The Sage Forge

The debate between the religious and atheists has, of late, become rancorous.  We are seeing a genuinely remarkable phenomenon in that atheism is being expressed evangelically. Let us examine why this is happening.

By all accounts the current spur for evangelical atheism is the rise of radical Islam and the threat implied by the essential intolerance of Islamic faith and its propensity for expressing itself in law.  But atheism is, by definition, the absence of a god of any sort.  That means that, though Islam seems to be the proximate trigger for atheistic radicalism, all forms of religious faith, especially Christianity, have become the movement's targets.  The reasoning appears pretty simple.  1. There is no god. 2. All assertions of god are superstition.  3. Islamic superstition constitutes a danger to civilization.  4. All superstitions represent intellectual weakness and are, therefore, subject to becoming the same sort of danger Islam represents.  5. All superstitions are a danger and should be eliminated.

What no one says, because it strikes at the logical heart of atheism itself, is that there is also another logical point. 6. All superstition is heresy.  In other words, once one has established an acceptable order for the world the things that fall outside that order become unacceptable.  Any religion presents itself as an attack on radical atheism if radical atheism has become the acceptable rational underpinning of society.

In as much as atheism has not yet become the rational foundation of our world (thank God) now is a good time to examine the surprisingly questionable logic atheists apply to their arguments and why these arguments seem to hold so much sway today.

In my introduction to this article one can see a kernel of my approach.  Atheism can't say there is no order to the world.  Nor can it say there is no overarching reality not beholden to our perspective.  Nor even can atheism claim that design processes of enormous power are not at work in the universe.  All of these statements are logical fallacies easily debunked in simple debate.  What atheists do, rather, is attack, on the small end of the logical scale, specific presentations or images of God, and on the large end of the scale, a sentient or self-aware overarching intelligence.

The vast majority of atheist attacks on religion take the first of these approaches.  The reason is simple.  Virtually all organized religions organize themselves around a fairly specific image of God.  The more specific the image is the easier it is to debunk the image.  I'm actually very much in favor of this sort of challenge to religion.  If we have a false image standing in for God in our common conception we commit idolatry.  Atheists do all religion a great service when they point out what we should already know - idolatry is bad.

The second approach is usually taken up with ipso facto statements not dissimilar to saying "All of the images of God I've debunked are wrong therefore there is no god."  This is something like saying all the pictures of the Baron de Bastrop from Texas history are wrong, (there being no contemporary images on which to base them) ergo he was a fictional character.  Here, of course, there is another logical fallacy.  Our inability to create an accurate image of God does not mean there is no God any more than our inability to define an accurate unified field theory for physics means there is no uniform reality for the universe in which we live.

Winnowing all this detail away, the single key point in the atheist's view of the world is that whatever provides order to the universe is not self-aware.  The order we see is without purpose.  That is the cornerstone of their faith.  Break or erode that stone and any moral authority they claim becomes null and void.

Thus am I delivered to my thought experiment.  The workings of individual neurons in a human brain are not driven by self awareness.  As a matter of fact an enormous amount of the activity in a brain could be said to be random to an extent we would be be apalled to know, given our sometimes defensive insistence on our own self-awareness.  Meanwhile, brain studies steadily reveal processes which look for all the world very like the random processes of evolution itself.  The haphazardness of the lowest levels of brain activity is channelled through pathways shaped by environment (memory) each of which shows a variety of specializations (speciation, or programming) for the accomplishment of some task (survival).  The signal cascades initiated by random neural firings less well adapted to the issue (environment) at hand are supressed while those better adapted tend to survive.

I would make the argument that any argument that can effectively define away the intelligence of the larger creation as we experience it in the world of genetic studies could also be used to define away our own assurance of self-awareness.  For that reason they are suspect in dealing with the difficulty of detecting a self-awareness we could recognize in the larger universe.

I will continue to add to these thoughts as days go by