It’s been so easy to get people to take the claims for design in nature seriously after they’ve been inundated by a huge dump of new atheism. But hey, the easy stuff never lasts:
To be sure, New Atheists could be very, very bad at arguing that God does not exist. There was, for example, Lawrence Krauss writing a book about how something can come from nothing while attributing material qualities to the latter. There was Richard Dawkins trying to refute the famous “Five Ways” of Aquinas without even attempting to understand their terms. (“Whereof one cannot speak,” groaned Wittgenstein, “Thereof one must remain silent.”) There was Christopher Hitchens striding into philosophy like an elephant onto an ice skating rink and saying:
…the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator.
Why is it unanswerable? People have certainly tried to answer it. Answers readily came centuries prior to Hitchens himself, actually. Hitchens is free to take issue with Aquinas’ distinction between contingent and necessary existence if he wants, but he’s not free to suggest no answers have been offered. How does the concept of the “necessary being,” for example, fail? Hitchens offers no sign of knowing what it is, because that “unanswerable” is not a logic conclusion but a rhetorical sledgehammer swung at the reader’s skull.
I know atheists can make better arguments. But the New Atheists never felt obliged to, because they were so confident in their own rationality that they never learned about the ideas they were mocking.
Ben Sixsmith, “New Atheism: An Autopsy” at Arc Digital
Fair cop.
Sixsmith also talks about elevatorgate and a few other stories from the glory days. Don’t miss it.
Oh yes, the elevator row from the glory days …
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Atheists never ask themselves any hard questions, since they have no answers. Arrogance is a distinctly human trait and does not exist in nature. Arrogance is defined as an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner. Arrogance is from the root word ‘arrogate’ and means to claim without justification. Atheists make a great deal of claims without any actual justification to support their views. They have no evidence to support their claims, which is why they don’t want a real debate. They will lose every time due to a lack of actual evidence. They rely on circular reasoning and demand the impossible from anyone who disagrees with them. They never have to respond to the question of life coming from no life. They never have to respond to the question of a lack of evidence of positive mutations. They simply demand others accept what they say and will demean anyone who dares disagree with them.
Good news, good ol’ down-home atheism/materialism/naturalism is still going strong.and still waiting for compelling evidence for the claim that the Christian God actually exists..
Sev, only as an ideology. Evolutionary Materialistic scientism is inescapably self referentially incoherent and self falsifying. KF
Seversky states
States the man who blatantly ignores, or tries to superficially rationalize away, the many findings of modern science that have falsified the predictions of atheistic materialism at every turn and, in the process, have verified the predictions of Christian Theism:
The materialistic and Theistic philosophy make, and have made, several contradictory predictions.
These contradictory predictions, and the evidence found by modern science, can be tested against one another to see if either materialism or Theism is true.
And here is a defense against Seversky’s flimsy naturalistic counterclaims
Moreover, modern science is even very good at pointing us to Christianity as the correct solution to the much sought after ‘theory of everything’;
Specifically, allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), by rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics then that provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
To give us a small glimpse of the power that was involved in Christ resurrection from the dead, the following recent article found that, ”it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology.”
Verse:
seversky:
In the minds of the willfully ignorant, perhaps. Good ol’ down-home atheism/materialism/naturalism still relies solely on faith.
From the article cited in the OP:
The problem for any theory of social justice for atheism (new or old) is that atheism does not provide any basis for interpersonal morality or universal human rights. So the SJW movement is for them a non-starter. It also undermines so-called secular progressivism itself because it is also basically atheistic. In other words, progressivism is a mirage with no real moral foundation and no real moral or “social justice” goals.
F/N: I see, “the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator.”
Someone here does not understand logic of being, necessary vs contingent being and reality-root.
KF
Seversky @ 2 and any other evolutionists
I’m still waiting for compelling evidence to support macro evolution. Not one atheist has ever shown a positive mutation exists in nature. Without positive mutations, there can be no evolution. Not one atheist has ever come up with a theory to explain how you go from no life to life. You cannot get something from nothing. Not one atheist can explain the constants that exist in the universe. There is no evidence to support the claim at all and all atheists have is circular reasoning and attacks. They are the ones that lack a single shred of proof to prove their position.
The evidence is there that He exists. When you want to look for it you will find it. We are in an Information Age.