by Scott Kaelen
I don’t know enough about “dark” matter or “dark” energy to say with any clear conviction that such things beyond our level of understanding may or may not be representative of a theoretical cosmic designer, nor that they may be the strings or mechanisms which turn the stars and galaxies. I only know that when it comes to worship, I’m out, and always will be.
FAITH VERSUS LOGIC
Atheists don’t have a faith or a teaching, or a book of rules and commandments. What they have is an inquisitive and open mind that is willing to explore every corner of the universe and not be afraid of what they discover out there, even if it’s a superbly powerful entity that tries to bully us into worshipping it. The word ‘atheism’ merely confirms a lack of faith and belief in the improbable and improvable.
I have to confess, I’m not entirely comfortable with being termed an atheist, since it’s only necessary as a testimony to the overwhelming existence of theists upon this planet. It is the theists, first and foremost, who need to identify a person who doesn’t believe in or worship a theistic deity.
I dare to hope that at some time in the future, the words atheist and atheism will no longer need to be used outside of history and language studies, because most people will have shed their vestigial necessity to believe in a god.
Anyone who thinks atheists have a faith system or a set of tenets and doctrines really hasn’t spoken to enough atheists. In fact, I’d challenge anyone who claims they are atheist but have “faith” in something and follow “teachings”. Either they’re confused about their own philosophies, or are linguistically challenged and have mistaken the words faith and teachings with logic and free morals.
Any self-proclaimed “atheist” who is, shall we say, somewhat lacking in the thought department (as a Brit, I really must call out the “chav” sub-culture here, which has become a national infestation) could conceivably be susceptible to becoming religious if enough people in their social circle had also begun to listen to religious preachings and were peer-pressuring their fellows into doing likewise. Such people aren’t “true” atheists, but merely individuals who have never considered either side of the fence, such as it is. But, just because someone who fits into this demographic ends up with God in their life (or, perhaps, Allah), it doesn’t necessarily follow that they would be overly conscious of that religious addition to their psyches and lifestyles; it would, at the very least, merely mean that they had allowed something in which they lacked the ability to contemplate with self-awareness and free thinking. It’s called ‘going with the flow’; if an uncultured social annoyance from a non-theistic society had instead been brough up in an area rich in Christianity or Islam, it is safe to assume they would have been nothing more than a brainwashed statistic among many. You might call such a person a victim of circumstance, or an obvious effect of a larger cause; one must possess a higher than average degree of critical thinking and deterministic free will to stand a chance of resisting the influence of one’s surroundings.
Etymologically, the root of the word “science” is “wisdom”; nothing more than that. It implies a mind that can reach outside of the box, philosophise, question, search, find, open up for peer critique, debate and study. Science is a part of that, but it’s not the whole. I can see and touch a tree, therefore I know it is there. I can see the clouds, so I know they exist because my eyes tell me so, even though I can not reach out and touch or hear or smell those clouds. I know the Sun exists, and I might speculate as to what the Sun really is, but I’m never going to jump to conclusions without sufficient testable evidence. We’ve already refuted the existence of a Sun-god, and we’re pushing all the other gods further and further away from the domain of Man.
It’s a “God in the Gaps” universe, and the bigger it gets, the smaller the gaps and therefore the gods become. Unfortunately, the latest god – the Abrahamic deity with multiple names depending on your religious tilt – is proving to be something of a stubborn god whose worshippers refuse to acknowledge the wealth of evidence which science has given against the increasingly archaic declarations of the Old Testament, New Testament and Quran.
How far away must the force of scientific progress push an object of faith and worship before said object crumbles under the crushing weight of human intellect? How much more wisdom must the inquisitive and scientifically-minded gain about the universe around them before the worship of gods finally has no more room left and disappears up its own stagnant backside? Forget the treasure trove of empirical evidence for a moment; do we not have enough logical and reasonable arguments to nullify the fantastical claims of the holy books? For some of us, of course there’s enough logic and reason. But, sadly, for far too many others, it seems there may never be enough.
The laughable irony of all of this is that the “gap” which science is pushing God into is becoming increasingly smaller and denser, and will likely continue until it becomes subatomic. I can see it leading to a stalemate situation (if it isn’t there already), since, as with the moments before the Big Bang, nobody will be able to either prove or disprove what lies beyond God’s “gap”. And so there he will remain, in his theologically theoretical domain, while back on Earth his followers continue to stubbornly worship him.
But even worse than a no-win situation against an all-powerful subatomic God is the very real stance that I know many Christians take today – that every new scientific discovery gets credited to God; that if sentient aliens were found to exist, God would have created them; that all of the hundreds of billions of stars and planets and galaxies and quasars and every single aspect of universal or interuniversal existence is all down to Jesus’s dad.
Unfortunate, isn’t it, how Jesus and his apostles forgot to highlight any of man’s scientific discoveries in their New Testament preachings as being God-made, just as God before them also deigned to mention throughout the whole of the Old Testament.
And so the battle between faith and logic does seem doomed to remain at an eternal loggerhead, or rather until one or both sides are wiped out entirely, either by the other or by a global or cosmic natural event.
THE THEIST’S FEAR OF SCIENCE
Many theists challenge science merely because it’s in their nature to take a contrary standpoint against anything that threatens their religion, and science is undoubtedly the strongest contender in that regard. Any such challenge from a theist will often snub the Socratic method of inquiry and debate.
To include their beliefs, they’ll no doubt misuse the definition of wisdom, which is:
The ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight.
To make it relevant to their holy book, they’ll likely also warp the definition of knowledge, which is:
A familiarity, awareness or understanding of someone or something, such as facts, information, descriptions or skills, which is acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering, or learning.
And it goes without dispute that they’ll utterly dismiss the definition of science, which is:
A systematic enterprise that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
You may, on a rare occasion, meet a clever theist, but regardless of how much they try to use science as a tool to bring science down, they never will, because their understanding of the sciences is murky at best, and skewed by the overwhelming presence of their faith. They will always fall back on the ‘good book’ as a last resort, because the Bible is their first and only refuge against progress.
Theists often decide to turn their noses up at logic, reason and rational debate, ignoring that science has already pushed their god back to beyond the edge of the known universe. That is their choice and their right. But when such theistic defences consist of a naive understanding of what science really is, what wisdom and knowledge really are, and the processes involved in achieving high standards of all of these things, how then can we debate with them when the han
d they’re playing contains no strong cards whatsoever? When their Ace is also their Joker, you’re not going to win. Or rather, you will have won from the offset, but against an opponent who refuses to admit or accept defeat.
Such discussion is best saved for other free thinkers – not just atheists, but also Buddhists, agnostics, deists and other spiritualists not belonging to any of the organised religions. In other words, people who are willing, through engaging in conversation, to alter their viewpoints as a result of critical thinking and deep debate.
THE RIDICULOUS INFINITY ARGUMENT
Certain Christians attempt to be clever by using arguments such as the organisation and complexity in living creatures limits out at infinity, and that, beyond the limit of infinity, God can be found. Clearly such a perception of ‘infinity’ is limited and therefore incomplete (not for want of confusingly using the term “limited”.)
It’s almost as if the suggestion is that infinity is tantamount to being synonymous with God. Religion ‘imagines’ God and uses it as a basis for creation, whereas science ‘imagines’ infinity and uses it as a basis of understanding. We’ve got a working mathematical equation, but there are areas within and beyond the observable universe that defy modern models of physics and calculus. Infinity is nothing more than a symbol, not an actual measurement of space-time. Historically, infinity began as a purely philosophical concept. Only much later was it given a mathematical equation. The theories of endless space and eternal time are still just concepts, albeit with working models that suit most areas of scientific study – but not all.
Rather than debunking atheism, the infinity claim debunks the idea that an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient entity could possibly exist. The claim itself topples the concept of God. Omnipresent does mean “everywhere, all the time”, so God can not only exist on the fringes of infinity, but must equally exist everywhere on the inside of infinity, and therefore ought to be measurable.
Don’t just throw a label on something and pretend to understand it. Calling a thing infinite, eternal, limitless, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, doesn’t make it so. There are as yet undiscovered levels and dimensions to existence that would boggle the minds of modern scientists, there are still many aspects of the mechanisms of the universe that can not be explained.
The limits of science can not disprove such claims as “infinity+(=God)”, not when Christians try to put the location of God beyond such concepts as infinity.
By its very nature, science has brought us where we are today; it’s given us the ability to understand geology so we may predict and avoid natural disasters; it’s taken us far beyond the confines of what ancient man believed the ‘world’ to be. We’ve progressed from the notion that Earth was made 6000 years ago by an invisible entity who (as a child having a tantrum) demanded global worship. That notion has evolved, through science alone, with absolutely zero thanks to religion, into the understanding that the ‘observable’ universe is 13.8 billion years old; a far cry from anything posited by the Bible, don’t you think?
The Christian/Hebrew faith does not allow room for progress. In fact it demands unchanging stagnation. Religion alone would never have brought us to the level of cosmic awareness we have achieved, and it certainly won’t help us with any future scientific findings.
There’s a suggestion from that clever-Christian corner that science somehow nullifies atheism. Again, such logic is not only flawed, but false. Yes, cosmic beings may and very probably do exist out there beyond the confines of our ken; I’m all for that, but I do not accept that the entirety of existence was created by one or more such entities. Just because our knowledge of the universe has deepened immensely – through scientific reach – that doesn’t provide a die-hard worshipper of a theoretical deity the right to expand the area that their deity allegedly created.
If only Christians would stick to the Bible, where God merely created all that can be seen with the naked eye or otherwise detected by one of the other human senses. Religion did not invent the telescope, for God commanded everyone to not look so upon the stars, but to revere them as angels … or some such nonsense. Religion did not further medical science, for, if someone became ill and died, it was God’s will and to attempt to counter God’s will is sacrilegious. Religion did not give us space flight, because Heaven is the realm of God and his chosen, not a place for Man to wander into willy-nilly.
Let’s suppose for just a moment that a vastly superior entity did create this little pocket of the known universe. Let’s theorise that mankind was a part of that creation. Let’s define this creation as containing absolutely zero scientific workings whatsoever, and that it occurred because of the entity’s natural abilities. This theoretical model looks very similar to, say, the forming of the Milky Way 13.2 billion years ago. As a believer in the natural universe and, by extension, many scientific theories of what lies beyond, I would never get down on the floor in supplication, nor put my hands together, bow my head and close my eyes in prayer and worship to Existence. So why worship a god who demands such worship, without giving even a shred of proof of his existence?
The Good Doctor Isaac Asimov once said, “Emotionally I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.” I can’t blame Asimov for that at all. In fact, I feel the exact way all too often. But although that great man may not have held the cards to disprove God, he did indeed do a great amount to discredit not only religion, but any form of belief in fairy tales, despite cleverly employing such elements in some of his own fiction writing.
We don’t know the universe stretches endlessly, and by “we” I mean not only scientists, but also the rest of us, including Christians, who are not privy to some special, secret knowledge that isn’t available to non-Christians.
While I agree that matter and energy can reach extremely high states of existence, and that time can bend and twist and stretch to heretofore unrealised boundaries, nevertheless infinity remains nothing more than a mathematical equation, albeit one which has helped and continues to help strengthen our scientific understanding. It is not an absolute in practice, only in theory, and therefore holds no practical weight whatsoever.
A Big Bang is a focal point in space, which means, by its very nature, that it can never reach infinite acceleration. It can’t bypass the speed of light in any linear way, not without involving unproven superluminal theories in space-time distortions. Infinity is not something that is reachable by a singular event.
A void is something else that is not entirely fathomable, and a theoretically infinite void can not simply be labelled as “negative infinity”.
The supposition that a species could reach a level of infinite complexity would suggest that such a creature would have achieved the status of godhood at that “infinite limit”. It would therefore be infinitely conceivable that humanity, given infinite time and space, could evolve into something akin to the definition of God.
But such talk is surely sacrilege. Man could never be God. How arrogant. And how silly.
True infinity does not exist, ergo God also does not exist. Case closed.
DO ONLY CHRISTIANS GET INTO HEAVEN?
Jesus preached the Old Testament 2000 years ago. Of course he did; the Torah and the remainder of the Jewish texts were the essence of his faith system, regardless of what he reputedly claimed about his ‘new covenant’.
Some Christians believe that to get into Heaven you have to not only believe in God, but also believe in Jesus. (In fact, some actually worship Jesus more than they worship God, if you can believe that.) With that in mind, do the Christians who prescribe to Jesus being an element of God believe that all Jews are going to – not Hell like the atheists and homosexuals – but Purgatory, because the Jewish beliefs just aren’t up to scratch? Perhaps they would have such thoughts if they spared the time to consider it; after all, the majority of Christianity no longer recognises most of the Old Test
ament as being ‘legit’.
Let’s take it a step further and suppose that all Christians are really just nice and lenient folk who allow anyone into Heaven from any of the Abrahamic faiths. Let’s suppose that anyone, from the founder of Judaism, Abraham, onwards— All right, all right, from Noah onwards. Still not good enough? Okay, from Adam onwards, 4000BC, let’s suppose that the last 6000 years of Jews, Christians and Muslims have all gone to Heaven. Let’s further suppose that the last 6000 years of atheist heathens, suicide cases, gays, and all the rest who didn’t fit the bill, have gone to Hell. Admittedly, that’s a lot of people; the vast majority of Homo sapiens who have ever lived, in fact. Ballpark figure? 200 billion.
But what about all those who lived and died before God created Adam and revealed himself to him? I know some of you out there are die-hard Creationists; I get that. However, the Catholic Church has accepted Darwinism over the Biblical Creationism myth since the 1950s. So let’s assume that all of that tangible evidence, in the form of fossil remains, carbon-dating, etc. is actually correct. Let’s further accept that the first primates evolved from mammals approximately 60 million years ago.
So what became of +/-59,994,000years of primates? Just because God hadn’t revealed himself to them, does that mean they all went to Hell for being disbelievers? Surely so, since it clearly states throughout the Bible that anyone who doesn’t believe in God is going straight to Hell.
Shall we go a bit further back? Shall we assume that God includes all animals in this zero-tolerance game of his? Imagine if, somehow, an armadillo managed to faintly grasp the concept of God as it was preached to him by some naked, bearded fellow. That armadillo has snagged itself a Gold Pass into Heaven. Sure, it might be the only mammal there, and conversation might be a bit thin on the ground for it, but nonetheless it has the right to be there, because it has embraced God. Hats off to that armadillo. But what about all the other poor mammals that have lived since the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event? Over 250,000,000 years worth of mammalian life has all gone to Hell, just because it was never privy to knowing God, because God didn’t bother revealing himself to them. Sheesh, there’s a certain deity who’s racking up the genocide count here.
