Wednesday, July 06, 2016

Are Atheists Rational?

 Notice that the title of this article is not “Is Atheism Rational”.  One of the things that all the new atheists claim is that they are “free thinkers”, rational, logical, science and evidenced based in having chosen atheism.  Is this true?  In fact is light years away from the truth.
Here are some facts about atheism and it’s inescapable logical implications and conclusions.
In atheism, you have no choice but to believe yourself an electrochemically animated “bag of meat” or a bag of chemicals. National Academy of Sciences, Anthony Cashmore claims that we are nothing more than a bag of chemicals.
“Materialism—the belief that nothing exists except matter, if true, means there is no place for any explanation of people and the ‘choices’ they make other than chemistry—the interactions of genes and the environment, and the random behaviour of matter.”
Chemicals
Cashmore thus claims that the concept of human responsibility is also invalid. According to him, the evolutionary process gave rise only to the illusion of responsibility. Indeed, he maintains,
“neither religious beliefs, nor a belief in free will, comply with the laws of the physical world.”*  –  The Lucretian swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(10):4499-4504, 2010;  http://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4499.full.pdf html Antony Cashmore is Robert I. Williams Prof essor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Prof. Will. Provine  said,
“There is no way that the evolutionary process … can produce a being that is truly free to make choices.”
So is evolution compatible with free will? Nope.  So is morality compatible with no free will? Nope. Cashmore wrote,
“The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar.”
And he says that freely, of his own volition? Apparently not. Not without glaring self-contradiction. But that’s atheism’s only possibility – as bags of chemicals or meat.   Atheism is an idea that doesn’t even matter and has never done anything good in the whole history of the world, but has caused irreperable dammage and mass death.
Now here is the fatal flaw in all this atheist nonsense. Rationality depends upon free will.  Rationality means being capable of understanding and choosing between conceptual alternatives. The No Free Will claim, if true, negates that possibility completely and finally. How can you choose what idea is correct and which is not, if you are not free to choose it? Stunningly obvious.
Atheist scientist Peter Atkins says,
“Free will is merely the ability to decide, and the ability to decide is nothing other than the organised interplay of shifts of atoms.”  – Atkins, Peter, The Creation, W.H. Freeman & Co Ltd, Oxford, 1981
I wonder if Atkins thinks that he freely choose to believe that and say that? Not according to himself. His DNA did it.
Atheist Nobel laureate Francis Crick wrote,
“The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”  (p. 3) -Francis Crick (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons
The late William Provine also stated,
” Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.”
So much for anyone being a free thinker and thinking for themselves.  Atheism’s super star TV evangelists shot that false idea to hell.  All this clearly implies that as bags of meat, no one ever really selects their beliefs, their own concepts based upon logical evaluation, critical thinking and personal choice. Under atheism, therefore, since free will is an illusion of the brain and we are nothing but sacks of meat, real rationality cannot even exist. Bags of meat cannot reason or rationally come to conclusions. Atheism means that you are nothing but a biological automaton, a robot, a computer that deludes itself into thinking itself rational and free while being nothing but a clump of conglomerated matter with integrated circuits giving the illusion of real volition.
No other conclusion is even possible, if atheism is true.

Atheists sometimes counter this by claiming that we have tested our brains and proved that our faculties of reason are in correspondence with reality. This too is a gross error and lack of intellectual depth. You cannot test your brain using your brain. Nor can you test all brains using brains. There is simply no way to really know that what the human mind is doing is truly related to reality.  We fall into The Matrix scenario. How do we know that we’re not all bags of flesh hooked up to machines with our brains being pumped full of illusions of a reality? We don’t. Not under atheism.
Moreover, only in deism or theism can we assume that the mind is rational, based upon it’s being made by a super intellect, as Sir Fred Hoyle called it.

Again, we are left with a serious vital choice to make. God or stupidity.

Atheism is a debilitating religious position with no foundations in logic or rational thinking – rationality cannot even exist in atheism. Another thing atheists fail to see. Meat can never be rational. Rationality itself is metaphysical, not physical.  Atoms moving in any form cannot be rational. Sad really. Just freaking sad.
The great theist philosopher – and ex-atheist – C.S. Lewis wrote,
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too -for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist -another words, that the whole of reality was senseless -I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality–namely my idea of justice–was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
“The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words ‘true’ or ‘false'”.

“If he is honest, the materialist will have to admit that his own ideas are merely the “epiphenomenon which accompanies chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process.” If all thoughts are merely the products of non-rational causes, this includes the materialist’s own thoughts. In other words, there is no reason according to materialism for materialism itself to be regarded as true.”

-C.S. Lewis
Simple and absolutely logical. And with that, there goes the ballgame for atheists. If they remain atheists, they cannot remain logically consistent with themselves if they claim they are free thinkers or free anything else, nor truly rational beings. They are obliged to consider themselves bio-automatons with no more self-determination than a hamburger.


This is atheism