ILLOGICAL ATHEISM A Comprehensive Response to the Contemporary Freethinker from a Lapsed Agnostic Bo Jinn ILLOGICAL ATHEISM 2 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM ~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. Cover Illustration: Diogo Lando www.diogolando.com Interior Book Design : Red Raven Should you have any inquiry feel free to contact the author via; Bo.Jinn80'a)Gmail.com Connect with the author at: twitter.com/Boiinn or facebook.com/boiinn Divided Line Publishing™ All rights reserved. 3 ILWGICAL ATHEISM 4 ILWGICAL ATHEISM 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 5 ILWGICAL ATHEISM 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 6 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM 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 7 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM 8 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM BOOK I ORIGINS 9 ILLOGICAL ATHEISM 10 ILWGICAL ATHEISM 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 11 ILWGICAL ATHEISM 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.