Ravage Thoughts

Dear A b y,
I know that the message was not for me ( it’s for a certain LEVI) yet since the massage is about atheism and some so-called proof about the existence of god, I think it will just be proper for an atheist (like me) to answer them.

Which side of Atheism are you in?

(1) the practical atheist who lives as if there is no God;

(2) the dogmatic atheist who openly repudiates God;

(3) the virtual atheist who rejects God by his terminology (e.g. Paul Tillich: God is the “Ground of all being”). This classification would include those who deny a personal God.

I think that these so-called “types of atheists” that you are referring are more of a Christian slander base on Christian apologetics. In an atheist vocabulary, there are no such things as a dogmatic and a virtual atheist.

The term “practical atheist” is described differently by the two camps. Believers says that practical atheism is a conceptual garbage dump for theistic rejects (According to Jacques Maritain) A practical atheist believe that they believe in God but deny His existence by each one of their deeds. (Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason p.97)

On the other camp, practical atheism means an atheist who justifies his stand base on practical reasons. We sometimes say that these atheists are those who use the common term “to see is to believe”. Compare to other types of atheists, practical atheism is simpler and their argument is really not that scholarly.

There is no such thing as a “dogmatic atheist” base on your definition @ A b y because all atheists repudiate the idea of a god. Let see...there really no difference between someone who is openly gay and a closet gay...other that the one is “lantad” and the one is in secret, both are still homosexual. That’s the same with atheism. A closet atheist and a “dogmatic” atheist both reject the idea of a god.

There is no such thing as a virtual atheist. Most atheists agree on the terminology use to designate theism, so I think a person who calls himself an atheist because he rejects the “word” god yet believes in the existence of a “Supreme Being” is preposterous. Let me post what a god-believing friend of mine wrote to me. According to my friend, “Theism and God are not the same...Theism is merely a human expression of God...But can any human definition ever exhaust the meaning of God?” (Thanks for this Hector)

It seems believers can’t even straighten out their god belief...Anyway...

The Christian “personal God” is just one type of theism. But not all gods are personal and theistic like the Judeo-Christian god. A good example of this is Paul Tillich’s god-concept. Paul Tillich is not and never was an atheist. Paul Tillich is one of the most influential Protestant theologians. According to Mr. Tillich...the question of the existence of God can be neither asked nor answered. If asked, it is a question about that which by its nature is above existence, and therefore the answer-whether negative or affirmative-implicitly denies the nature of God. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God is being-itself, not a being.

Paul Tillich believed that God is being-itself. This God would not be a theistic power, a being among beings, whose existence we could debate. This God would not be the traditional divine worker of miracle and magic like the Christian god. This God is not the dispenser of rewards and punishments, blessings and curses. Nor would this God be the capricious heavenly super parent who confronted us, heard our cries, and become the terrestrial Mr. Fix-It for some while allowing others to endure their pain to the bitter end in a radical unfair world.

Since Paul Tillich doesn’t believe in theism, technically he’s an atheist (not a theist – if you define atheism as merely the absence of theism). Yet Mr.Tillich still believes in a “god” in a different sense. By using some series of linguistic contortions, he just manages to erase the distinction between god and theism. Tillich believed in a self-transcendent god, an existentialist version of theism. That disqualifies him for being an atheist in a more complete sense. We may say that Paul Tillich is a “non-theist” (I feel Herald is a non-theist...I’m still not so sure) but not all non-theists are atheists.

Anyways, you and some of your atheist friends probably heard about
these arguments on the existence of God..


Yep @ A b y, we atheists are too familiar with your so-called evidences of a god, but are you familiar how atheists refute these so-called evidences?

(Atheist Answers to Common Arguments on the Existence of God)

1. Cosmological Argument
The Cosmological argument is about cause and effect. Simply state: Everything requires a cause to account for its existence. Each cause, in turn, is itself an effect which demands a preceding causal antecedent. If, therefore, we regress indefinitely through this chain of causation, we would ultimately arrive at a First Cause, to whom we give the name “God.”... Well that’s according to theologians.

Atheists tackle this argument in the following refutations:
A. A first cause need not have the properties associated with God. For example, a first cause need not have great, let alone infinite, knowledge or goodness.
B. Secular-minded philosophers countered the First Cause argument by asking, “What caused God?” When churchmen responded that “God always existed,” secularists usually offered two points of rebuttal:
1) If we can suppose that God always existed, then why not suppose instead that physical matter always existed? After all, this non-supernatural assumption is far simpler than presupposing a highly complex series of Divine miracles.
2) The ecclesiastical argument—that God always existed—contradicts the original premise of the First Cause argument—that the “Law of Cause-Effect” can be consistently applied. If everything except God is governed by the “Law of Cause-Effect,” then the First Cause argument becomes ad hoc and therefore logically impermissible.


2. Teleological Argument
This is also known as “Argument of Design”. The classic example of this was William Paley’s watch argument.

The teleological argument is really an argument of analogy. According to David Hume, the effectiveness of the argument relies on the analogy. An argument from analogy is as strong as the closeness of the resemblance. The less strong the analogy and the less convincing will be the inference based on it.

Now is the universe really shows order and design?
Christians claim that the Judeo-Christian god designed the universe with one major purpose...humanity. So base on the teleological argument, the universe should show design in relation with god’s purpose.

So A b y, when you claim that the universe has “Order and useful arrangement”, is this for human use? If the universe were congenital to human life, then we should expect for human life to develop and survive throughout the universe...but...

The universe is so enormous and for one thing, everything is too far away. The whole universe consists mainly of empty space that seems to serve no purpose for humanity. Planet Jupiter for example is 139,822 kilometer in diameter...What humanly purpose does for Jupiter to be that big that it can accommodate a thousand Earth in its interior?

Back here on Earth, our planet is 75% water, and take note: the largest bodies of water are salt-watered....totally useless for human consumption. We can’t even use this water to grow our crops. Speaking of crops and land use, we also have large unlivable spaces in this planet. We are talking of wasted space in planet Earth where human life will be impossible like the polar region of the Artic and Antarctic and those large deserts like the Sahara in Africa.

The universe is so vast that the farthest observable galaxy, Abell 1835IR1916 is 13.2 billion light years away. If God created the universe perfect for humanity, he seems to waste an awfully large amount of space where humanity will never make an appearance.

Not only space but the teleological argument also seems to imply that the Christian god wasted matter and energy. Let us ponder the enormous waste of matter. Humans as we know it are composed of carbon. One-half of 1 percent of matter in the universe is composed of carbon. That is 0.0007 of the mass of the universe. Dark Matter, which is quite useless in humanity, makes up 26 percent of the mass of the universe, while the bulk of the universe, about 70 percent, is dark energy. In this breakdown of mass, we see that 96 percent of the mass of the universe is not even associated with life or human life.

In the issue of energy, the sun emits only two photons in a billion to warm planet earth for human use, the rest radiates useless in space.

So looking at the following scientific facts, it seems the teleological argument have failed to posit the argument that the universe shows any design for the Judeo-Christian god’s purpose.

3. Anthropological Argument
The problem with the anthropological argument is that the argument seems to be going nowhere. The Christian believer guarantee us that the anthropological argument prove the existence of god. So according to the Bible believing Christian, man is a spiritual being and that’s the proof of the Anthropological Argument because man was created by God base on the image and likeness of...you know who...God. So, where’s the proof? Listening to this explanation make me feel that I’m riding a broken down merry-go-round huh? Nauseating.

So why can I not turn the table a little... I can consider the reason that the gods or the Christian god have the following anthropological features because humans created god base on his own image and likeness. Hahaha! Philosophy is really an agreeable pastime.

Conscience, intellect, emotion, and will are in fact products of a human mind, not of some supernatural brainless Creator (No puns intended...according to Christian belief, God is suppose to be a disembodied entity). So maybe if A b y here can prove that conscience, intellect, emotion and will can manifest without the material brain, then his argument holds water. If not then A b y’s anthropological argument is not reliable.

That’s the same with conscience. Conscience is motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person's thoughts and actions. Now if the Christian god is responsible for our conscience then we should expect everyone’s conscience is based on the Judeo-Christian god’s standards. But we have a problem: For the Muslim community, the destruction of the Kafirun (disbelievers in Allah, His Oneness, His Angels, and the Qur’an) pleases Allah so they will not be bothered by their conscience if a Muslim kills a Kafirun while in Jihad (Surah 47:4). This action is quite different from a Christian believer standard, yet the Christian won’t be able to lay blame on the Muslim as having an evil conscience since he (the Muslim) acted by faith as ordered by the Qur’an. Case sited.

In the issue concerning the “suppose inherent belief of a Creator”. It was already solve by the Austrian Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. According to Freud, the belief in god is just some inner recesses of the human psyche, the effect of the trauma of self-consciousness. It isn’t really about a god but it is the need of a father-figure to placate flattered or appeased. Psycho-Analysis tells us that humans have always seemed to place father figure as a symbol of protection. Hmmmmm... maybe that’s why most gods are men and are called “father”. When human are born, the dependence for a father develop. Yet as time passes, humans seem to discover that their “earthly” father is really not that superlative. That’s why humans created “heavenly fathers” to continue their dependency upon the good favor of the divine heavenly fatherly figure. This oedipal nature, created the gods.

Another problem with the “suppose inherent belief of a Creator” claim is that the belief in god is not universal. Also, the belief in a god is not acquired by reason but through religious indoctrination and socialization.


4. Moral Argument
Einstein once said that morality is a human issue not god. So is Einstein right? Morality that requires a god is really a by product of the Divine Command Theory. According to this theory, nothing is right or wrong unless God makes it so. Whatever God says goes. So if God had decreed that killing was permissible, then killing would be permissible.

The problem with this theory is that it really doesn’t define what morality is. The Moral argument cannot tell us what make goodness “good”.

Christian claims that morality proves the existence of their god, yet ancient civilizations that doesn’t worship their god and haven’t read the Bible already have ethics and moral.
Also, believers seem to have different moral standards. Is it, for example, morally right for blood to be transfused from one person to another? Most Christians permit it, but the Jehovah's Witnesses argue that biblical principles properly understood condemn it. Who is right?

Morality can also be explained through evolutionary biology (unlike A b y’s claim). Biologists and secular philosophers like Dawkins, Shermer, Buckman, Hauser and Hinde have already explained the role of evolution to morality. We can even observe sign of moral or protomoral behavior in animals. Vampire bats share food. Apes and monkeys comfort members of their group who are upset and work together to get food. Dolphins push sick members of a pod to the surface to get air. Whales will put themselves in harm’s way to help a wounded member of the group. Elephants try their best to save injured members of their families.

Objective morality is possible even if a god doesn’t exist as Sam Harris said, “You believe that unless the Bible is accepted as the word of God, there can be no universal standard of morality. But we can easily think of objective sources of moral order that do not require the existence of a lawgiving God. For there to be objective moral truths worth knowing, there need only be better and worse ways to seek happiness in this world. If there are psychological laws that govern human well-being, knowledge of these laws would provide an enduring basis for an objective morality. But we can easily think of objective sources of moral order that do not require the existence of a lawgiving God. For there to be objective moral truths worth knowing, there need only be better and worse ways to seek happiness in this world. If there are psychological laws that govern human well-being, knowledge of these laws would provide an enduring basis for an objective morality.” (Letter to a Christian Nation)

5. Ontological Argument
An example of British humor, Richard Dawkins has given us a good picture of this infantile argument.

'Bet you I can prove God exists.'
'Bet you can't.'
'Right then, imagine the most perfect perfect perfect thing possible.'
'Okay, now what?'
'Now, is that perfect perfect perfect thing real? Does it exist?'
'No, it's only in my mind.'
'But if it was real it would be even more perfect, because a really really perfect thing would have to be better than a silly old imaginary thing. So I've proved that
God exists. Nur Nurny Nur Nur. All atheists are fools.'

Seriously speaking, there are problems on St. Anselm’s a priori argument.
1. The form of the argument is suspect as it cannot be applied on anything except God. The critic was formed by a French Gaunilon using a perfect island scenario. Yet Anselm reply was the argument is applicable only to God. So that means the argument disallow any analogy by which it can be tested.
2. Existence is not a property of an object. Existence is not an added perfection. As Immanuel Kant have said, By whatever and by however many predicates we may think of a thing – even if we completely determined it – we do not make the least addition to the thing when we further declare that this thing is. Otherwise, it would not be exactly the same thing that exist, but something more than we had thought in the concept; and we could not, therefore, say that the exact object of my concept exists.

He also used a triangle as an example. “To posit a triangle, and yet to reject its three angle, is self contradictory; but there is no self-contradictory in rejecting the triangle together with its three angles. The same holds true of the concept of an absolutely necessary being. If its existence is rejected, we reject the thing itself with all its predicates; and no question of contradiction can then arise.”

Let me wrap this up on what Arthur Schopenhauer wrote....”considered by daylight...and without prejudice, this famous Ontological proof is really a charming joke.”

I am assuming that Atheist are doing better job if there are any helping, feeding poor people in Africa......

If so, poor souls- they are only getting fed physically, but left rotten internally...

Praise God for Christians!!!!!!!!! They nurture the body as well as the souls....

Humanists are doing a good job of philanthropy in Africa. Remember A b y,
Give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.

There is a story... which is fairly well known, told about then missionaries came to Africa, that they had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. And then they said,
"Let us pray," and we dutifully shut our eyes.
And when we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible. - DESMOND TUTU


Have a nice day,
John the Atheist