It's Your Turn, Atheism!

Often in my previous writings, I seem to give an admonishment of sorts to Christians I feel get lazy in their thinking. On the other hand, I think I often give atheists a little bit of an edge when debating. This isn’t because I think atheists are smarter or because atheists have better arguments. It’s generally because I expect more from Christians. Christians should know better. They have a history of placing importance in rational thought with great thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi, and even modern apologeticists like C.S. Lewis. To see a Christian simply not care about the evidence for their faith is mind numbingly frustrating.

However, that being said, this one’s for the atheists out there. I know you’ve been waiting patiently for me to write about you. While I am frustrated with Christians who don’t think logically, at least some of them come straight out and admit that they believe Faith is more important that Reason. They at least say that Reason will never be able show truth in the way Faith can, and Reason is at best a crutch to help us understand what we should be taking on Faith. To these Christians, I tip my cap, say God Bless, and realize that by their own definition, I will never be able to reasonably convince them of differences we may have.

Atheists don’t have this excuse. Atheists usually believe that Reason is much more important than Faith. I’m not talking about agnostics or skeptics: they have a completely different set of issues, which I hope to go into sometime. But a true atheist, who strongly believes God does not exist, has no excuse for faulty reasoning.

The worst part is that when atheists usually commit these logical errors, they do so while berating the idiotic Christians who could believe in “Tooth fairies, unicorns, Santa Claus, and God”. So rather than bash on the Christians who actually live out what they believe, maybe we can go over some of worst arguments I’ve heard atheists use.

“Atheists can be just as good of people as Christians.”

                Do atheists not see how insignificant this point is? Christianity does not claim that Christians are good people. Some Christians may claim they are good, just like I’m sure most people of any religion would. But the fundamental doctrine of Christianity is that “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” The Bible is full of exhortations to Christians to not live an empty faith and to stop the hypocrisy of their lives (look basically anywhere in James or in much of the gospels, to name a couple places). Christians are decidedly not good people. But then again, neither are atheists from a Christian viewpoint, and I feel this may strike the cord harder. If you, as an atheist, feel judged by Christianity, that is likely because you don’t meet up to what we think God’s standards are. It does not mean we think you are a worse person then people already Christians. Christianity is a tool to help the people who need help, and they come from every area of life.

                Besides, how well a group of people carries out their belief hardly is proof of the validity of their belief. Look at the cult of Charles Manson. Its members had strong convictions as to what was true, and they followed those convictions to the bitter end. Does that mean the cult had true beliefs? Not at all. Christians are humans too, and they still make human mistakes. But that does not necessarily invalidate the beliefs they hold.

“The Theory of Evolution/The Big Bang proves the Bible lies.”

                The Bible is no science book: we’ll give you that. Or I will at least, I’m sure you’ve heard your fill of fundamentalist objections. But lets examine this statement. Assuming all of these theories are true, what does that really prove? It proves that the theories of science held most commonly by scientists today (and are most likely to accurately represent our universe) are more or less in direct conflict with the views of the Bible. That is, Jewish writers thousands of years ago did not understand redshift, general relativity, genetic mutation, or natural selection. How dare a Jewish writer not understand evolution when the microscope wouldn’t be invented for thousands of years? How dare the Bible not explain general relativity, a theory based on the constancy of the speed of light, when geometry wouldn’t even be invented by the Greeks for a few hundred years?

                You might ask why God didn’t tell people to write down “In the beginning, nearly 14 billion years ago, to be precise, matter, energy, and time were created as they began expanding from a point of singularity.” Well, besides that the Hebrews may not have even been able to grasp how many a billion is, they certainly didn’t have any idea of what matter or energy is or even a relativistic view of time. “In the beginning” doesn’t sound like such a bad way to explain it after all.

                Even more importantly, why assume God told the people what to write at all? Despite what some Christians will tell you, the Bible doesn’t say that it is historically inerrant or that it is scientifically accurate or even that God told people what to write.  What it says is that the whole Bible is useful for teaching and instruction, and that the Bible is God breathed: God inspired. Sure God inspired the Bible. But just ask what the Ancient Hebrew word for micro bacteria is, and you may understand why the process of evolution is not given in the Bible.

“There are lots of other religions, and they all believe they are right.”

                This has logical fallacy written all over it. To say that one religion is wrong because there are lots of other alternative explanations is not only ridiculous, but logically unsupportable.  Say we have an equation: 5x + 2 = 0. The set of numbers we could take an answer from is at least the entire line of real numbers. Even if you realize that the answer has to be rational, that still leaves an infinite set of numbers from which the correct answer (only one in this case) can be taken. Here, obviously the answer is -2/5, but perhaps you have an army of elementary school students, each with a different answer. Would that invalidate the correctness of -2/5? Not at all.

                I think the point of this statement is not usually meant to provide an actual proof of Christianity, but perhaps an attempt to give the Christian some perspective. Maybe this statement is meant to say, “Look at all the other religions. They all think they are right too. Maybe faith isn’t such a great measure of proof.” If this is the point, then you’re right. By the same statement, though, don’t trust so heavily on your own beliefs. It works both ways.

“Christianity has been used to do lots of bad things in this world.”

                Absolutely it has. The Crusades, the Inquisition, much of the Dark Ages in general, murders of doctors who perform abortions, and much more can be attributed to the religion of Christianity. If you expand the statement to include all of religion, you get even more, including Islamic jihad, and the majority of conflict in the Middle East throughout history. However, on the other side of the coin, Stalin was a stanch atheist. Castro is a staunch atheist. Pol Pot and the Chinese revolution and Tiananmen square were all results of atheism. Nietzsche, an atheist, said “God is Dead” and predicted that following His death, social paradigms would fail and anarchy would break loose.

                Now, it’s no use simply divvying up the evil acts of history into “Religious” and “Nonreligious” piles. The simple point of the previous paragraph was to show that there have been evil people in both camps. The 20^th century was extremely good at showing that people are just as capable of using atheism to justify the evil they do as they are of using religion. There are evil people in this world, and they will use whatever they find convenient to do whatever they want to do. Don’t blame it on some contradiction within Christianity though. Blame it, if anything, on the gullibility of mankind.

There are more, but I think I covered many of the more frequent arguments. Of course, atheists will point to this and say it is nothing more than a straw man created by me so I can knock down the easiest arguments. Well, if I never went near the actually strong arguments of atheism, than I suppose this would be. But the purpose of this article is not to prove atheism wrong. It is instead to try to wake up atheists who themselves get lazy with their thinking. You are supposedly rational creatures. You should be able to formulate a decent argument based on something that isn’t so obviously flawed.