Mocking atheism

I can’t really say that I enjoyed writing this article, but I felt it was necessary, all the same. I don’t want to sound smug or condescending while attacking the personal beliefs of another human being, but there are times when it simply can’t be avoided. Nonfiction often requires a brutal honesty.

The purpose of writing this isn’t to irritate an atheist, but simply to demonstrate that such criticism is fairly easy to produce. Consider it proof of concept, if you will. It seems that too many atheists are convinced their worldview can’t be mocked.

As atheism becomes more popular worldwide and  the internet offers some degree of anonymity, some atheists have become considerably more aggressive, and obnoxious. They are no longer satisfied with their atheism, and now gravitate toward anti-theism. For example, an atheist recently posted this rather inflammatory comment in the discussion group on Facebook associated with the Unbelievable? podcast, where topics about atheism and religion are being constantly discussed:

As god, you get to screw up and theists get to apologize it away

Now, the only apparent reason to post such an inane comment is to provoke an angry response from the theists that read it. The assertion wasn’t particularly clever and didn’t seem to merit a more serious response, but to let the author know that I had noticed his effort, my response employed sarcasm, using a cartoon…

Another atheist then joined our conversation and (somewhat more eloquently than the first atheist) said:

I realize that it is incredibly frustrating to have it demonstrated that your supposedly sophisticated and deeply intellectual religious faith can, in fact, be summarized in a single silly meme. But rather than lash out at the authors of the meme, perhaps you should ask yourself why such a simplistic point can serve to effectively puncture thousands of years of pontificating.

For the record, I was neither frustrated nor particularly offended by the deliberate attempt to provoke people like me, because my religious beliefs cannot be reduced to a single, silly characterization by an atheist I’ve never even met. If anything, I was mildly amused. Even so, I advised this particular atheist that anyone’s personal beliefs can be mocked and ridiculed, if you know what that person believes and what the evidence tells us. Apparently this person didn’t believe me, because he practically dared me to produce an intelligent critique of atheistic beliefs, using logic and good, old-fashioned common sense as my primary tools of analysis.

Both of their posts were attempting to inspire a reaction from theists to the problem of theodicy, perhaps most effectively expressed by the question, why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?  Why, indeed.  The short answer why bad things happen to good people because humans have free will, and therefore an ability to choose between good and evil. The longer answer goes beyond the scope of this article, at the moment given the constraints of time, and the average attention span.

So let’s get right to the point. If atheism is true, the following assumptions must be true: our universe came to exist from nothing. in spite of the incredible odds against “nothing” producing a universe capable of supporting complex life that includes humans. Sir Roger Penrose calculated that the odds of our universe being created from nothing due to random chance are a ridiculously small fraction of a single percentage point, only 1 in 10 to the 300th power. That’s extraordinarily unlikely, in case you aren’t very good at math. The only alternative to a created universe is an eternal universe. However, scientific evidence (redshift and cosmic background microwave radiation, or CMB) has apparently resolved the question beyond dispute and established that our universe did have an origin.

After that unbelievably improbable anomaly (popularly known as the “Big Bang”) an almost equally improbable event called inflation caused the universe’s rate of expansion to vary with unbelievably precise timing, to the point where Stephen Hawking said that even the slightest variance of even one in a million-million would have caused the universe to collapse. Inflation could not have occurred prior to the Big Bang, and the universe would not exist if inflation hadn’t occurred immediately after it.

Then, abiogenesis had to occur, another anomalous event that chemists believe is virtually impossible to believe has a mathematical probability. All of these contingent, improbable events had to occur before Darwinian evolution could ever become possible.

In other words, before evolution even becomes debatable, several significant milestones of special creation have already been achieved. And then, every modern organism allegedly evolved from that first living cell, meaning that in addition to humans sharing a common ancestor with apes, we must also share a common ancestor with the banana that humans and apes both like to eat.

This assumption is based on the philosophical belief that the theory of evolution has explanatory value for the origin of new species. However, the origin of a truly new morphological form has never been observed in nature or produced by laboratory experiment.

The problem with assuming that every modern organism descended from a single common ancestor (which would be necessary in lieu of a supernatural Creator) is this simple question: if the original form of life only reproduced via asexual reproduction, from where could any new genetic information come? It can’t be viral, because by definition viruses are living organisms, and a virus would contain new genetic information that had to come from somewhere.

So from where did it come? The multiverse? (That was sarcasm, for those who are humor-impaired.)

The universe exists. Life exists. Consciousness exists. These observable facts are essentially inarguable. But science insists that the universe, and life, have not always existed. Therefore, we can safely assume the universe and first living organism were created by something, rather than nothing — our choice is not “God” or “no God” as atheism presumes, but a choice between God versus some remarkably unlikely good luck.

Critics will probably insist that I’ve somehow misrepresented the scientific evidence, or that my argument commits some logical fallacy, but at most I’ve paraphrased the science based on learned from some prominent atheist or skeptic,

Life is too short to waste on silly arguments that ultimately prove futile, because beliefs tend to rely on faith in evidence. If you happen to be an atheist, more than likely you believe that when you die, your consciousness immediately ceases to exist. That doesn’t mean you’re stupid. It probably means that you’re merely ignorant about the nature and volume of evidence that strongly implies that the mind and brain can exist independently of each other. As an atheist, you have even more reason than I do to loathe wasting valuable moments of your life in futile arguments, and if you think you could ever convince me that atheism is true by an argument, you’d have to know a lot more about existential science than I do, and frankly that’s doubtful.

The only point to be made by writing this article is that any beliefs can be mocked, especially when examined from a irreverent perspective of disbelief.

The next time you’re bored and try to elicit a negative reaction from a theist on the internet, please consider reading a book instead. You might be biting off more than you can chew. And beware assuming that every person with religious beliefs will be dumber than you are, because you might find yourself cured by a serious dose of humility.

If you’d like suggestions of quality reading material (that I didn’t write myself, of course), I can recommend An Atheist Defends Religion by Bruce Sheiman, who does an excellent job of explaining the probability problems related to atheism, coming from the perspective of an acknowledged atheist.  I can also highly recommend The Living Cosmos by Chris Impey, another atheist and academic who writes a book that is very easy and entertaining to read, and does an excellent job of using simple to understand and visualize analogies to illustrate the precise and delicate composition of the universe. If you have time to waste, put it to constructive use and try learning something you may not already know.

Perhaps you’ll even learn how to humble yourself.