A Response to an Atheist

(I thought for quite some time about how to write this blog or even if I should. The long and short of it is that it doesn't make a bit of difference in the long run. We believe what we believe. Eventually God will show me the answer of how to prove my Faith to others. But until then, I can only say that when I think of Atheism, these are the main problems with their arguments.)

It is all about faith; life that is. Reason is a tool of our human faith, whatever that faith may be, our reason is that tool. If I am a Christian, Buddhist, Shintoist, Atheist, Muslim, Jew, Pagan, and so on and so on and so on I have faith above reason. And the cool thing about life is the fact that each and every one of us has faith in something be it science, God, nature, or whatever. And most of us have varying degrees of faith in all sorts of things or more faith in a certain field for something than in others. So, faith and reason are not mutually exclusive propositions. They are different tools of humanity that perform different tasks; and whatever notion of reality you may hold, you can respect that this is most certainly the case.

A good example of how faith works is in the case of medicine. I am a philosopher (and if ever there was something to be proud of...being a philosopher is not it). I know nothing of medicine. However, I have trust and faith that doctors know what is wrong with me when I am sick, and to have faith in their ability is to have faith in something I do not know or see. I am also a Christian. I am sick with problems in my head and soul that I know exist. I trust in experts to see the solution to my problem and give me a remedy for it. If you think you have found the remedy in some other faith (even if that faith is the non-existence of God), that is well and good. However, as of late, many atheists have gone about saying they believe in reason over faith.* Even if this were possible, it would be saying my reasoning or reasons are better than your reasoning or reasons. Yet Christians and Buddhists and what-have-you-ists all have reasons for their beliefs. The atheist has done nothing to discredit the theist, but has forced him or her to become more entrenched in their reasons or, worse for the person making the charge, explore the opposing reasons and discredit it.

So, atheism stands on the same legs of faith that theism does; namely: faith. However, if we are to explore atheism's claims of superior reasons, we are left with another problem. With atheist logic, God gets caught in several catch-22's in the realms of miracles or interference. The Christian** believes in miracles because they make logical sense. If there is a God more powerful than the created world, and Who lives outside it, would He not want the world to function a certain way? Miracles happen when He makes the world sync more in tune with His will than it normally does. The Christian accepts that the world is sin sick and that reality is not operating as it should. (In fact this is the general consensus with ALL belief systems, the question is how to fix it.) A prime example would be with my braces I had put on my teeth when I was younger. I believe that only a lunatic would say that my teeth should be allowed to naturally grow the way they would, so we place things that shouldn't go there on our teeth to straighten them out; namely: braces. Each and every day we manipulate every aspect of the world and ourselves to fix problems. Here begins one of the catch-22s God finds Himself in. If He is always interfering, than He is loathed for not allowing us to freely do anything. When He doesn't interfere, He is judged as cold and heartless. (We usually base this on our own sense of timing, which isn't as reliable as we pretend it is.) God cannot win in this scenario. And, upon further examination we come face to face with a frightening truth. If God did things on our timing (even assuming our timing was correct), we are left with a God who is weaker and more pathetic than us which is totally contrary to what we would expect God to be like. It would be as if aliens came to earth and were incapable of understanding simple machines such as the wheel or screw or inclined plane and couldn't talk and were complete infantile in their reasoning. How could this be? It is completely illogical. If God can create things ex nihilo, he will be smart enough for miracles.

The second catch-22 is that of miracles. I don't know how the world was created. God could've taken seven days or it could be imagery to explain things. (The odd belief among some atheists or Christians or a plethora of adherents to other religions, that we must take everything in these books as literally true is both un-imaginitive and intellectually insulting. If we are capable of such things like imagery, why wouldn't the ancients be? It is an intellectual arrogance nowadays to think ourselves knowing new secrets in the art of writing. The average American high schooler may know a great deal more about electricity and computers than people of the ancient world, but our knowledge in the humanities is always among equals.) However, let us assume that the Bible is in fact literally the case that...say...Moses parted the Red Sea and led the Israelites out of Egypt.

Science says this is plausible. You see an island volcano blew up and the shock-waves would've clouded up the sky (plague of darkness), released iron into the water (turning the Nile red as blood and killing sea animals), and eventually drawing a bunch of water back up to it, and then releasing it back in a shallow enough body of water. Well, here is where the theists would be stymied, because the Red Sea isn't shallow enough. But the Sea of Reeds is in fact that shallow, and usually is mistranslated as the Red Sea. So, science proves this event is plausible.

Here an atheist would say that this proves that things can happen naturally without a God. This is the main philosophical problem that the atheist runs into. If a miracle is impossible to prove at the time, he or she says that the writers must have been liars or some such. However, when it becomes verifiable in a natural world, the atheist then says the event must have been true, but the people were mistaken for believing in God. This is extremely problematic for the atheist though, since while the conclusions have stayed the same, the propositions have not. Usually scientific atheists (since atheism has many different denominations) state that deductive reasoning is the only way to go, but here it would appear that the premises and conclusions are irrelevant because of the faith of the atheist.

The point I am making is that the world is filled with beliefs. This is a key component to humanity. It is impossible to empirically prove or disprove the existence of God through this sort of reasoning unless your faith is in this reasoning, if not the point is moot. As one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein put it: That which we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence. Logically we cannot prove or disprove God from this scientific standpoint anymore than I place a picture from a t.v. signal under a microscope in order to see the molecules in the actor's flesh.

Faith is usually seen as something that is always fighting against reason, yet this is complete foolishness since it is faith that propels reason. We believe there is a cure for cancer even though we don't know where it is. We believe we can find some way to better power our vehicles, even though reason is quiet about this as well. To rid ourselves of faith is to rid ourselves of the engine of reason.



*This is hardly possible, because to believe is to have faith and that violates the law of noncontradiction (~p ^ p : Not something and something at the same time).

** I will hereafter use Christian as my example, since I am a Christian and it will be less cumbersome than trying to use counter-examples from other faiths as well.