Monday 12 September 2011

Bad Bad Atheist Thinking

I was accidentally going through the entire internet, when I came across a few youtube videos that really ground my gears of war. It buggers me silly when both atheists and unsophisticated Christians use bad thinking to support their beliefs.



This girl is some sort of atheist which is rather jolly. I don't know about her other claims, but in this video she makes the common, and rather annoying, 'problem of suffering and evil' argument. These sort of arguments are ridiculous, as any religious studies or philosophy student should be able to tell you, in their first year. This atheist argument is worth dismissing out of hand; however, I am quite fond of this counter-argument to the problem of suffering and evil. It simply states that all suffering, whilst horrific for us temporarily, is insignificant in the greater scheme of things. That's why Christians let themselves get eaten by lions by the by. Or by the way. Should it be by the by, or by the way? Anyway, one religious position, which is also a Christian position, is that the natural material world of experience is not actually the real plain of existence, which would be the divine plain of existence. Thus the world of 'human suffering' is essentially a dream. When you feel pain in your dreams, does that invalidate the existence of God? Nope. Likewise, for suffering in the natural world. The world is one big test for us, it's not real, even though we might think that suffering is real. What is real, is the choices we make, when we respond to the suffering we see. That's the kind of stuff a deity might be inclined to judge us on. This is no 'apologetic', but simply logical – if you accept the existence of a Christian-like God. The real 'self' is the soul, not the physical body. At the end of the video she makes a totally crazy claim that her existence, and Richard Dickwad Dawkins' existence, is proof of the atheist position … because if God really existed, s/he would come down and smite her. Which, if God did just that, he would be a God desiring worship through fear etc, which has nothing to do with real free-will and so, insert your standard free-will argument.



Now this chap makes another bad argument, this time in advocating the existence of a God. He's correct to a point. Existence does demand a first-cause, a prime mover: which is a 3000 year old observation. Everything that exists, has a cause, but the cause cannot be endless therefore the universe demands a first cause as shit just doesn't appear out of nothing. This is no doubt true, however, this Christian makes the irrational jump from a first-cause to an anthropomorphic deity (I assume that's his argument). I recall Hume dealing with this quite effectively. Just because, as goes a standard cosmological argument, that the universe must have had a first-cause, whose existence is necessary, a priori, and self-sustaining, etc., does not mean that that 'first-cause' is moral entity or a creator. In fact the first-cause could, logically, merely have existed to start things off. The cosmological argument tells you nothing about the nature of a deity, or if it even, presently, exists. If he does even have consciousness outside the 'first thought of creation', he could quite happily be the Blind Idiot God of Lovecraft's literature. These sorts of arguments for the existence of a god are the product of bad thinking.

Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . . - Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain

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