Reasonable Dissent

Follow up to atheist morals

I just read a painful post about A Christian Analysis of Atheism. I don’t know what I might have expected with a title like that, but the ideas in this misguided commentary make me cringe. I’m embarrassed for both of us. You because you don’t understand a lot of things, and me because we aren’t explaining it well (apparently).

This reminded me of a recent post I made about atheists and morals. This is, apparently, what some Christians think of when they hear the term “atheist”:

According to Chuck Colson in Against The Night: Living In The New Dark Ages, in the arena where relativism reigns supreme in opposition to the law of God, there is no legitimate ground in which one can exclude the arguments and proposals of Nazis, serial killers, and pedophiles (47).  From today’s headlines, the nation is coming to realize in the most brutal of ways that these ideas do not confine themselves to academic journals or newspaper opinion pages.  And in the case of school shootings such as Columbine High, this radical antipathy towards God can in fact turn deadly.
If the lawlessness of atheism can wreak havoc upon individual lives, just imagine its affects (sic) magnified across entire societies.  The major dictatorships of the twentieth century testify to this blood-soaked historical truth.  Founded upon assorted atheistic ideologies, these totalitarian regimes promised secular heavens on earth but instead dragged their nations down to the very borders of hell.
Unfettered by eternal external standards, those holding the reins of power in such societies had nothing to hamper the implementation of their most extreme policy whims, not even the value of innocent human lives.

Oh no. Really? The “lawlessness of atheism”? I get so tired of this argument. There is no lawlessness necessitated by atheism. Read that past post of mine for more of that. Atrocities have been committed in the name of many things, including CHRISTIANITY. Some people may try to blame the religion for them, but in general, I do not. It’s the people using what they can to rationalize what they want, nothing more. Blaming atheism for the Columbine shooting? I seem to remember that they picked that day to coincide with Hitler’s birthday (and lest we forget, he made numerous mentions of his Christian beliefs and motivations). So just drop it! Atheism is not about abandoning morality because you don’t have to answer to anyone. Would Mr. Meekins go on a shooting rampage if he wasn’t worried that he would be punished by an invisible man in the sky? Let’s hope not.

But my main point is this: Atheism is not inconsistent with morality, and it’s completely orthogonal. The discussion of belief in a god has nothing to do with if we lose our morality or not. It’s a complete non sequitur. Saying, “Christianity must be true, otherwise people will kill each other”  is not arguing any point of truth about Christianity, it’s appealing to the emotions of listeners who don’t really want to die.

And I’m not done with this commentary. He wants to bring up science, so I’m happy to oblige.

The Laws of Thermodynamics declare that, left to themselves, systems degrade to the maximum level of entropy; or in laymen’s terms, things wear out.    Employing this principle, one is forced to conclude that, if the universe is an infinitely-old closed system those like Sagan claim it to be, then the universe would have already wound down in eons past.  Therefore, the universe must have had a beginning.  And since something finite cannot come from nothing, the hypothesis of a divine creator provides the most plausible alternative.

Now, my thermodynamics is a little rusty, but if I remember from college, thermodynamics deals very heavily in probabilities. That is to say, all of the molecules of air in this room could rush to one corner all of a sudden, but that isn’t very likely. The laws of thermodynamics make predictions based on the fact that, over time, things tend to follow certain rules, because the probabilities of them not doing so are so small. But IF the universe is an infinitely-old  closed system, you would need zero probability for an event before you could say it won’t ever happen. Don’t underestimate infinity, it’s quite a long time. I’m not claiming that this is true, but consider the possibility. Some 13.5 billion years ago was the last time that all the matter in the universe happened to get to a state that it was crunched down together so tightly and exploded. Can you say with certainty that this hasn’t happened before, or will again? In another 20 billion years? 20 billion billion? (20 billion billion)^(20 billion billion)?

One more comment on the cosmological argument in general, while we’re talking science and math. The argument is more or less a failure of semantics. We start with a premise: everything in motion has a cause. So, that cause must then have a cause, and so forth until we get to a “First Cause”, which must be God. There is a fallacy here that is less than obvious: you can’t use a timeline argument to discuss something that is not temporal. Give it some time to roll around in your brain. If you want to ask “What happened before time began?” you have already used language to make any answer meaningless. What does “before time began” mean? You’re asking what temporal relation something had when there was no measure of time at all. Time is a tricky thing to think about, but watch out for this mistake. “Before time” is meaningless.

It’s too bad so many people misunderstand these things. But I’ll keep doing my part, one post at a time.

Tags: atheism, Christianity, logical fallacies, morality, science