John Piippo: It's False That an Atheist Just Believes in One Fewer God Than a Theist Does

Good stuff that all "new atheist" fundamentalists seriously need to read.

John Pippo: It's False That an Atheist Just Believes in One Fewer God Than a Theist Does

http://www.johnpiippo.com/2014/01/philosophical-atheism-as-superstition.html

John Piippo: I Don't Believe in Fairies Either (On the Conceptual Confusion of Unlearned Atheists)

Simple, logical and effective - John Piippo: I Don't Believe in Fairies Either (On the Conceptual Confusion of Unlearned Atheists)

The Religion of Atheism

How many times per day do atheists, worldwide, deny that atheism is a religion?  My guess is millions. Why? Because wherever there is debate on the existence of God vs atheism, you are absolutely guaranteed that sooner or later in the discussion, the word religion will be brought in and the atheists present will be eschewing all religion.  But then some deist or theist will tell them that atheism itself is a religion, having all the telltale signs.  At that point the atheists will get angry, act insulted, and arrogantly state that atheism isn’t a religion and that if atheism is a religion, then not playing tennis is a sport – or some such similar analogy (which they copy/paste parrot from their masters, the high priests of atheism). They radically deny that atheism is a religion because they despise religion per se and cannot endure to have their own beliefs called religion.

A Stable Universe - In Atheism or Theism?

In my last article I discussed the "God of the gaps" accusation levied against creationists and IDists.  A "refutation" that is common all across the scope of Darwinian influenced minds.

I showed that, in fact, it is the Darwinists that use "gap" arguments, or arguments from ignorance and not the designists at all.

Now at the end of that article I quoted professor Richard Lewontin on his absolute adherence to materialism in all things "scientific".

Here is the quote again, followed by my comments on the last sentence of it:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”  – Richard Lewontin, 1997. Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997 (review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark).- Dr. Richard Lewontin, Geneticist, Harvard University

Lewotin makes a perfectly foolish unthinking statement at the end when he says that appealing to an omnipotent deity allows that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured.  Really?

Lewontin fails to see that this is perfectly true for atheism, not theism!

Under atheism there are no absolutes, there is no absolute truth, so no one cannot even know anything for sure -including no scientists, such as Lewontin. Now if there are no absolutes THEN it would be true that we allow that the regularities of nature may change any & every moment. The laws may dissolve, mathematics is no longer certain, nothing remains! Nothing is certain under atheism's obligatory relativism. Nothing can be known as objectively true in atheism, including atheism itself! This is standard atheist dogma and if atheism were true, then they would be right in claiming this.

However, under theism, what is the reason that the regularities may be ruptured? The only possible reason would be the will of the deity.  But then why would an intelligent creator simply screw everything he made from one day to the next?  What reason would he have?

Moreover, even if he did, would mankind ever know it? Highly unlikely, well at least not for more than a few seconds. We would almost certainly disappear in some sort of total cosmic implosion if only 1 of the "fine tuning" constants were to be radically altered by the deity. And who would be left to give a damn for humanity?


In theism, we infer through multitudes of inferences and the very state of the cosmos,  that the intelligence of the creator is infinite (just look at what he made) and that his moral nature is the very foundation of all morality.

Worse, Lewontin's statement is in fact ludicrous, since we already have ample testimony that in fact the laws of the nature are universal, stable and constant since the beginning of all human history. Simply because we have something we call "science" and it works!

Now to prove how utterly asinine atheists can get on this specific point, lets read the "expert" atheist version; one that, if true, literally turns Lewontin's inane statement upside down:

"There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago." — Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind,1921, pp. 159- 60

Can you see that the truly unstable, unreliable, utterly mutable universe Lewontin imagines under a deity, is actually the highly probable state of nature if atheism were true and not at all if theism is true!?
Thank God it isn't!

Why else would Einstein consider that one of the most surprising attributes of nature to be that it is understandable?

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility ... The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle"
-Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, p. 462

Einstein was not an atheist by any means.
Thank God for that too.

On the Problem of Evil & Suffering

Atheists often argue against the existence of God, and specifically an almighty and good God on the basis of the existence of evil and suffering in the universe.   The argument goes something like this:
God is all-powerful, loving, and perfect.

A perfect, good God would create a universe that was perfect (e.g., no evil and suffering).
The universe is not perfect but contains evil and suffering.
Therefore, God does not exist.

So in short, either God is not good, or not all-powerful or he does not exist, because if he did exist then surely he could stop all the suffering. The atheist then concludes that both the idea of a bad God and idea of a limited God makes no sense, therefore God must not exist. Variations on this ages old theme exist but that is the gist of it.

So how does one answer this type of objection?

Most apologists go into lengthy arguments concerning why a good and almighty God could and does allow evil & suffering in the world.  They will usually get into the biblical fall of Lucifer and of man to explain how such evils and sufferings came to be.

Forget all that for now. There is a much simpler way to demonstrate why this argument is utterly flawed.
First you must see that in a universe with no God, there cannot be any absolute moral values. Most atheists admit this. For example:

"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." -William B. Provine, atheist professor of biology at Cornell University

"In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music."Richard Dawkins, --Out of Eden, page 133

"If there is no God, everything is permitted." - Jean Paul Sartre on Ivan Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevski's character

"Morality is no more … than an adaptation, and as such has the same status as such things as teeth and eyes and noses. . . . [M]orality is a creation of the genes". - Michael Ruse

"Nature has no concern for good or bad, right or wrong. . . . We cannot get behind ethics." - Naturalist Simon Blackburn

Evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson said that morality is just a survival mechanism. Ethics, he claims,

"is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate," and "the way our biology enforces its ends is by making us think that there is an objective higher code to which we are all subject."

Now how does one refute the atheist argument against God based on evil & suffering?

Easy, since without God, there is no good or evil. The atheist high priests, quoted above say so.

The atheist thus shoots himself in the head again with such arguing against God based on "there is so much evil".  For such an argument becomes too obviously wrong given that "no God = no evil", (as most atheist philosophers themselves state).

Suffering becomes a mere amoral, purposeless event in a cold uncaring cosmos. Or as Dawkins put it, a blind, pitiless, indifferent universe. Suffering but without God suffering is neither evil nor good nor "bad". Thus we see how the atheist in using the existence of evil and suffering to refute the existence of God is unwittingly assuming the existence of God in the very argument itself!

Therefore, how can one claim God doesn't exist while admitting the existence of evil? If there is no God how does one define evil?  Indeed, how does one claim that suffering is "wrong" in a universe without God?
One might even state,

"Evil exists.  Therefore God exists."

The fact that all men everywhere and at all times have recognized the existence of evil, demonstrates the existence of a transcendent moral law, else, evil does not exist. Things simply are what they are - neither right nor wrong; neither evil or good.

Without an absolute law giver, there can be no such thing as evil or good and since atheists, as shown above, really do admit that without God there is no real good or evil, how can they then contradict themselves by claiming God doesn't exist based on it?!

Thus the atheists show a rather amazing lack of perception, as always.  But in this case it is a lack of perception of their own arguments logical implications and flaws! To argue against God based on the existence of evil is to argue for God based on the existence of moral right and wrong! So when atheists use the old "problem of pain and evil" argument they are unwittingly admitting of a transcendent Law that defines evil by the existence of absolute good - which is the ONLY way evil can be defined!
C.S. Lewis wrote,

"Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also."
–The Allegory of Love

Indeed, without God (ultimate truth) there is no reason to call anything at all "evil".

Thus the whole "evil and suffering" based argument falls apart under its own underlying assumptions! Thus, this argument actually does more to uphold the existence of God than it can ever do to refute it!
Sadly, atheists do not and will not see this, such is the hardness of their hearts (and heads).