ATHEISM DEBATING POINTS

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I am an atheist, a humanist, a secularist, a person of no religion. I am nothing.”1 Of course, this is an obvious contradiction. To be the things in her list means she is something. She has picked and fashioned a worldview. Being nothing is impossible even for someone who claims to be nothing, because the nothing she claim to be is actually being something. Being something is an inescapable concept. Pressed on this, Nica would have to admit that she really is not “nothing.” She has a belief system that she must account for given atheistic, materialistic, and secular assumptions.

Nica wants her “live and let live” worldview, but she has nothing on which to build it. There’s no way to account for Good Samaritans or anything else that is good (or evil) given her atheistic assumptions.
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Then there’s the Shermerian call to be a “good person” and do “the right thing?” By what standard?

The degree to which my actions enhance the survival of the species? If so, wouldn’t the “right thing” include exterminating or, at least, sterilizing individuals with congenital defects like diabetes, autism, or heart disease? Wouldn’t it also include cutting off “useless eaters,” like quadriplegics, Down’s children and AIDS victims. Wouldn’t the species be better served by taking the resources needed to maintain these individuals, and using them for curable diseases? Why shouldn’t the hopeless few be sacrificed for the well-being of the many?

True altruism, the “caring for the least of these,” makes little sense in a fully materialistic world. Not only is Shermer’s explanation unhelpful here, Shermer himself is left with a much bigger question: Why, in a universe cobbled together by the unguided process of evolution, is the survival of the species necessarily a good thing? Since matter and energy have no teleology, “no end in mind,” whatever is, is. There’s no good or bad to it.

There is little doubt that altruism will forever remain an “unsolved paradox” for those trying to unravel it through the rubric of science. Over a hundred years ago, the materialist Sigmund Freud spent his life trying and failed. In a letter to a colleague, Freud confessed,

“When I ask myself why I have always behaved honorably, ready to spare others and to be kind wherever possible . . . I have no answer. . . . Why I—and incidentally my six adult children also—have to be thoroughly decent human beings is quite incomprehensible to me.”

But for those who accept its Divine origin, altruism is a laser beam of light emanating from the radiance of Him who showed us what true love is.
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Because someone can come up with a purely human explanation why someone would believe in God doesn't refute God's existence at all.

If you argue that morality evolved, you may end up saying that one "ought" to be selfish.
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In other words, “survival of the fittest” is the social and intellectual worldview of the “New Atheists.” Harris and Dawkins are simply this century’s model of the Bolsheviks which in 1925 created the League of the Militant Godless “to bring atheism to the masses.

A propaganda campaign that would make Richard Dawkins proud was mounted in early 20th century communist Russia by the League that effectively promoted atheism as progress and religion as poison.
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It is one thing to espouse a desire to live in a place where there is no God, but it is an entirely different thing for such a place actually to exist. For it to become a reality is more than the atheist can handle. Adolf Hitler took atheism to its logical conclusion in Nazi Germany, and created a world that even most atheists detested. Although atheists want no part of living according to the standards set out by Jesus and His apostles in the New Testament, the real fruits of evolutionary atheism also are too horrible for them to contemplate.
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Perhaps Gore has his countries mixed up. If eighteenth century history teaches anything, it teaches that France was the country that elevated reason to the level that Gore and Harris think it should occupy, not America. The signers of the Declaration of Independence appealed to “the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,” not to Harris and Gore’s invisible god of reason. The signers realized that for reason to be reasonable it must be fixed on a standard outside of man himself. Thomas Paine’s book Common Sense was instrumental in promoting this view throughout the colonies. Conversely, the French Revolution made it a point to destroy any vestige of Christianity and start all over again—even including their calendar. Their experiment was a miserable failure and a case-study of tyrannical government intervention. What “reason” leads Harris, Dawkins, and Gore to believe that their own “experiment” will fare any better?
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At the end of the Darwinian atheists’ first great experiment in civil government, 1917–1991, at least 85 million residents of Communism’s officially atheistic social laboratories had been either executed or starved to death by their rulers. The more likely figure is a hundred million, according to The Black Book of Communism. The total may have been higher. Mao’s strategy of systematic extermination may have resulted in tens of millions of executions not recorded or else not yet made available to researchers. What went on in Castro’s Cuba has been recorded in horrifying detail.3 What has gone on in North Korea has not been equally well recorded. The death toll from starvation is in the millions. This is the survival of the fittest, Darwinist-style.4

Barker and Gaylor believe that “reason and kindness” should replace “superstition and ideologies.” Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot thought they were being quite reasonable as they implemented their purges. Barker and Gaylor need to read the literature of their fellow atheists. The French revolutionaries of the eighteenth century elevated reason to high art, turning it into a goddess and confirming its legitimacy by the blood of the guillotine. Kindness is a great thing, but atheists cannot account for it given atheistic assumptions. Try telling a lion to be kind to a gazelle or a serial killer to be kind to his victims.

What Barker and Gaylor do not understand is that atheism is theocratic with the human animal as the final arbiter of truth.

What Barker and Gaylor do not understand is that atheism is theocratic with the human animal as the final arbiter of truth. If atheists get their way, they will be running the world in terms of some ultimate principle. At the moment, atheists have the benefit of a vibrant Christian worldview where they can borrow moral plugs like compassion and kindness to keep their hole-filled materialist boat afloat. Given time, future generations of atheists will logically throw off these moral precepts that at one time had been mined from “ancient literature.”5 Consistency will lead these newly empowered atheists to conclude that “kindness” is a superstitious remnant of an ancient book-led religion that once proposed that immaterial entities exist. Science will show that there is no way to account for these religion-defined virtues given naturalistic assumptions. It’s the apostle Paul who defines love as being “patient” and “kind” (1 Cor. 13:4). When atheists no longer have Christianity to borrow from, from what bank will they draw their moral capital?

Don’t be fooled by the charge that a new theocratic form of government is threatening America; it’s already here. For example, there is a new secular Third Commandment that says, “Thou shalt not take the name of a homosexual in vain.
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The ideological engine of atheism is evolution, and by the declaration of its own practitioners, it’s a religion.

The distinguished biologist Lynn Margulis has rather scathingly referred to new-Darwinism as ‘a minor twentieth century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology.’ Stuart Kauffman observes that ‘natural selection’ has become so central an explanatory force in neo-Darwinism that ‘we might as well capitalize [it] as though it were the new deity.’

When Richard Dawkins was asked, “What do you believe that you cannot prove?,” he admitted the following: “I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.”5 Dawkins, and those who follow his naturalistic creed, have faith in an impersonal cosmos that is the product of a faith-committed impersonal concept that has no inherent moral brake.

The atrocities of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler reveal in stark detail how despotic and cruel the impersonal worldview of naturalism can be if followed consistently. It is no accident that Communism and Nazism claimed Darwin as their patron saint. Darwin’s approach to origins found an enthusiastic adherent in Karl Marx and his communist successors. Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels in 1866 that Darwin’s Origin of Species “is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”6 The results have been horrendous. One-hundred million dead in what has been described as “Darwin’s century.”

“We make men without chests and we expect of them virtue and enterprise,” C. S. Lewis writes. “We laugh at honor and we are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”7 We strip men and women of the certainty that they are created in the image of God, and we are surprised when they act like the beasts of the field.