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Why I am not an Atheist
“I wanted to believe the Darwinian idea, I chose to believe it. Not because I think there was enormous evidence for it. Nor because I believed it had the full authority to give an interpretation to my origins, but I chose to believe it because it delivered me from trying to find meaning and freed me to my own erotic passions.”
Some few days ago, I was engaged in philosophical argument with some of my friends. They raised a convincing rhetoric and adduced evidence why the idea of a creator is not plausible. I was forced to retreat as I could not counter all of their intelligence; and went into a research to establish the reason why I believe what I believe. So here is my rejoinder.
There are many arenas within which theism and atheism can be addressed. But this is fundamentally a response to my friends’ belief system. I will give four existential reasons for which atheism has no answer, and consider what happens if the conditional statement: If God Doesn’t Exist was true. Although in reality, the statement logically outworks itself.
The question arises. May we define our terms?
‘Atheism’ comes from literally the Greek ‘alpha’ (meaning negative), and ‘Theo’ (meaning God). The statement literally means ‘negative God’ i.e. there is no God. That is what atheism really means. It is not saying ‘I do not think there is a God’, it is not even saying ‘I do not believe there is a God’, it is affirming the non-existence of a God. It affirms a negative. Anyone will recognize that it is a logical contradiction- how can you affirm a negative in the absolute? It would be like me saying to you ‘there is no such thing as a white stone with black dots anywhere in all the galaxies of this universe.’ The only way I can affirm that is if I have unlimited knowledge of this universe. So to affirm an absolute negative is self defeating, because what you are saying is that I have infinite knowledge in order to say to you that there is nobody within finite knowledge. Atheism as a system is self defeating.
Some people have already recognized this and they do a quick step on it. They move on to agnosticism. Agnosticism is very easy to defend; all you have to do is to prove that you do not know. To clarify this point- it is very foolish to say, ‘I know that you cannot know.’ That is also self defeating. But there are honest agnostics out there who would say, ‘I have honestly studied the subject on hand, and I am convinced with the evidences that I have studied, and philosophical issues that I have wrestled with- I do not believe it is really possible to know with certainty if there is a God.’ Now that is a different and a respected type of position. (Refer to my previous article: Case for Agnostics; and Atheists).
These are the four outworking that an atheist has to life with:
If atheism is true, ultimately there is no moral law in this universe, and any moral pronouncements is utilitarian, pragmatic, subjective or emotive. There is no moral law reflective in this universe and anything that deals with good or bad is purely the product of your environment and your culture. Anytime a man lambasts or criticizes religion for having caused bloodshed, it is a legitimate criticism and it is unfortunate. The same people often forget of the bloodshed that has been shed in the name of atheism. Stalin was an avowed atheist; Lenin singularly selected Stalin because of the former’s hatred of things religious. Adolf Hitler personally presented Niche’s atheistic and philosophical book to Benito Mussolini. How then does atheism give someone a moral basis for decision making? Those who study this subject deal with it, and there is a constant contradiction in the value systems.
The second struggle an atheist has to deal with is a problem with no hope. Atheism basically as a personal philosophy offers no ultimate hope. Death is the end of personal existence as we know it. If death is the end of life as we know it, what does it make of justice which is not carried out in our courts of law? What does that make of any ultimate sense of right and wrong?
Without God (i.e. with atheism) there is a complete loss of meaning. There is no point of reference that defines what the meaning of life is all about. In the scientific world, when they deal with the second law of thermodynamics, that things left to themselves move to entropy to hit death…the whole idea is that things don’t move from disorder to order, they move from order to disorder. And if you see how the biological evolution is defended, they defend it by saying that biological parts moved against the entropic stream. That what applied to the whole did not apply to the parts. In meaning, they have reversed the whole thing. In meaning, they tell you that life ultimately has no meaning, it doesn’t apply to the whole but it does apply to the parts. (Give your day to day activities tiny little meanings, so that there are punctuated meanings under an arching overall meaninglessness). Tiny little purposes with no ultimate purpose.
One philosopher said of this conflict we live now, describing the modern man in revolt and the schizoid nature in which he lives. ‘The modern rebel is a skeptic and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be a true revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts anything gets in the way wherever he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind, and the modern man doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. So he writes one book complaining about imperial oppression and superiority of women, then he writes another book, a novel, by which he denounces it himself. He curses because Christian girls lose their virginity, then he curses Mrs. Grandy because they keep it. As a politician he cries out that war is a waste of life, then as a philosopher he argues that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical standards that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bubble, and then he blames the oppressors of Poland or Iceland for taking away that bubble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting where he complains that savages were treated as if they were beasts, and then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes to a scientific meeting where he proves they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic is always engaged in undermining his own mind. In his book on politics, he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics, he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become useless for all purposes of revolt: by rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything.’
Blaise Pascal, the father of modern computing asserted, ‘should a man be in error in supposing the Christian religion to be true, he could not be a loser by mistake. But how irreparable is his loss and how inexpressible his danger who should err in supposing it to be false.’ This argument is purely existential.
If God Doesn’t Exist:
Notice the conditional statement if. If God doesn’t exist what choices may I then make…? If God doesn’t exist what choices am I forced to make and you tell me if it is possible to live logically having made these choices:
You will be forced to mistake man for God. Each person will play a god of himself, and if you make man God, you can be sure it will not be an abstraction such as man becoming God; Some MEN will become God.
You will have to take your body to be your soul. If there is no God, there is no soul, all that is left is the material, and if the material is all you have left, you will have to take your body to be the ultimate and the eternal. You will in the end kill all feelings of nobility and shame. And the only way a person can live with this is with a constant sense of contradiction.
You have to take time to be eternity. It will be no more meaningful to you if a 95 year old died today and a 5 year old passes on too.
About the Author
Nelson Ndalila is an author and a blogger. Follow his blog here.