The Irrationality of Atheism
Dear Reader,
The accusation is often made that to become a Christian requires one to abandon reason, to ‘just believe’, and that one might as well believe in a great sky-fairy or a flying spaghetti monster. Granted, some Christians do act as if they have lost their reason, but the Christian faith did not come to be held by over 2 billion people or underpin our understanding of the world by promoting the rejection of mental faculties. Rather, it is the Christian faith and its belief in one supreme, omnipotent, rational God, who both created and sustains the cosmos in accordance with his own nature, that enabled mankind to move beyond a belief in superstition and magic and develop the habits and thought modes of reason. Theism is a rational and reasonable understanding of how the universe works. Conversely, atheism is dependent upon numerous assumptions that can be construed as irrational, in that that these assumptions are less reasonable than the propositions of theism.
Atheist historian Tom Holland, in his recent book ‘Dominion’, illustrates how the Christian faith and world-view underpins the break-throughs in knowledge made by science. He relates how in the 1600s Jesuit scholars in Beijing, drawing on their understanding that the universe was built on regular laws put in place by a rational and all-powerful creator, outperformed the Chinese scholars of the Confucian tradition in the making of astronomical calendars to predict such events as eclipses. Despite the Confucians having hundreds of years of observations to support their work, their lack of understanding of this vital truth left them unable to confidently predict what would imminently happen. The Chinese, like the Romans, Greeks, Persians and Egyptians before them, were unable to develop science and technology because they lacked this fundamental understanding of the nature of the universe.
There are five strong arguments for believing in a divine creator of all things:
1. That there is a physical universe and that this physical universe had a beginning (the Big Bang.) Observably all events have causes, physical events have physical causes yet of the Big Bang, being the first event, there is no observable physical cause. If there is no physical cause for the Big Bang there must be a non-physical cause. Theists claim this non-physical cause to be an act of the Creator. Atheists claim this non-physical cause arises from other, unknown factors, postulating cycles of universes and a multi-verse as possible sources of our universe. Both of these answers however just push the question of ‘beginnings’ back, eventually one must choose between two options, either the universe has a creator or it is eternal, causeless and ultimately meaningless. This argument addresses the ‘how’ question, ‘how did the universe come into being?’
2. There is sufficient reason to accept the reality of a creator God from the very existence of the universe itself. All things have a reason for existence, either by the necessity of its own nature or by an external reason; therefore the universe has a reason for its existence. The universe consists of all physical things, therefore the universe must have a non-physical reason. If the universe consists of all physical things but - as the atheist would say – it does not have a non-physical reason then one has to assume that out of nothing the universe ‘willed’ itself into being - an irrational assumption. This argument addresses the ‘why’ question, ‘why does the universe exist?’
3. The argument from fine-tuning. This is a modern variant of the classical argument from design, but one which is based on solid scientific fact. Fine-tuning is the understanding that if any number of a very large number of factors were even slightly different, the universe would have been unable to sustain life. The universe in fact appears to be ‘fine-tuned’ for the creation and sustainment of life. As the late Professor Stephen Hawking put it ,‘The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. ... The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.’ Hawking’s colleague, the mathematician and physicist, Nobel Laureate Professor Sir Roger Penrose has calculated the odds against the universe being able to sustain life as 10^10^123rd to 1 – a number so enormous that it cannot be comprehended, only computed. No gambler would ever stake anything on such impossible odds. The atheist who refuses to acknowledge this as evidence of a higher power behind the creation of the universe is forced back on one of two explanations (i) the multi-verse theory that there are an infinite number of universes and we just happen to have struck lucky or (ii) that it is not the universe that is fine-tuned for life but life that is fine-tuned to the universe. This second option however must presume that there is something called ‘life’ that is independent of the material to which it has adapted itself – and so treads into metaphysical waters.
4. The existence or otherwise or objective morality. Morality is the understanding that human actions have consequences either for good or for harm, and the quest to define actions so as to maximise the good and minimise the harm. An objective morality states that good morals are ‘out there’, to be discovered. An objective moral value is one that is perceived to have an absolute force and to be true whether or not people believe in it, for example that it is wrong to commit murder. A subjective moral value is one that is perceived to be relative in its application and only true in the eyes of someone who believes it to be true or chooses to act upon it. A subjective moral system is not absolute but changeable, dependent upon the moral agent, that is the human, to determine whether it is applicable or not. An amoral person, that is a person without morals, is one who does not believe that human actions should be limited or defined by a moral code at all. Examples of amoral people would be Friedrich Nietzche and Heinrich Himmler.
The existence of absolute, objective morals depends on the existence of a superior moral being who defines these attributes. If moral values are ‘out there’, to be discovered, it is because they are written into the fabric of the universe, a moral universe. As prominent atheist Richard Dawkins wrote, ‘It is pretty hard to defend absolutist morals on grounds other than religious ones.’ It is for example difficult to believe in the problem of evil if there is no such thing as good, the charge of ‘if there is a god why is there such evil in the world?’ holds little sway if there is no such thing as absolute good or evil. The acceptance of the concept of good and evil is itself a pointer to a belief in God or otherwise human behaviour is ordered on a subjective spectrum of ‘better’ or ‘worse.’ A person who accepts the concept of good and evil or any absolute moral value is driven towards faith in God. A person who does not believe in God must hold that there are no moral absolutes and that any and all actions are acceptable in appropriate circumstances, that ultimately the end justifies the means.
5. The Ontological Argument. Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, a discipline that goes back at least as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Plato argued that things existing materially in this world represent a perfect, immaterial archetype or ‘Form.’ For Plato, things existed because they were manifestation of the perfect, immaterial Form, whether that be a table, a colour or a person. The material world we live in was thus just a poor reflection of a perfect immaterial dimension.
In modern ontology it is argued that God is a necessary being. A necessary being is a being that must exist if its existence is possible. As the greatest conceivable being, an omnipotent being upon which all others rely for existence, it is certainly possible that God exists, by reason that we ourselves exist. Therefore since it is possible for God to exist, he must exist. The emphasis is therefore on the atheist to prove that God need not – and therefore does not – exist.
The author G.K. Chesterton said, ‘when a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes in anything.’ This truism is being enacted before our eyes, in a desperate gamble to avoid faith in a divine creator – and the moral consequences that come with it – mankind is grasping at straws. Some rely on aeons of time and infinities of universes to even the unfathomable odds against our existence, some believe the universe to be self-creating, still others postulate that the innate goodness of man is able, despite all evidence to the contrary, to create morality without divinity. These assumptions are illogical and irrational, seeking to establish a pre-eminence for mankind over its creator that it does not hold. It is logical and reasonable to believe in a Creator as science, logic and human experience reveal that this world is so much more than mere physical existence, it has material, spiritual and moral dimensions that fuse the human with the divine, the material with the transcendent, to believe and argue otherwise is to hide in the shadows.
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