The Inherent Flaw in Atheism

Atheism is to be distinguished from agnosticism, which asserts only that since God’s existence cannot be proven, no one can know whether or not there is a god. Atheism is the proactive statement that there is definitely and conclusively no God. Really the question of God’s existence is secondary. A more fundamental question is whether or not individual consciousness continues beyond and outside of this mortal life. If conscious souls are eternal, then it is not inconceivable that one might be brightest among them and therefore God. Atheism asserts that consciousness ends with death and that there is therefore no God. Atheism also asserts the absence of a creative or governing intelligence in the universe on the grounds that the creation and function of the universe can be explained by natural laws.

Many assert the truthfulness of atheism on the grounds that it is “scientific”, that the claims of religion cannot be substantiated by physical evidence or logical proof and therefore must be abandoned. They assert that since God cannot be proven to exist, he therefore does not exist. Proponents of atheism make a crucial mistake in their logic. It is simply this: to claim that because something cannot be proven that it therefore does not exist. For centuries Europeans believed that the sun was a perfect entity, spotless and without flaw. It came as a supreme shock to them to learn that the sun had spots on its surface. Up until the time of Galileo no one had ever reported having seen spots on the sun. Evidence of the sun’s physical imperfection did not exist. Anyone who tried to assert that the sun was an imperfect object would have been dismissed or even persecuted for saying so. Nevertheless the fact that proof did not exist at the time did not change the nature of the sun. In reality the sun had spots. It has always had spots. Just because men did not have proof of that fact did not change the fact itself. Similarly the absence of proof of God’s existence does not permit an assertive statement that God does not exist. It permits only the statement that he MIGHT not exist.

Another mistake made by proponents of atheism is the assumption that there is no creator on the grounds that creation can be explained by natural laws. The problem is that most people do not perceive the mind behind nature any more than an ant perceives the mind that placed a block across its customary pathway. The natural laws that the ant comprehends do not permit it to question what caused the block to arise, only that it is now there. Similarly our imperfect minds do not comprehend the laws of nature sufficiently well to be able to rule out the possibility of there being an intelligence behind them. Just because the ant has a “natural” account for the existence of the obstacle does not mean that an intelligent mind did not put it there. The ant cannot perceive any difference between an obstacle that arose by natural means and one that was placed by a sentient being. Similarly no experiment can prove the action of an intelligent mind behind natural events, but no experiment can disprove that either. If God created the universe, then his actions within it could conform so well to the laws he created as to be indistinguishable from them. In short, God can accomplish his purposes through natural laws and natural events.

On the scale of the very small, physics has shown the universe to be inherently fuzzy. The smaller particles and events are, the less deterministic they are. An electron’s velocity can vary within a certain range of freedom without violating the laws of nature. Yet the precise position and velocity of an electron, as random as that may be can determine whether or not a radioactive atom will decay at a particular moment. This in turn determines the speed and direction of ejected particles. If one such particle happens to strike the DNA molecule within an egg cell of a particular human being, she may give birth to a child with a particular mutation, perhaps even a birth defect. The quantum behavior of a single electron may then lead directly to a child being born with a defect. The behavior of the electron was not determined by natural laws. It was a free and unpredictable event. It is conceivable that if a God exists, he could operate through the quantum behavior of matter and energy.

There is a more philosophical flaw in the arguments of atheists. If consciousness does not continue beyond this mortal world, then nothing that happens or doesn’t happen in this life will have any permanent effect. Whether I am happy or miserable will not matter to myself in the end. I will not exist to remember it. Only my children and the people whose lives I touch will be affected. These in turn will also cease to exist and nothing that happens to them will matter either. We can extend the reasoning forward to the eventual demise of the human race and eventually the extinguishing of life on the earth. It will not matter in the end whether I was an atheist either. All the efforts of atheists to assert their cause are therefore inconsistent with their beliefs. Atheism and nihilism are inseparable. The only logically consistent consequence of nihilism is apathy. Atheists want to eliminate moral laws so that they can pursue pleasure without limitation, but they act as though it will matter in the end whether they experience pleasure or not. If atheism is true, then all of their efforts are the vain wiggling of earthworms, just highly evolved earthworms.

A more fundamental question is this. Why does anything exist in the first place? Atheism cannot answer this question. The atheist universe is a bleak, meaningless chaos, exhibiting only temporary order on its inevitable rush to oblivion. If atheists were honest, they would be so depressed at the outlook of their own beliefs that they would lose all interest in life and would starve to death. I have never met an honest atheist. Most or all of them borrow concepts of existential meaning from the world of religion. They claim to live for pleasure, as though that had some inherent purpose or meaning. They claim to live for the good of their children, or the human race, willfully forgetting that in a godless universe human life will one day be extinguished. The fact is that few if any atheists have really applied logic to their own system of beliefs. They use logic to tear holes in the claims of the religious, yet fail to see the gaping holes in their own claims. They steam and fume with anger against the religious world, as though it mattered one hill of beans what a person believed in. The fact is that most and perhaps all atheists hold to atheism for entirely negativistic reasons. They are atheists out of rebellion against religion, not because they really believe in the tenets of atheism. This can be for a number of reasons. For some it is because they were offended or abused by a religious person or persons. For others it is because they were disciplined for bad behavior by religious authorities. Others still simply want the freedom of hedonistic expression without guilt. They reason that if religion is done away with, moral guilt with disappear as well.

In a college course I took, we were taught the principles of “cultural relativism”. This philosophy maintains that the truthfulness or “goodness” of any behavior or principle of belief is only determined within the relative context of a person’s culture. Thus all so-called “truths” are not truths, but only matters of belief that either work or don’t work within a given cultural context. This cultural relativism is actually one of the favorite tenets of atheists in the academic world. There is, however, an inherent flaw in the argument. If all would-be truths are only relative, then so is the doctrine of cultural relativism. It is only relatively true, which means that it is not a universal truth. Atheism suffers a similar fatal flaw. By denying the existence of God and of continued consciousness, it denies the meaning of things and therefore its own meaning and significance. Atheism commits logical suicide.

Copyright 2009 by Blake Knightley