A Letter to a Young atheist

You asked if I had read any books written by atheists.  I’ve read a number of the books written by the four Horsemen and many other atheists.  After reading them, I still think atheism is a mental disorder that shows up at the end of any declining civilization.  Even if every religion throughout the world is wrong that doesn’t make atheism right.

You argument that the division in the religion world is proof that there is no God demonstrates a shallow understand of the human condition. In fact, if there is an all powerful being you would expect finite creatures like humans to be divided concerning their belief about it.  So, what you point out to be inconsistent is very much consistent with a belief in an all-knowing God.  The disunity of belief is the very thing you should expect to find when a finite creature believes in an all-powerful God.

Your quibbles about there being no proofs for the existence of God border on the hysterical.  First, there is an enormous difference between evidence and proof.  A huge percentage of human knowledge has little to no proof of its own accuracy.  The majority of human knowledge believed is based on the authority of a teacher, and to have faith in that teacher.  Very few people ever see the evidence or proof for numerous beliefs.  These beliefs range from Darwinian evolution to theories of the multi-verse.  If you believe these things, it’s because someone told you to believe it and you accepted it by faith and you accepted it as logical because they framed the evidence in a world view that you had already accepted. When talking about evidence we are using the language of science, when you start talking about proofs you are using the language of philosophy not science. Science cannot possibly prove or disapprove the idea of God[1].  Science recognizes its limitations.  Why can’t you atheists? The truth is that you don’t understand science any better than you do religion.

However, science can offer evidence that seems at least to support the idea of a supreme consciousness that created all things.  The apparent design that we see in the universe is one of these things and the other is the fact that the universe had a beginning. Both scientific theories support the idea of consciousness more than a belief that the world and the universe were just cobbled together by a mindless force. However, it does not prove it be on a shadow of a doubt.

If you’re looking for proofs in philosophy, you can forget it.  Philosophically, it would be hard to prove that you even exist, much more than proving the nonexistence of a god.  Human beings are small ignorant creatures whose existence is based pretty much on faith in many presuppositions, which cannot be proven. Our ambiguous position in the universe tends to cause insecurity so we gravitate towards seeking certitude (proofs) of our beliefs. In this religion is actually more honest than secular people when it says that we walk by faith and not by sight.

The new atheists are small-minded people who have an over-inflated view of themselves and their intelligence.  As a result, they are fundamentalist in their thinking and they still live in a world of proofs.  This alone is an unbelievable paradox because of their belief system, or their lack of beliefs.  For in their belief system of materialism there couldn’t be such a thing as truth for truth[2] is a concept that belongs in a religious framework that believes in an Ultimate Authority as a foundation of human knowledge.  The atheist appeal to truth demonstrates that they are still thinking in a religious framework and in essence, for many their lack of belief has become a religion.

[1] The US National Academy of Sciences has gone on record with the following statement: ‘Science is a way of knowing about the natural world. It is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes. Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.” Taken from “Who made God?, a searching For a Theory Of Everything” by Fay Weldon.

[2] In a materialistic worldview there cannot be a traditional moralistic truth. Atheism will always lead to relativism where truth is what a person believes.