The Irrational Atheist

WorldNetDaily ^ | 11/17/03 | Vox Day

[Tribune7]

The idea that he is a devotee of reason seeing through the outdated superstitions of other, lesser beings is the foremost conceit of the proud atheist. This heady notion was first made popular by French intellectuals such as Voltaire and Diderot, who ushered in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

That they also paved the way for the murderous excesses of the French Revolution and many other massacres in the name of human progress is usually considered an unfortunate coincidence by their philosophical descendants.

The atheist is without God but not without faith, for today he puts his trust in the investigative method known as science, whether he understands it or not. Since there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, let alone following their implications, and since specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he knows nothing.

In fairness, he cannot be faulted for this, except when he fails to admit that he is not actually operating on reason in this regard, but is instead exercising a faith that is every bit as blind and childlike as that of the most unthinking Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Still, this is not irrational, it is only ignorance and a failure of perception.

The irrationality of the atheist can primarily be seen in his actions – and it is here that the cowardice of his intellectual convictions is also exposed. Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have good reason for attempting to live by the Golden Rule – they are commanded to do so – the atheist does not.

In fact, such ethics, as well as the morality that underlies them, are nothing more than man-made myth to the atheist. Nevertheless, he usually seeks to live by them when they are convenient, and there are even those, who, despite their faithlessness, do a better job of living by the tenets of religion than those who actually subscribe to them.

Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics.

[whattajoke]

cosmology, chemistry or any other branch of science can tell you, me or anybody, how we came to be. Not even the very edge of high energy physics or astrophysics knowledge will teach anybody how SpaceTime evolved from nothing

Fair enough. I'll concede that point for now. However, I'd like to know your take on a certain oral history of middle eastern peoples from a couple thousand years ago and how it can possibly be accurate in such matters.

[PatrickHenry]

I always wonder how supposedly bright people can seriously hold such grand contradictions. Surely they cause massive friction as the concepts rub & scrape against each other inside their brains?

I suspect that for many people, ideas are little more than jingles, and their contradictions cause no more discomfort than you experience after seeing several commercials at one sitting.

[DannyTN]

"How so? I've seen this assertion before, yet I've never actually seen it defined how someone would live if they believe such, nor any justification for the assertion."

Well, you would think that an athiest would reject most conventional notions of right and wrong. And be somewhat selfish and ruthless, constrained only by social law and less so by social convention. Almost like sociopaths.

But that's conjecture, because I don't really believe in atheists. See I think God put knowledge of Him on peoples hearts, so there are no true atheists. Just people in deep denial.

Yeah. I'm just rejecting Krsna because I ignore the evidence. What's your excuse for following a false god instead of becoming a Vishnuvite?

Krsna? Vishnu? Yeah, what evidence??? There's only one God who provides evidence.

While Vishnu threatens you with having to live this life over and over again until you are good enough. The God of Israel tells you that "it is appointed unto man ONCE to die and after that the judgement".

The God of Israel flat out tells you, you aren't worthy, you aren't going to be worthy, so let Me handle it. Let Me pay the price. I AM your only hope. "Isaiah 1:18 - Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."

Only one God stands and invites people to seek Him and only one God stands ready to make good on that invitation.

Zephaniah 2:3 - Seek ye the LORD, all ye meek of the earth, which have wrought his judgment; seek righteousness, seek meekness: it may be ye shall be hid in the day of the LORD's anger.

Jeremiah 29:13 - And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.

9 And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. 10 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. 11 If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? 12 Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? 13 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?

[betty boop]

The problem is -- at least I see it as a problem -- there just ain't no such place. You're either in the universe, which means being in time, or you're nowhere. There are no priviliged reference frames. Except in science fiction novels.

Patrick, the excerpt I quoted is not about science fiction plots. It is about the way the world appears to us intuitively, and to what extent that appearance really matches the universe as it actually is. The speculation begins with a search for what it means when we say the space-time universe had a beginning, before which (by logical implication) there was no space and no time. The Big Bang is widely understood to be the beginning of both space and time.

What Overman and Pannenberg suggest is that the beginning is the creative act sine qua non. But we can know nothing with certitude about this beginning, either on the basis of direct observation (impossible) or imaginatively, based on the laws of physics. That’s because the laws of physics utterly break down at Planck time – that ridiculously teensy (10^-43 second) quantum of time following the “explosion” of the singularity.

But if time starts at Plank time (and space too, for that matter), then the singularity itself is not part of time (or space): It belongs to eternity (to “no time”). And if it belongs to eternity, while at the same time (so to speak) specifying (i.e., as a kind of cosmic program) all of universal reality evolving in time -- natural laws, the “tuning” of the primary physical forces in nature, etc. -- then you might say natural laws and physical forces, etc., are eternity -- or at least marks or expressions of eternity -- operating in time.

It is perhaps in this sense that we might understand what Einstein meant when he observed that the distinction between past, present, and future is in many respects a stubborn illusion. I can imagine the “world view” of relativity theory as Pannenberg describes it. I can see what he means when he says that it is, in a certain sense, “a last contemporaneousness of all events that for us are partitioned into a temporal sequence.”

I’ve been yelling and jumping up and down and turning blue in the face for some time now, from yelling out loud my claim that man “stands at the intersection of time and timelessness.” Pannenberg sheds light on what I mean by this. FWIW.

Another fun thing to think about is that everything that exists, including our own bodies, is composed of matter -- particles and atoms -- that was manufactured by distant stars, and released when those stars exploded.... "Living stars" like our Sun make our life possible, and sustain it continuously.

Truly, we need "cosmologies of wholeness" in order to describe the actuality of our universe. Everything is connected to everything else, and everything is always on the move....

Thanks for writing, Patrick!

[jennyp]

And I do hope tortoise's Iterated Prisoner Dilemma claim is correct. It would give mathematical backing to a the teachings of Jesus.

Weeeeeelllll... Be careful what you wish for! If it gives mathematical backing to the teachings of Jesus, then that would really hurt the claim that Jesus/God himself must be the source of the truth of those teachings.

It's kinda like the parable of the Talents. The moral of the story is, invest your money instead of stuffing it into a mattress. (Or metaphorically, don't hide your talents, but use them to produce something good.) That's about as obvious as "Buy low, sell high", IMO, but do you really believe that "buy low/sell high", or "it's better to invest than to hoard" would not be true if God didn't exist?

What's so remarkable about a set of teachings that merely restate the obvious?

[bert]

....Of course the athiests will deny every word of it....

and enlightened sceptics will recognize it for what it is.....drivel.

[whattajoke]

For the record, and in an effort to help you better understand where it is I (and other like me, perhaps) are coming from, Neither the God of Israel nor Vishnu has ever "told" me anything.

[general_re]

His hair style is a result of his massive brain pushing on the sides of his skull.

Actually, that style with the hair on top, but none on the sides, is known as the "reverse Vade", so named because it's a sort of photo-negative - an inversion, if you will - of the coiffure favored by our own VadeRetro ;)

[bert]

Leviticus 19:18 Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD

Chelsa Clinton

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your excellent posts, betty boop!

A-G -- this is what I imagine all of space-time would look like, if we could "get out of it" and take a perch in our hypothetical 5th time dimension.

Indeed, my view is very similar. Outside of our 4D space/time – in an extra dimension of time – the 4D would appear as a block, a unity, the entire movie appears at once. From inside the 4D, it would seem that the movie advances one frame at a time - were it not for some strange things going on, especially in physics and cosmology.

Because the extra time dimension renders the time dimension of our 4D block as a plane (or brane) and not a line – past, present and future are moot. This could very well explain a number of physics enigmas: dark energy, non-locality, superluminal events, superposition. In areas bordering metaphysics, it also could explain such things as precognition, retrocognition, remote healing, power of prayer and positive thinking, consciousness, near death experiences, etc.

PatrickHenry, you dispute the existence of an extra time dimension:

The problem is -- at least I see it as a problem -- there just ain't no such place. You're either in the universe, which means being in time, or you're nowhere. There are no privileged reference frames. Except in science fiction novels.

However, some quite distinguished scientists are pursuing this very aspect with regard to string theory. The most notable may be Cumrun Vafa:

NASA: Superstrings

Things changed in 1996. Andrew Strominger, then at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, and Cumrun Vafa from Harvard University, used string theory to "construct" a certain type of black hole, much the same way one can "construct" a hydrogen atom by jotting down the equations, derived from quantum mechanics, that describe an electron bound to a proton.

Strominger and Vafa confirmed a result derived by Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking back in the late 1970's. Bekenstein and Hawking found that the amount of disorder (or "entropy") in a special kind of black hole was very large. This was a surprising result, since no one could understand (and nor did the computations give any insight) how an object as simple as a black hole (which can be characterized simply by its mass and its spin) could have such a large amount of disorder within it.

As a result of building this special black hole using string theory, Strominger and Vafa were able to obtain the correct value for the disorder predicted by Bekenstein and Hawking. This result electrified the physics community! For the first time, a result derived with "classical physics" could be obtained from string theory. Even though the black holes for which the result was derived have very little in common with the black holes which are believed to sit in the middle of galaxies, this new computation illustrated the connection between strings and gravity. In addition, the computation provides insight into the physical reasons for the answer.

Here is some of Vafa’s work on string theory relative to dualities, which leads to the extra time dimension:

Geometric Physics

Dualities as Geometric Transitions

Geometric Engineering of N=1 Quantum Field Theories

Evidence for f Theories (1996)

Or for an easier to digest summary, here’s a link and abstract:

Duality and strings, space and time

Duality symmetries in M--theory and string theory are reviewed, with particular emphasis on the way in which string winding modes and brane wrapping modes can lead to new spatial dimensions. Brane world-volumes wrapping around Lorentzian tori can give rise to extra time dimensions and in this way dualities can change the number of time dimensions as well as the number of space dimensions. This suggests that brane wrapping modes and spacetime momenta should be on an equal footing and M--theory should not be formulated in a spacetime of definite dimension or signature.

[LittleJoe]

Right ... Stalin, for example.

Stalin was an Atheist, but he did not kill anyone. His followers did. To me, that makes him a religious leader. Atheists are just as religious as any other belief system. They just refuse to recognize that.

Hitler and Stalin were both insane. That a whole country would follow the teachings of a lunatic show just how religious we humans are. A true Atheist would be incapable of being suckered into mass murder. So would a true Christian.

Why would any sane man follow the orders of a lunatic, if it were not for religion?

[gcruse]

Well, you would think that an athiest would reject most conventional notions of right and wrong.

Well, you'd be wrong.  Violence against others except in self defense doesn't spring wholly from scriptures, but rather the necessity to get along, as do many other behavioral strictures.

[PatrickHenry]

Thank you for one of your always thought-provoking posts. I readily admit that I'm not up to speed on string theory. However, until I'm hit in the face with a solid pie of data and argument that I find convincing, I'll stick with my position that there is no privileged vantage point from which one can be, as it were, exempt from time and yet observe all of the things which occur in time.

I have no problem with the notion that the instant of the big bang was the start of time (whatever that means), at least as a practical matter. That doesn't mean -- to me -- that such a place exists now from which some privileged observer can watch over all the centuries. It may be good theology to posit such a state of affairs, but at this stage of my knowledge (scanty) I just don't see it as a scientific possibility. But I'm open to persuasion.

[DannyTN]

"Yeah. I'm just rejecting Krsna because I ignore the evidence. What's your excuse for following a false god instead of becoming a Vishnuvite?"

Actually a better answer to that is this. Look at the teachings of Krishna. He taught that Jesus was a avatar of Vishnu. But what Jesus taught and what Krishna taught are two different things. They can't both be avatars of the same God as claimed and yet teach two dramatically different views.

So which is right? The Vishnu religion with it's internal contradictions between alleged avatars?

Or Christianity, which openly declares that there are no other Gods but the God of Israel.

[semaj]

"Why do you always asume that your proofs are "infallable" and that people who don't agree with them just haven't read them?"

My proofs? They are anything but. Atheists seem to have a problem with acknowledging the self-proclaimed truths that abound, and instead seek complex explanations that rely on fantastic and often fabricated evidence. Sometimes the answer to a question is the most obvious and simple, and that is where atheists have difficulty. It has nothing to do with a lack of evidence, but an abundance of pride and arrogance in refusing to acknowledge the simple truth right in front of their faces.

[VadeRetro]

... the "reverse Vade"

Vox Day seems to be the anti-Vade, which explains his extreme irrationality.

[DannyTN]

"Violence against others except in self defense doesn't spring wholly from scriptures, but rather the necessity to get along, as do many other behavioral strictures."

Is it really necessary to get along? There are societal laws that one has to be careful of. Certainly an atheist doesn't want to be a fool and bring society down on himself.

But if the Atheist can gain from violating societal laws and conventions with a reasonable certainty that society will never be the wiser, then does the Atheist believe that it is "wrong" to do so? I would think a true atheist would act entirely in his self interest.

Saddam is a good example of a man who lived like an atheist. He used religion when it suited his needs. He also fed men to the shredder when it suited his needs. He lived totally for himself. And because He did, he became very powerful, which is what he desired.

[desertcry]

.......certain oral history of middle eastern people..... If you are talking about the 'Old Testament', I do have certain openion about it. Particularly about "In the begining there was the WORD and word was God..." The way I interpret this is: In the begining there was Pure Thought, Pure Logic (mathematics?),from which physical things(the Laws of Physics) evolved. By the way, please read on Spin Network Theory and Loop Quantum gravity, it's very interesting how SpaceTime can evolved from pure logic.