A topic for discussing atheism, presenting arguments against it and memes etc.
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Atheism
- Thread starter Lawrence87
- Start date
I'm not an expert on TAG itself but in my understanding from how Dyer presents it, a major component of it boils down to the fact that an atheistic worldview is inherently incoherent. The typical atheist holds that the universe is essentially random, chaotic, unstructured and without meaning or purpose, yet they take for granted transcendental categories like truth, consistent identity across time, logic, ethics, morality, "the good" etc, without being able to justify why those things should exist or be held as presuppositions in a universe that has no teleology or meaning baked in. It's inherently contradictory and intellectually honest atheists have nowhere to arrive at except nihilism, absurdism and/or hedonism.
On the flip side Christians can justify these principles through God, his Divine revelation, and the fact that He designed creation to be structured, ordered, and imbued with meaning.
Theists will often criticise atheists for their lack of objective moral grounding, whilst it is a good line of attack, I think theists often don't push it far enough. They stay within the realm of ethical decisions such as there being no reason not to do genocide and so forth.
However, if you ask an atheist why they don't believe in God, they will inevitably say "because I have yet to see a reason to justify a belief in God." This hints at a value judgement. That a belief that is justified is more valuable than one that is not. Furthermore, if you enquire about other things they value you will inevitably get such things as; a value of truth over falsehood, logic over illogic, rationality over irrationality, etc. etc.
The problem is that atheism, or scientific naturalism---however you want to name it, has no basis for valuing any one thing over any other. So it is not just an issue that is confined to ethical decisions. Anything that an atheist says can be met with the question 'why should we value that?' They cannot justify it within their own worldview. They might try to take one step back and say 'we should value being logical because they effects of not using logic would be terrible for society' but you can just say 'why should we care about society?' you can just keep asking and ultimately it just comes down to a subjective decision on their part about what does or does not have any value.
So you can entirely refute the claim that atheism is superior by saying 'I grant the atheist worldview, but I don't think there is any reason to value life over death, truth over falsehood, etc'
However, if you ask an atheist why they don't believe in God, they will inevitably say "because I have yet to see a reason to justify a belief in God." This hints at a value judgement. That a belief that is justified is more valuable than one that is not. Furthermore, if you enquire about other things they value you will inevitably get such things as; a value of truth over falsehood, logic over illogic, rationality over irrationality, etc. etc.
The problem is that atheism, or scientific naturalism---however you want to name it, has no basis for valuing any one thing over any other. So it is not just an issue that is confined to ethical decisions. Anything that an atheist says can be met with the question 'why should we value that?' They cannot justify it within their own worldview. They might try to take one step back and say 'we should value being logical because they effects of not using logic would be terrible for society' but you can just say 'why should we care about society?' you can just keep asking and ultimately it just comes down to a subjective decision on their part about what does or does not have any value.
So you can entirely refute the claim that atheism is superior by saying 'I grant the atheist worldview, but I don't think there is any reason to value life over death, truth over falsehood, etc'
Look into Cornelius Van Til who formulated it. And read Greg Bahnsen who still remains the best expounder of it.
The God of the Bible is real by the impossibility of the contrary. There are many assumptions and presuppositions that atheists make, but even in their denial of God, they rely on philosophical categories that only make sense in a Christian worldview, not a materialist one. One cannot be an atheist and live in consistency with his beliefs. Every time the atheist says something is "good" or "evil," he is appealing to an objective value as his standard; but in the atheist worldview; objective truth cannot be grounded, it always come down to the subjective truth of human beings.
Here are a couple of good debates that show this.
Shouldn't this go under Other Religions, because in reality Atheism takes faith to believe in nothing.
There's a Youtube channel called Modern Day Debates that does a lot of these atheist vs Christian debates. These debates are usually done online via Youtube streaming but they also hold a live event each year called DebateCon where these debates happen live with a n audience watching. Earlier this month during this year's DebateCon, they had Andrew Wilson who is an Orthodox Christian against Matt Dillahunty who is one of most well known atheist debators (he debated Jordan Peterson before a live audience at a similar type of event). In this debate, Dillahunty raged quitted and walked out right after Wilson gave his opening statement and has become a bit of a laughingstock after being feared as one of the best atheist debators on the scene.
Dyer uses the argument extensively in this debabe if you want to see how it can be deployed in arguments
I have come to the conclusion that Matt Dillahunty has a weird power fetish about cutting off and ending discussions abruptly. He does it all the time to callers, he tried to do it here, if you look at his Twitter most of his tweets seem to be interactions with people that end in '.Goodbye' like he is hanging up on them via Twitter.
He got totally wrecked here, it was one of the best things I've ever seen.
JR5
Other Christian
Without belief in God it's simply Nietzschian will to power anti-morality all the way down. Ernst Jünger would ask himself during World War 2 what one could “advise a man, especially a simple man, to do in order to extricate himself from the conformity that is constantly being produced by technology?” In contrast to Carl Schmitt, the answer Jünger, an atheist, eventually settled on was: “Only prayer.” For, “In situations that can cause the cleverest of us to fail and the bravest of us to look for avenues of escape, we occasionally see someone who quietly recognizes the right thing to do and does good. You can be sure that is a man who prays.” Ultimately only a recovery of a sense of the transcendent, he decided, could serve as an antidote to nihilistic modernity’s temptations. Without it, “our freedom of will and powers of resistance diminish; the appeal of demonic powers becomes more compelling, and its imperatives more terrible.”
The other thing atheists get wrong, imo, is that the mind balks at an infinitely existing universe or an infinite series of Big Bangs. Our minds demand cause and effect from a first cause. If you bundle all the matter in the universe together, something outside of that matter - outside of space and time - had to have created it. Being outside of space/time, such a thing must be both everywhere and everywhen. We call this thing God.
The other thing atheists get wrong, imo, is that the mind balks at an infinitely existing universe or an infinite series of Big Bangs. Our minds demand cause and effect from a first cause. If you bundle all the matter in the universe together, something outside of that matter - outside of space and time - had to have created it. Being outside of space/time, such a thing must be both everywhere and everywhen. We call this thing God.
staddlelateen
Catholic
Good aesthetic debaters will blow right past normative ethics and adopt a subjective or relativistic meta-ethical moral position. It's nonsensical for an atheist to argue for normative ethics because there's no binding force of morality in the absence of God. Even the moral rationalism arguments fall apart because where does moral a priori phenomena come from? Most atheists don't adequately grapple with these questions and hopelessly entangle themselves by confusing normative ethics, meta-ethics, and applied ethics.
So, what's a good morally relativistic position look like? Well, start by criticizing Christians for not holding to a moral universalism in practice. For example, Paul clearly condoned slavery as morally good in his letters and the Church, following Paul, accepted slavery as morally permissible for centuries. How can Christians profess moral universalism, but then, in practice, transform slavery from morally permissible to morally repugnant? In physics, the law of thermodynamics never changes and have never changed since the beginning of the universe. If morality had the same metaphysical character as physics, then it should also have the same unchanging nature. Therefore, if slavery was morally permissible 2000 years ago, then it ought to be morally permissible today. The same line of argumentation could be advanced on what is currently going on in Christianity with homosexuality. For over 2000 years, homosexuality was a grave and mortal sin that God punished with annihilation, but now it's tolerated and in some Christian churches, like the Church of England, it's morally permissible. Well, if morality is universal and unchanging, why does it change?
Most atheists are just the “end of the line” of Protestant progression. I mean that respectfully btw. I mean once you hit Unitarian Universalist what’s next? Many I’ve talked to still have a Christian moral compass and Christian world view, they just want to feel smart.
I was thinking about this the other day. There is a reason atheists can be quite smug, and thats because its basically one of the only perks that one can possibly find in the atheist worldview.
"I believe nothing means anything, life is a futile accident, nothing I do has any significance, but hey at least I don't believe in things with no evidence."
Acting smart and self righteous is like the only benefit that you could possibly squeeze out of such a bleak worldview. Hence why they milk it.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the Puritan areas of the United States were also areas where Unitarian Universalism was big and are also some of the most secular parts of the United States. These people also tend to have still have a Christian moral compass at least when it comes to things such as the inherent dignity of a human being and also looking out for the the disadvantaged even if they have no underlying metaphysical justification for it. I'm actually quite interested in the flow from Protestantism to liberal Protestantism to secular humanism that has been observed in history. I remember seeing another guy write in another forum over a decade ago about how a lot of this SJW secular humanism activism can be seen the most successful non-theistic Christian sect on the planet in terms of their influence and the power they possess in society and how reading that really struck a chord with me.
JR5
Other Christian
This is due to the egalitarian ratchet effect: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-egalitarian-ratchet-effect-why
Orthodoxy does not suffer from it: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/an-exploration-of-eastern-orthodoxy
I don't think there is much of a point in having any debates with atheists or even trying to understand them. It's utter gibberish and no one genuinely believes it. People do not become atheists because they hear some sound argument that makes them go "hmm, never thought about it like that, maybe you're right". As a matter of fact, that never happens with anything. It's a dull post-"enlightenment" myth that humans are even capable of operating like that with their main worldviews. Like, maybe some kind of high-functioning autist will "look at your data" or whatever, but broadly speaking, it just doesn't work like that.
It can sometimes look like it, maybe someone seems to change their mind when an atheist explains one of his positions to them, maybe even they themselves think that it was him who convinced them, and they attribute to him the feat of owning them with fax and logic (because actually people feel good about themselves when they believe that they were smart enough to "listen to reason"), but when that happens, it's actually because they were already very open to it, or more likely, actively wanted to believe it.
People become atheists, not because they actually think it's true that there is no God, but because they want it to be true. They are rarely conscious of it, but that's the reason. Perhaps they really like their promiscuity, their pornography and their sexual deviancy so they are terrified of the idea that this goes against the laws set by an absolute being. Or perhaps, and I think this is the most common reason, they have daddy issues and so just have a problem with any and all masculine authority, which God is of course the absolute epitome and origin of. They feel spiritually repulsed by the idea of an all-*father*, and this is why you sometimes see them say incoherent nonsense like "erm, god is a woman, heh heh" without even having that be part of any larger point, they literally just wanted to say it. Have you witnessed people do that? Because I have, and it makes no sense unless you understand it like this.
Psalm 14:1 is very interesting, because it's not actually talking about people who openly go "yeah I don't believe in any sky daddy heh heh", because in fact those people just flat out did not exist up until very recently in history. That passage is specifically talking about people who, regardless of their stated beliefs, think and act as if there is no God.
Back then, everyone everywhere believed in some kind of deity, because it was just self-evident to everyone on Earth. Not necessarily because they did all this philosophing about how things are obviously intelligently designed, and about how everything has an origin so there must be some kind of absolute first uncreated origin for existence to make sense. No. Even 0IQ African tribesmen who stabbed random bones into their septums could see that supernatural forces were real, because here's the thing: They often revealed themselves to people. Do you think African tribes and South American natives just up and created all of that witchcraft they practice? No, it was taught to them. I am of the belief that most if not all religions outside of Christianity originated from demons appearing before people, teaching them things, and deceiving them into worshipping them. This is literally stated in the bible, mind you.
Atheists are simply those people that Psalm 14:1 talks about, and the only thing that has changed is that it's now socially acceptable for those people to lie to themselves externally rather than just internally, and actually state that they don't believe in any deity rather than simply live like they don't.
Here is a full list of atheist arguments.
Do any of those sound like someone being genuine and just trying to figure things out? Those are of course simplifications, but those arguments, even if steelmanned, are very easy to dismantle, and I have never heard any other arguments than those from an atheist, or if I have, I cannot remember them off the top of my head, and that's even though I used to be one of those online-debate-obsessed people, and I used to spend hours upon hours deboonking atheists, back at the very start of my journey into becoming serious about Christianity.
I did not become interested in Orthodox Christianity because I heard some iron-clad philosophical argument that made me reconsider my Catholicism or sedevacantism or whatever I was at the time. I became interested because I saw truth, light and tradition in there, which I felt an inherent desire to pursue, and which I felt I was not finding in any Catholic church I visited, nor in online tradcath circles.
It can sometimes look like it, maybe someone seems to change their mind when an atheist explains one of his positions to them, maybe even they themselves think that it was him who convinced them, and they attribute to him the feat of owning them with fax and logic (because actually people feel good about themselves when they believe that they were smart enough to "listen to reason"), but when that happens, it's actually because they were already very open to it, or more likely, actively wanted to believe it.
People become atheists, not because they actually think it's true that there is no God, but because they want it to be true. They are rarely conscious of it, but that's the reason. Perhaps they really like their promiscuity, their pornography and their sexual deviancy so they are terrified of the idea that this goes against the laws set by an absolute being. Or perhaps, and I think this is the most common reason, they have daddy issues and so just have a problem with any and all masculine authority, which God is of course the absolute epitome and origin of. They feel spiritually repulsed by the idea of an all-*father*, and this is why you sometimes see them say incoherent nonsense like "erm, god is a woman, heh heh" without even having that be part of any larger point, they literally just wanted to say it. Have you witnessed people do that? Because I have, and it makes no sense unless you understand it like this.
Psalm 14:1 is very interesting, because it's not actually talking about people who openly go "yeah I don't believe in any sky daddy heh heh", because in fact those people just flat out did not exist up until very recently in history. That passage is specifically talking about people who, regardless of their stated beliefs, think and act as if there is no God.
Back then, everyone everywhere believed in some kind of deity, because it was just self-evident to everyone on Earth. Not necessarily because they did all this philosophing about how things are obviously intelligently designed, and about how everything has an origin so there must be some kind of absolute first uncreated origin for existence to make sense. No. Even 0IQ African tribesmen who stabbed random bones into their septums could see that supernatural forces were real, because here's the thing: They often revealed themselves to people. Do you think African tribes and South American natives just up and created all of that witchcraft they practice? No, it was taught to them. I am of the belief that most if not all religions outside of Christianity originated from demons appearing before people, teaching them things, and deceiving them into worshipping them. This is literally stated in the bible, mind you.
Atheists are simply those people that Psalm 14:1 talks about, and the only thing that has changed is that it's now socially acceptable for those people to lie to themselves externally rather than just internally, and actually state that they don't believe in any deity rather than simply live like they don't.
Here is a full list of atheist arguments.
Do any of those sound like someone being genuine and just trying to figure things out? Those are of course simplifications, but those arguments, even if steelmanned, are very easy to dismantle, and I have never heard any other arguments than those from an atheist, or if I have, I cannot remember them off the top of my head, and that's even though I used to be one of those online-debate-obsessed people, and I used to spend hours upon hours deboonking atheists, back at the very start of my journey into becoming serious about Christianity.
I did not become interested in Orthodox Christianity because I heard some iron-clad philosophical argument that made me reconsider my Catholicism or sedevacantism or whatever I was at the time. I became interested because I saw truth, light and tradition in there, which I felt an inherent desire to pursue, and which I felt I was not finding in any Catholic church I visited, nor in online tradcath circles.
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Was worried I’d honk off my Protestant neighbors. I think what happened is Protestantism is inherently egalitarian. Some of your ultra egalitarian Protestants like Unitarian Universalists, Quakers, Presbyterian Church USA, United Church of Christ woke up one morning and decided instead of talking about theology - let’s actually go out into the world and do what Jesus told us to do. It’s called the social gospel - Which is very noble if we’re honest, but these churches were also theologically liberal so it was only a hop skip and a jump to get rid of the god of the Bible. These churches also controlled the university system in the 1800s and first half of the 20th century. With God out of the picture, it’s quite easy to see how these types of Christians would merge with communists.
Kingdom
Orthodox
That's wrong, Paul never viewed slavery as *morally* right. Christianity teaches that all people are equal before God, that God is impartial, which you should know if you are Catholic. Paul's advice to Christian slaves to "obey their masters" is contextual, because of the specific circumstances in which it was given, and practical in nature, because if Christian slaves had rebelled against their masters, Christianity would have very quickly ceased to exist. This does not mean that he considered slavery morally correct.
More on it:
As for the moral revisionism of mainstream "Christianity": it is anti-Christian. That "argument" cannot be used against Christianity because those who do so are apostates and heretics by their very actions, and should not be considered Christians.
I'm reading something right now that goes into the detail about how a lot of the mainline Protestantism in the US is precursor for a lot of the ultra egalitarian ideals we are discussing here. The author calls it "Ultracalvianism" and also thinks Unitarianism is a good label for this grouping of beliefs and thoughts. As I mentioned before, it's not a coincidence that New England was the epicenter for all of this.
The ultracalvinist hypothesis: in perspective | Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug
Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug. Ebook links and full chronological archive. An introduction to neoreaction (NRx).
www.unqualified-reservations.org