“Live and Let Live” is a popular mantra among modern atheists. The idea of this quote is SUPPOSED to be a tolerance for diversity, tolerance for people with different views then oneself. Atheists, however, use this quote to try and show that religious people should not force their views/beliefs on others and let them have their own beliefs.

The problem is, however, that atheism has ceased to be simply a point of view. Atheism is no longer just a world view. It has morphed into a campaign against religion. It is as much anti-religious as it is anti-god. In truth, atheism shouldn’t be anti anything. Atheism is simply the belief that god doesn’t exist, the opposite of theism.

Atheists do the very same things with their beliefs that they accuse other religions of doing. They go around to various settings defending their beliefs and trying to get others to convert to their point of view. They even place billboard advertisements to proselytize their beliefs. Atheists should practice what they preach – “Live and Let Live”!!!

Popular Opinion

Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg recently revamped his 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University for an essay entitled “Without God” in The New York Review of Books. As the essay moves toward a close, Weinberg tells us:

the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

What, then, can we do?

Answering his own rhetorical question, Dr. Weinberg believes

that the first thing we need is a healthy dose of humor, beauty, inspiration, and honor. Regarding the need for humor, Weinberg rightly notes that,

In some of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, just when the action is about to reach an unbearable climax, the tragic heroes are confronted with some “rude mechanical” offering comic observations: a gravedigger, or a doorkeeper, or a pair of gardeners, or a man with a basket of figs. The tragedy is not lessened, but the humor puts it in perspective.

In addition, we can seek beauty in the high arts and find inspiration in beautiful poetry. Yet in the end,

Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God.

As a young man, I was enamored with Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialists. When I got to college, I found that Nietzsche was greater than them all. Even though by this time I had come do disagree with their metaphysics, I admired their courage to live intellectually honest, consistent, and honorable lives.

But one day it dawned on me—as I believe it will one day dawn on Dr. Weinberg—that speaking of honesty, courage, and honor as though they were actually objectively honest, courageous, and honorable was inconsistent with naturalistic metaphysics. If you asked Nietzsche why one should forge his own way rather than follow herd morality, I believe he would have answered: “Are you kidding? Think about it. Which one would you prefer? Wouldn’t you prefer this noble enterprise of making your own way? Oh, well maybe you wouldn’t, Gage, you wretched sheep! Baaaahhhhhh!”

Or at least that’s how I imagine him speaking. But, this is simply not convincing. The whole notion of an honorable and noble existence is a residue of Christendom that Nietzsche should have recognized and rejected.

And the same goes for Weinberg. The first question he should ask himself is why, if we live in a naturalistic universe, did it produce humans with a need to cope with a naturalistic universe? I mean, why does Weinberg feel so out of place? Shouldn’t he feel at home if naturalism is the true metaphysic?

Moreover, Weinberg must understand that his coping mechanism (a heavy cocktail of humor, beauty, inspiration, and honor) is not the panecea for which he hopes. He is not being consistent here. If Weinberg can explain away religion and all other things as Darwinian adaptations…what does he think humor, beauty, inspiration, and honor are? Why is it that only traditional religion and morality are seen as undermined by the Darwinian mechanism? Looks to me like things he likes are reduced to mere chemicals in the brain while things he enjoys—like the inspiration he gets from Philip Larkin’s poetry—he is unwilling to reduce.

Weinberg is trying to have his Darwinian atheism on the cheap. He cannot maintain that the universe has no inherent meaning, is essentially nihilistic, and still hold on to a handful of meaningful, comforting pleasures as though they had real value. To retain all of his physicalist reductionist explanations, his panacea must also be reduced.

Conversely, for Dr. Weinberg to have a truly courageous existence, courage must be real. Some of us may take comfort in the fact that Weinberg’s Shakespearean analogy, if it holds any lesson for us, tells us that humor—far from being a meaningless adaptation—is real, for it was intended by intelligent design.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/09/on_nonnihilistic_scientific_at.html

Popular Opinion, Science

Who Made God and Who Designed the Designer?
by Bill Ramey

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/billramey/whomade.htm

“… it is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.” — G. K. Chesterton

One of the most common objections to the design and cosmological arguments is a simple question: “Who made God?” According to Morton White, this question had quite an effect on Bertrand Russell:

[Russell] rejected the so-called First Cause argument for the existence of God after reading a passage in [John Stuart] Mill’s Autobiography in which that precocious child reported: “My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made God?’”[1]

Russell and Mill are not the only famous British thinkers to make use of the “Who made God?” argument. In both The Blind Watchmaker and the recent Climbing Mount Improbable, the biologist Richard Dawkins updates the argument, giving it a Darwinian twist:

… any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself…. To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like ‘God was always there’, and if you allow yourself that kind of easy way out, you might as well just say ‘DNA was always there’, or ‘Life was always there’ and be done with it.[2]

[I]f we postulate [God] as our cosmic designer we are left in exactly the same position as when we started. Any Designer capable of constructing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent and complicated beyond all imagining. And complicated is just another word for improbable–and therefore demanding of explanation.[3]
Other variations of this objection include (1) the assertion that if theists can say that God is uncaused, then atheists can say that the universe is uncaused and that (2) theists by their own logic must offer an explanation for God. Unfortunately, these objections are rather naive and superficial, for several reasons.

1. The “Who made God?” question is a textbook example of the compound question fallacy. A fallacious compound question occurs when one ignores questions that should be asked first. For example, “have you stopped beating your spouse?” is fallacious when it is has not been established that one has ever beaten one’s spouse. Likewise, “Who made God?” presupposes the prior question “Is God a created being?”

2. A non sequitur lurks in the reasoning of both Mill and Dawkins. If one can explain Y in terms of X, even though X has no explanation, it hardly follows that we have not explained Y. The theory of continental drift explains certain facts, yet for several decades there was no explanation for continental drift itself, until the discovery of plate tectonics. Likewise, to suggest that “Who made me?” has no answer because “Who made God?” has no answer is a non sequitur, as is Dawkins’ suggestion that we “might as well just say … ‘Life was always there’ and be done with it.” People and DNA still require an explanation, even if we have no explanation for what created them. The issue at hand is whether Y has an explanation, not whether its antecedent cause X has an explanation.[4] Contra Dawkins, postulating God as the cosmic designer does not leave us “in exactly the same position as when we started.” If we encounter a mysterious probe in space and determine that it is a product of alien intelligence but never learn anything about the aliens themselves, we can hardly complain that we’re left in the same position as before. Explanation is by nature progressive.

3. The objections hinge upon a misconstrual of the design and cosmological arguments. No proponent of these arguments asserts that all things need a designer or a cause. For example, the kalam cosmological argument runs:

1. Everything that begins to exist has cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

This argument concludes that the universe had a cause, but whether the same is true of God or not is a logically separate question. If God began to exist, then He has a cause; but this has no bearing on whether the universe began to exist or not. Hence there is no contradiction in saying that (1) the universe is caused and that (2) God does not have a cause.[5] The only contradiction would be in holding that (1) everything has a cause and that (2) God does not have a cause.

4. Critics often retort that if theists can say that God is uncaused, then atheists can say that the universe is uncaused. But this retort commits a category fallacy; what’s true of God is not necessarily true of the universe. If I say that God created angels, atheists can hardly retort that the universe created angels. Again, the universe requires an explanation, because it had a beginning (among other things); whether this is true of God is another matter.

Notes

[1] Morton White, ed., The Age of Analysis (New York: New American Library, 1983), 21-22.

[2] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 141.

[3] Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 77.

[4] It should be noted that Dawkins himself has no explanation for the existence of the first replicating molecule, other than given enough time and chance such a molecule will appear (see the chapter “Origins and Miracles” in The Blind Watchmaker). But why does a universe exist in which such molecules can appear at all? I doubt that Dawkins thinks this question needs to be answered in order for him to postulate the appearance of a self-replicating molecule.

[5] In fact, the logic of the kalam argument precludes the theist from special pleading for the existence of an uncaused God:

From nothing, nothing comes.

Therefore, if nothing existed in the past, nothing would exist now.

Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.

If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a cause of its existence.

The universe began to exist.

Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

An actual infinity cannot exist.

An infinite regress of cause and effect would be an actual infinity.

Therefore, something must always have existed that is the cause of all other things.
One might take issue with the soundness of these premises, but the point here is that unless one wants to argue that something can come from nothing (and I realize that there are atheists who do so), something has always existed. The KCA then goes on to argue that the universe has not always existed and that, therefore, something else has always existed. That’s why proponents of the KCA can maintain both that God is uncaused and that the universe has a cause, without special pleading.

Popular Opinion

Atheists we encounter often make the argument that God is a myth much the same as Unicorns are a myth. Well, it just so happens that Unicorn are real. Below is an article by By MARTA FALCONI, Associated Press Writer Wed Jun 11, 3:06 PM ET:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080611/ap_on_fe_st/italy_unicorn

ROME – A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday.

“This is fantasy becoming reality,” Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, told The Associated Press. “The unicorn has always been a mythological animal.”

The 1-year-old Roe Deer — nicknamed “Unicorn” — was born in captivity in the research center’s park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence, Tozzi said.

He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw; his twin has two horns.

Calling it the first time he has seen such a case, Tozzi said such anomalies among deer may have inspired the myth of the unicorn.

The unicorn, a horse-like creature with magical healing powers, has appeared in legends and stories throughout history, from ancient and medieval texts to the adventures of Harry Potter.

“This shows that even in past times, there could have been animals with this anomaly,” he said by telephone. “It’s not like they dreamed it up.”

Single-horned deer are rare but not unheard of — but even more unusual is the central positioning of the horn, experts said.

“Generally, the horn is on one side (of the head) rather than being at the center. This looks like a complex case,” said Fulvio Fraticelli, scientific director of Rome’s zoo. He said the position of the horn could also be the result of a trauma early in the animal’s life.

Other mammals are believed to contribute to the myth of the unicorn, including the narwhal, a whale with a long, spiraling tusk.

For me, this brings up all kinds of issues regarding the faulty thinking of the Atheist movement. The biggest of which is the complete and utter denial atheists are in when it comes to the possibility of the existence of God. Atheisms biggest fault is it assumes that since they have never seen a god that one doesn’t exist. They completely ignore the possibility that someone else could have seen god or have proof of his existence. There could very well have been a horse with a similar genetic anomaly that had a single horn on it’s head. So the next time you use the argument that god is real just like unicorns are real, you’d better think twice.

Popular Opinion