Posted on 07/28/2013 8:22:20 PM PDT by Patriot Politics
A Question for Atheists: The Book of God's Existence Atheists maintain that rejection of faith is superior to practicing faith. However, despite this commonly held view, one may at least force an atheist to admit he/she is capable of practicing faith. Simply ask this question:
Suppose there exists a book simply titled "The Book of God's Existence" which, using formal logic and reasoning, proves the existence of God. However, if one who does not already believe in God reads this book that person is doomed to eternal damnation. Many prominent and vocal atheists have read the book intending to prove it wrong, but in each case they immediately become depressed believing their fate in Hell is assured.
You, as an atheist, are not convinced that the book is correct. In fact, you're almost certain that it can be proven wrong since you discover it is simply a modified ontological argument and have successfully found logical fallacies in numerous other similar arguments. What do you do?
There are only 3 valid actions that an atheist may take:
Refuse to read the book, but continue to deny God's existence. Refuse to read the book, but accept God's existence. Read the book. Each action requires a display of faith, either in God or one's self. Here's why:
1. If they respond with "I wouldn't read the book, but I wouldn't believe in God either" they express a blind faith that the book is fallacious without examination of its contents and in direct conflict with the evidence that every atheist who has read the book believes in God--even those who were most vocal about their non belief.
2.If they respond with "I wouldn't read the book, but I would believe in God's existence" they express a blind faith that the book is correct without examination of its contents and accept the testimony of those who have read it as correct without any real proof to validate their claims. Most importantly, however, they also express a faith in God.
3. Unfortunately, this is the choice most atheists would make. If they respond to the question with "I would just read the book" they express a blind faith that their intuition of the book's fallibility is correct without any evidence. Further, they show a faith that the testimony of all the atheists who read the book is misguided despite the fact that each person who read the book was a strong atheist before, most likely including others that had also successfully refuted other ontological arguments. However, the greatest faith they place is in their belief that they will not be damned to Hell for reading the book without assurance.
Final Thoughts
In the end, each person is "granted a measure of faith" (Romans 12:3) by God, and an atheist is no different. Despite the claims that they will not express any faith, they are quite capable of doing so in many different situations. This question is simply a thought experiment to point out that they are indeed capable of faith.
Of course atheists have faith. Just suggest that they either decline to celebrate Thanksgiving or rebrand it as “Plumb Dumb Lucky Day” to fit their belief in random, disconnected events. I did this in a blog a few years ago. The atheists were outraged because they were “thankful” for all sorts of things. But when asked where they directed their “thanks”, they became unglued. Atheists need the argument because they are the insecure side. They know they are wrong, but can’t admit it.
We humans are on solid ground talking about faith but getting into the “damnation” thing is folly because it attempts to limit God. In the past six months two of my former colleagues died - true story. One was an avowed atheist; the other an overt church going born again Christian. In practice their lives were identical. They were both teachers; both kind and gentle; both reached out to students; rescued animals; visited people in the hospital; gave their time and money to strangers who needed help. The notion that one is in heaven and the other in hell is absurd!
What if God punishes faith, and only rewards skepticism? We can play "what if" all day...
How do they explain the atheists who have never set foot in churches, never had any Christian upbringing, that have had been clinically dead, and are revived after brain death, and recount being in the most awful place they’ve ever been, with fire and heat and pain and seeing others there in pain and torment? And that talking with others realize that the place they actually went to, was Hell?
They would explains it the following manner:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html
What you described could either be a weak atheist (one who asserts that there probably isn’t a God, but isn’t sure) an agnostic (one who asserts that there is no way to know for sure weather or not God exists) or an ignostic (one who asserts that the question of weather God exists is meaningless because a consistent definition of what God is cannot be known)
Almost exactly so, although I would quibble with your definition of weak atheism; weak atheism doesn't necessarily assign a probability to the existence of God, but rather expresses that given the lack of evidence for such a being(s), there's no reason to assume its (or their) existence.
And the more I read of ignosticism, the more I lean towards it....
A detailed reply will have to wait until tonight...work beckons.
Speaking as an atheist, while I do "celebrate" Thanksgiving with my family, I don't actually give thanks to anyone, other than those who provide the meal (usually my sister and brother-in-law, these days).
In that case you might think about how rational belief and faith differ. The atheist in your post might have a rational belief that the book is wrong, because all the other proofs of the existence of God were refutable by him, and why should this one be any different? On the other hand, he might have a rational belief that the book is correct, because no previous atheist has ever been able to refute it, and why should he himself be any different? These beliefs are rational, at least in part, because they are supported by past history, but lack direct evidence to his own case because until he reads it, he doesn’t know what it actually says. (So, from a logical standpoint, they have almost zero weight.)
Incidentally, if I were an atheist, I wouldn’t read it. Because if I did, according to the premise, I would be damned as of that moment. But if I didn’t read it, there could still be some chance that God would reach out to me and establish His existence to me prior to my death, therefore enabling me to be saved at some future date. But, that’s because I’m not that cocky. A much more cocky atheist might read it in the expectation that he could go down in history as being the first person ever to refute it, all the ones before being beneath him. (These possibilities are from game theory: what is the payoff matrix for read it/don’t read it vs. the book is right/the book is wrong?)
Pascal’s Wager is an argument in apologetic philosophy which was devised by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, Blaise Pascal. It posits that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually does exist and assuming the infinite gain or loss associated with belief in God or with unbelief, a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.).[1]
Pascal formulated the wager within a Christian framework. The wager was set out in section 233 of Pascal’s posthumously published Pensées. Pensées, meaning thoughts, was the name given to the collection of unpublished notes which, after Pascal’s death, were assembled to form an incomplete treatise on Christian apologetics.
Historically, Pascal’s Wager was groundbreaking because it charted new territory in probability theory, marked the first formal use of decision theory, and anticipated future philosophies such as existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager
For me, its easier to convince them they’re agnostic, like everybody else.
It’s one thing to say you aren’t sure. It’s another to say there is no God.
Most of the time, I say, “So, prove God doesn’t exist. I’d like my Sunday morning’s back.”
They inevitably say, “You can’t prove a negative.”
To which I say, “I can prove you aren’t dead, so let’s dispense with that and let’s see your evidence that the Earth and everything in it could have come about as a great cosmic accident. Proceed.”
btttt
I wonder why you equate atheism with belief in anthropogenic global warming. I am an atheist and I think AGW is complete nonsense. I do believe in global warming and global cooling. I even believe that humans have a minuscule effect on climate. The idea that we are destroying he planet with our cars and air conditioners is ludicrous. So why so often is atheism conflated with AGW. And why is it so important to prove that atheists have faith about something?. That would not prove that faith in god is justified. It would just mean that the belief they hold by faith is also unjustified.
Personally, I can’t think of one thing that I have faith about, faith being defined as belief without evidence or in the face of evidence to the contrary.
The answer for most atheists will be: I’m not going to read the book because I don’t care. Most atheists aren’t of the driven kind that give all the speeches and make all the headlines, we just aren’t into the whole God thing, it’s an avenue of interacting to the world that we can’t relate to. And then we see the weird (at least to us) stuff religious people obsess on (like the current thread here on why Mary’s sins didn’t transfer to Jesus), and we’re glad we’re not in that club. You guys think about things that just don’t rate for us, and I’m sure we think about things that don’t rate for you. And yeah, if you use an ridiculously broad definition of the word “faith” we have “faith” in a lot of stuff, but that’s more the definition your using than actual faith. It’s really more just assumptive behavior, we all assume (”faith”) when we go to bed at night we’ll wake up in the morning, doesn’t mean we have a God concept, just means if you honestly didn’t think you’d wake up on the morning nobody would ever go to bed.
You confuse faith with a decision based on imperfect knowledge. Most decisions are based on imperfect knowledge. By your use of the term “faith” everything is a matter of faith. But you are wrong, that’s not faith.
Whichever choice is made in your scenario, it would be one the person made for rational reasons. Let’s say I didn’t read the book. That choice is a judgement about the best possible outcome and the probability of being right. It doesn’t demand faith in the right answer. You can make the choice while still acknowleding that one of the other choices might turn out to have been better.
Faith is believing without evidence. These choices aren’t about believing.
From a purely naturalistic point of view, the idea that consciousness can exist without the chemical and electrical energy in the brain is absurd. From the same point of view, when one dies the chemical and electrical gradients in the brain reach equilibrium, a state in which there is no more usable energy to be directed toward certain tasks (eg. to transmit signals between neurons which ultimately leads to perception of the world and consciousness.) Since there is no way for these neurons to continue to transmit messages, one is no longer conscious and the person slips into a state of non-being.
From a naturalistic point of view, it is absurd to assert there exists consciousness past life. However, if you continue to insist on this, please provide an example of how this is physically possible, given all brain activity eventually stops in the brain.
I don’t “celebrate” Thanksgiving. It’s just a day off, with food, and football, really bad football usually. And nice weather, because I live in the desert and late November is usually an excellent time for bike rides, swimming, and eating on the patio. If I express any thanks to anybody it’s my wife and friends for making my laps on this rock more enjoyable.
The idea is not absurd. If one assumes there is an eternal life past death and that it is predicated on the Christian faith (ie. Jesus Christ came to the world to forgive those who believed in Him and give them eternal life in Heaven) then it makes sense why two people who act in the same moral, ethical, and essentially kind way would end up in two different places.
Living a life of evil does not send a person to Hell, instead it is merely transgressing against God one time that does—something literally everybody has done whether it be lying, cheating, coveting or taking the Lord’s name in vain. Because of this disobedience all people will go to Hell when they die. You may reply with the “infinite punishment for finite transgression” is absurd, but this assumes the premise Hell was created for this purpose. It is not. It was created to punish Satan and his followers for trying to become more powerful than God. They deserved infinite punishment for such a horrible and direct transgression against God. It just so happens that we as humans are “caught in the crossfire” of this arrangement. When the first sin occurred, it was mandatory that disobedience to God be punished with Hell.
You know the rest of the story of Christ I’m sure, but in the end, only one of these two people sought God to make things right again. Only one of these two people sought God’s forgiveness and only that person will enter into Heaven.
If your actions alone sent you to your eternal fate then life would be absolutely horrendous since every person in the entire world would be damned to Hell for all eternity.
Thank you!
Having the Cowboys and Lions playing every Thanksgiving will do that.
It’s interesting you lean toward ignosticism since this is such a rare position to hold. However, there are some qualities about God that can be safely assumed even if a complete and concise definition of God doesn’t. Namely, that God is eternal.
Since God is eternal, one can conclude that he will always exist and always has (a priori.) Using this single attribute, a very strong argument can be made for God’s existence. Namely, the first cause argument.
Given the temporal geometry of the universe (ie. it has a beginning) then it makes sense the universe has a cause since all things that have beginnings have causes. One could argue that a sort of multiverse is responsible for our own universe, however, if there was a point in the multiverse before which our universe didn’t exist, and after which it did, then it is safe to assume the multiverse experiences time. This would mean that the multiverse has a beginning and therefore a cause in itself. Of course, you could continue with even more elaborate hierarchies of unifying universes ad infinitum, but it is much more logical to assume the existence of a being that caused the universe to exist without itself being created or having a beginning.
If you only assume this single attribute about God (something, by the way all monotheistic religions and most polytheistic ones maintain) a very strong argument about the mere existence of God can be made. Whether His other attributes follow those commonly thought must be decided with further logical investigation.
The idea of convincing them they’re agnostic is really ingenious for a number of reasons!
First, it is so easy since atheists main motivation for absolutely denying the existence of God is pride—the pride of being “awakened” to the “truth” when everybody else is mindlessly following God. This perceived intellectual superiority solidifies their faith of non belief. Yet when you simply explain why an agnostic is much more intellectually superior, since they practice very little faith at all, only relying on that which can be observed, then they will likely gradually lean towards weak atheism, and then agnosticism (moving towards theism) out of sheer need to feel intellectually superior to others (in this case, both atheists and theists.)
From this position of agnosticism, one can get the person to claim theism is possible, albeit unknowable. Simply admitting that theism is possibly correct is a huge step in helping them have faith in God.
Ultimately, this is the best tool to get them to admit the possibility that theism is correct. Thank you for sharing this!
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