Atheism is unthinkable

Atheism is unthinkable

There are things, we can call them things because we don’t really know what else to call them, like the laws of logic, numbers, consciousness, ethics, relations, things that seem to be eternal and unchangeable, that are inexplicable in terms of eternal material as the singular explanatory fact, or mere empirical observation, as the method for determining or measuring truths. But if you have all of these facts of experience that are either inconceivable or inexplicable within the scope of a proposed worldview, as in naturalistic atheism, you would need to either deny many facets of human experience by reducing them to being the accidental relations of objects in space, and so say that most of what we find ourselves to be is an illusion of some kind, or find an understanding of the world that can be held in concert with the perceived facts and experiences of the self and the world as we actually find them to be.

This is simpler than it seems. With God, I understand who and what I am, and why the world is the way it is, and why things are the way they seem to be, including everything from physics, to sorrow over death, the love of friends and family and the longing for the afterlife. My grief over sin, the desire for salvation, and the need for reconciliation to one greater than myself, that seems to be innate, makes sense in this context but not outside of it. We need to have a worldview that can coherently reconcile that we grow through time into something either wonderful, or base, and that being either wonderful or base is not just a subjective judgment or opinion, but a real condition ascribable to persons and behaviors.

There is something better and worse that I can be, and it matters. This is a given of human experience so powerful and effectual upon my psychological status that to claim it to be simply an environmental construct, or the accident of a mindless process of unplanned mutation, seems unthinkable if I am going to take my experiences seriously, and not simply decide to accept what others have decided my experiences should be, or let them dictate to me that they really amount to nothing. The longing for understanding itself, for justice, for hope, for joy. All the human things, that some say are not, but that we say are, and are definitive of what we are.

There are many kinds of Atheism but all carry a similar sentiment. That all that we seem to be, we are not, and that what we really are, is nothing very interesting. Just a bag of chemicals. Accidental fuzz on a sphere of mud wandering an inadvertent universe with neither rhyme nor reason. Cause and effect. Atoms bouncing. A paraphrase. An epiphenomenon at best. In the end, just a trick of the light.

Now, I’m not just saying that Christianity is the better of two possible answers, and so should Pragmatically be accepted. I’m not even saying it is the lesser of two evils or the best bet yet. It does seem to be true but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that given the properties and facets of human experience, Christianity, its view of existence and the teleology of man, is positively rational and comports with the real world. While Atheism is negatively unreasonable, irrational, and almost seems to edge toward absurdly contrary to common sense. It argues by the erasure of the common elements of experience to an alternative framework that has never been experienced by anyone (meaningless mechanical determinism), on the basis of things that have never been seen (the ultimate resolvability of all phenomena by reference to the relations of tiny unobservable particles, fields, strings, or whatever), by a method that is self refuting (that the scientific method is the only means to truth while that itself as a premise cannot be shown to be true through the scientific method).

In line with this way of looking at truth, I’m also yet to see any good argument against the verity of Christianity, which if it were not true, should be obvious and forthcoming. There are many things that at first sight seem to hold some compelling force, but I find that with a little study and the application of God given Logic and Reason, they fall through.

This is a way of looking at proof that many people are unfamiliar with. Most of the important things in life simply cannot be proven in any way that is reconcilable with the way we talk about it today. What is surprising to people, is that that is not a weakness. If we predecide that what is real must be observable beneath my microscope, we will certainly miss the world beyond it. I cannot prove that I exist. I cannot prove to anyone else that I think this or that, or feel this or that. I cannot prove even to myself that the experiences that I have of the external world in anyway realistically represent the actual world beyond the tip of my nose. I cannot prove that electrons exist. I cannot prove that things fall down “because” of gravity. I cannot prove that I love someone, that I don’t like eggplant, or that rainy days make me sleepy. I cannot prove that 1 + 1 = 2. And I cannot prove that the laws of logic are valid and should be followed in common intellectual discourse. Any proposed proof would be necessarily circular.

How we apprehend and measure truth in the real world is not reducible to the world that people end up with when they choose to narrow the scope so as to exclude the real world. But when they go home at night they live in the real world with the rest of us. The world where good and evil exist and people matter more than all of the accumulated content of the sciences combined. More than the stars themselves, and we would give up any one of them in all their glory for the peace and safety of even one of our small children. Because in the end, if we are true to ourselves, we can only live consistently in a Theistic universe. It’s the one we we’re made for, and the kind of thing we are doesn’t make sense in any other. The one where persons are more important by far than anything else, and are not reducible to chance and time and matter in the void, but carry within themselves a transcendent importance that speaks of something else.

The Atheist, because of some strange impulse within himself, reduces all things to the impersonal. He feels a need to make himself, judge himself, part of a dead world of impersonal forces and meaningless events. He longs for oblivion and defines himself as such. Because in creating a world that has no meaning, they self consciously and purposefully delete themselves, from consciousness and purpose.

Because we are personal beings and all of our experiences are personal, understanding the ultimate nature of impersonal things is impossible for us. We cannot experience impersonality. We do not know what it is like. We do not know what it really means. Everything we think or experience is within the context of our personhood unless we suppress the truth and make believe we are stones. They will always be, as they were made to be, for us, and not definitive of us. We cannot look at them, learn their properties, and then define ourselves in terms of them, worshipping the created instead of the Creator. They have their only significance conceived in relation to purpose and use. I’m not saying we make them what they are, God makes them what they are and what He made them to be is inherently related to what we are, as personal beings created in the Image of God, who is a personal eternal Spirit, the Logos, the Divine Wisdom. What they are is dependent upon what we are because that’s what they’re for. And so the only interpretation of the world that can possibly make the slightest bit of sense to us, is to think of it as the product of a Personal Being, because there is no other way we can think, and be what we are. Otherwise we are just pretending to be nothing so that we can avoid facing the fact that we are truly something.

Is this a “First Cause” argument? In a sense. It’s just a more primary a priori rather than an a posteriori use of the idea. Everything’s gotta come from something, or there is something itself that is as it is and that helps to explain everything else, and if there is anyway to find and measure that thing it will be through either the contents, the presuppositions, or the consequences of whatever it is that we find ourselves to be. Augustine would say the presuppositions. Aquinas would say the consequences. Anselm would say the contents. An immediate aspect of all three, seems to be, God.

Christopher Neiswonger