand Russell on God and Religion with Al Seckel (1986); Prometheus Books

Bo Jinn- The Evolution of War (2013) Divided Line Publications

Branden Fitelson and Elliott Sober, Plantinga :S Probability Arguments Against Evolutionary Naturalism (1997) University ofWisconsin-Madison,

326 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

C.S Lewis- God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, Eerdmans (1970)

Miracles, Fontana (1974)

The Abolition ofMan, Lits (20 10)

Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity/Ethics of Authenticity (1991 ); Harvard University Press

Christopher Hitchens- God is Not Great (2007); Atlantic Books

Churchland, P.(1987). Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience. Journal ofPhilosophy LXXXIV, 544-553

Dan Blazer, Religion/Spirituality and Depression: What Can We Learn From Empirical Studies?, Am J Psychiatry 2012;169:10-12. 10.1176

Dan Smyer Yu, Delayed contention with the Chinese Marxist scapegoat complex: re-membering Tibetan Buddhism in the PRC, The Tibet Journal32.1 (2007)

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell Penguin (2006)

Daniel Goleman- Emotional Intelligence (1996); Bloomsbury Pubishing Social Intelligence (20 11 ); Random House

David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, Christopher R. Guidry, Peter F. Crossing, World Christian Trends, "AD 30-AD 2200, p. 230-246 via; http://www.gordonconwell. edu/resources/documents/W CT_Martyrs_ Extract. pdf

327 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

David Berlinski, The Devil :S Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, Basic (2009)

Dean Nelson- Quantum Leap: How John Polkinghorne Found God in Science and Religion (2011); Lion Hudson PLC

Dimitry Pospielovsky, A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Antireligious Policies, Palgrave Macmillan (1987)

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France , ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Hackett (1987)

Edward E. Ericson Jr., Solzhenitsyn- Voice from the Gulag, Eternity (October 1985)

Emile Durkeim Suicide: A Study in Sociology ( 1897). Translated by Spaulding JA; Simpson G. New York, Free Press, 1951;

Encyclopedia Britannica Online: Fascism -Identification with Christianity via http://www.britannica.com/ EBchecked/topic/20221 0/fascism/219389/Identification­ with-Christianity

Ernst Nagel, Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy, Methodological Issues in Psychoanalytic Theory

Francis Collins- The Language of God: A scientist presents evidence for belief(2006); Free Press

328 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM

Gerald Schroeder, Genesis and the Big Bang, Bantam (1990), Chapter 2: "Stretching Time"

Guy Thorne, When it Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy (1902) [Kessinger (2008)]

Hilaire Beloc, Europe and Faith (1920), 3rct edition, T.A.N books, (1992)

Hippolyte A. Taine, The Origins ofContemporary France Vol. IV The French Revolution Vol. III, Echo Library (2006)

Hitch-22 (2010); Allen & Unwin

Hitler- Mein Kampf (1925) Trans!. Ralph Manheim ( 1998); Houghton Mifflin

Ian McGilchrist- The Master & His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the making of the western world (2010); Yale University Press

Immanuel Kant- Critique of Pure Reason (1855), Translated by J.M.D Meiklejohn (2011); Oxford University Press

Isaac Newton- Principia

J.B.S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and other Papers, (1920)

J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)

James Hannam- The Genesis of Science (2011); Regnery pub.

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Jeffrey L. Bada, Orgins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, Stanley Miller's 70th Birthday 107-112

John Anderson, Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States, Cambridge University Press (1994 )p. 72-73

John Brockman, What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today s Leading Thinkers on Science and the Age of Certainty. Harper Perennial.

John E. Hare, God and Morality: A Philosophical History, Blackwell (2007)

John Farrell, The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaitre, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (2006); Thunder's Mouth Press

John Gresham Machen, Christianity and Culture, Princeton Theological Review, Vol. 11, p. 7 (1913)

John Horgan, Be wary of the righteous rationalist: We should reject Sam Harris' claim that science can be a good moral guidepost, Scientific American (20 10) via http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=be­ wary-of-the-righteous-rationalis-201 0-10-11

John Lennox- God and Stephen Hawking (20 11 ); Lion

John Maynard Smith, Taking a Chance on Evolution, New York Review (June 14th 1990) John Polkinghorne, Science and Theology: An Introduction, Fortress Press (1998)

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Jonathan Barnes- Early Greek Philosophy 2nd Edition (200 1); Penguin Classics

Joseph Bingham, The Science of Bad Philosophy, University of Chicago Conservative Quarterly via; http:// counterpoint. uchicago.edu/morals.html

Jurgen Habermas and Josef Ratzinger- Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (2006); Ignatius Press

Jtirgen Habermas, Time of transitions, "Conversation about God and the World.", Polity Press (2006)

Kai Nielsen, Why Should I Be Moral? American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984)

Kelly, D. (1994) The Art of Reasoning. W W Norton & Company, Inc

Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001); Basic Books

Marie Joseph L. Adolphe Thiers, The History of the French Revolution, tr. Frederick Shober! Vol. Ill (1836)

Matthew J. Baker, Mandy Robbins, Mental Health, Religion & Culture, Vo. 10, Iss. 12, (2013) p. 1077-1084

Max Planck, Where is Science Going? (1932)

Michael Coren, Why Catholics Are Right, McClelland & Steward (20 11)

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Michael Koenigs, Michael Kruepke, Joshua Zeier and Joseph P. Newman, Utilitarian Moral Judgment in Psychopathy, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access (July 2011) via; http:// koenigslab. psychiatry. wise .edu/pdfs/Koenigs%20 SCAN%20psychopathy%20moral%20judgment.pdf,

See; Michael Murray, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Oxford University Press (20 11)

Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on History, Philosophy and Religious Implications, "Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics", Routledge (1993)

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, tms. Michael Karpelson, Wordsworth Classics (2011)

Miller L; Wickramaratne P; Gameroff MJ; Sage M; Tenke CE; Weissman MM; Religiosity and major depression in adults at high risk: a ten-year prospective study. Am. J. Psychiatry 2012; 169:89-94;

Noam Chomsky- Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements ofPropaganda (2002); Seven Stories Press.

Norman H. Baynes, ed., The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: Apri/1922-August 1939. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. (1942)

Ophelia Benson, Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape, Philosopher's Magazine iss. 53.

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Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

Patrick Raszelenberg, ( 1999), The Khmers Rouges and the Final Solution, History & Memory (1999) Vol. 11 iss. 2

Peter Atkins- On being: A Scientists Explanation of the Great Questions of Existence, Oxford University Press (2011)

Peter Foster, Sam Harris' Brave New World, National Post (October 9th 2010), Jules Evans, The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris- Review, The Observer[Guardian] (Sunday 15th April2012)

R.J. Rummel, Death By Government, Transaction (2009)

Rabbi David C. Dalin, The Myth ofHitler s Pope, Regnery (2005)

Ravi Zacharias- The End ofReason, Zondervan (2008)

Richard Dawkins- The God Delusion (2006); Bantam Press

The Blind Watchmaker; (1996) W.WNorton

Richard Swinburne- Is there a God?(l996); Oxford University Press

Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ, Hodder & Stoughton (1967)

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life; Perseus (1995)

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Roger Penrose, The Emperors New Mind, (1989) Penguin

Russell Blackford, Book Review: Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape, JE&T Vol. 21 Iss, 2 (December 201 0) p.53-62

Sam Harris- The End ofFaith (2005); W.W. Norton

The Moral Landscape (20 10); Free Press

Sigmund Freud, The Future ofan Illusion ( 192 7)

Totem and Taboo (1913)

Sir Peter Medowar- The Limits of Science (1988) Oxford University Press

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Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow- The Grand Design (2010); Transworld

Stephen Meyer, Signature in the Cell, Harper-Collins (2009)

Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ed, Hitler s Table Talk 1941-1944. Trans. N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens (3rd ed.). Engima Books (2000)

Vox Day, The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Holy Trinity ofDawkins, Harris and Hitchens, BenBella Books (2008)

Wilfrid Parsons, Mexican Martyrdom, McMillan (1936)

334 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

William Lane Craig- Reasonable Faith (2008); Crossway Books

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335 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

Other Sources

"The Papacy", The Economist, December 9, 2004, p. 82-83

Albanian Constitution 1976

David Brooks, New York Times, 'The Neural Buddhists', May 13th, 2008

George Sylvester Vierek interviews Adolf Hitler (October 3rct 1923), republished in Liberty magazine 193

Jeff Forshaw, Science and Religion United in a Shared Sense of Wonder, The Observer Sunday 28th October 2012

Mark Oppenheimer, The Turning ofan Atheist, New York Times (November 4th 2007)

Michael Zimmerman, Social Darwinism: A Bad Idea with a Worse Name, Huffington Post (14th March 201 0), available at; http://www.huffi.ngtonpost. com/michael-zimmerman/social-darwinism-a-bad­ id b 489197.html

Moving Naturalism Forward (2012) Workshop Video Recordings

337 ILWGICAL ATHEISM

Richard Carrier: Antony Flew Considers God. .. Sort Of(Secular Web, 10 October 2004.)

The 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, Wars of the Vendee available at; http://www.1911 encyclopedia. org/Wars _Of_The_ Vendee

Thornhill, Randy , A Natural History of Rape, Lecture delivered at Simon Fraser University, (March 16, 2001) http://www.d.urnn.edu/clalfaculty/ jharnlin/3925/Readings/Thornhill_on _rape.pdf.

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