NOTAE INRITAE

This is a collection of old posts from my old blog, they are moved here as an archive.
Most have something to do with atheism or theism, or rational thought about these.

Meme's, Atheists, and laughable arguments! (Copied From Mark Shea's Column in the NC Register, full credit to him) There are, according to St. Thomas, only two arguments against the existence of God. The first, translated into modern lingo, means: “Bad stuff happens, so God doesn’t exist.” The second says, “Everything seems to work fine without God, so he’s not there.” Most “scientific” attempts to argue for atheism (such as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell) rely on the second argument to claim that human beings and their religions are, like everything else, a product of the same purposeless natural forces of matter and energy that gave us the beetle and paramecium. The problem is that, by the materialist’s own logic, “everything else” also includes the human mind and means that the free human mind is, ultimately, an illusion. What we call “reason” is, in a materialist universe, the consequence of the physical-law-bound motion of molecules in our brain, according to atheists such as William Provine, a professor of biological science at Cornell University. The first consequence of this is that there is a self-contradiction embedded in trying to persuade somebody that religion should be abandoned, for persuasion presumes real freedom. Beyond this, atheists try to use not only the materialist argument that “nature causes mind,” but also the moralist argument that evil exists and that, furthermore, its greatest source is theism itself. Atheist literature is thick with denunciations of the moral evils of theism and with appeals to abandon this enslaving priestcraft for the liberating heights of “reason.” In short, atheism tends to not only assume that reason is intrinsically free, it assumes reason can be freely and even perversely misused by cunning religionists. Atheists do not merely claim that “reason” is the force that will liberate us from the shackles of “nature” (by freeing us from the naturally evolved delusion that God exists). They also blame theists for doing bad things in ways they do not blame other creatures. Tapeworms and televangelists both exploit other creatures, but atheists blame only the televangelists. In short, in the very act of denying that humans have a supernatural element to them, it affirms we are higher than tapeworms, and capable of free moral acts of both good and evil that no other creature can conceive. It assumes our thoughts are not simply caused by nature as the motions of animals are, but that they are grounded in something higher. That something is what theology calls the rational soul. However, atheists like Dawkins are not eager to acknowledge this self-contradiction. Instead, they plunge further on into more self-contradiction. And so, having just made the case that religion is the product of natural evolutionary forces that tend to make for the biological success of homo sapiens, they simultaneously argue that religion is a naturally evolved blight that will surely doom homo sapiens. Only by listening to Dawkins, Dennett and Co. — who refer to themselves as “Brights” to distinguish themselves from the “Dims” who believe in God — may we be saved. Yet, on their own evolutionary accounting, what basis do we have for thinking that Dawkins, Dennett and the “New Atheists” have evolved beyond the religious herd of humanity and point the way to biological, much less spiritual, health for the human species? Curiously, Dawkins and Co. explain all this, not with science (which is about the business of quantifying matter and energy and their effects) but by inventing invisible pixies called “memes” and claiming that they cause religion. By a complex series of handwavings and incantations, they argue that these “memes” have, in the case of religion, led directly to the survival of the unfit (namely, belief in God) and that Brights have magically escaped the influence of these “bad memes” that nobody has ever seen, smelled, heard, tasted or measured. And because Brights have out-evolved the rest of us meme-enslaved theists, they are qualified to argue that the state should be allowed to take children away from parents who hold the “wrong” sorts of religious beliefs and pass along these invisible memes. Given that nobody has yet been able to actually see a “meme,” I think it might be worth asking how we know they exist, much less guarantee the superiority of Dawkins, Dennett et al to the rest of the gene pool. Might it not be that atheists such as Dawkins and Dennett are not the “next phase in evolution” but rather mutants doomed to extinction? Suppose the reality is not that they see better and therefore possess an evolutionary advantage, but that they are blind to what most humans can see and are therefore doomed evolutionary dead ends? For, on a purely Darwinian accounting, it would rather appear that religious people, who believe in the sanctity of life and have more children than the secular atheists are, by every scientific measure, the winners — even in this life. And if atheism’s account of things can be that self-contradictory when it comes to earthly things, what of heavenly ones? ______________________________ (From the Standing on My Head Blog.) To paraphrase G.K.Chesterton, "Tolerance is a nice word for indifference and indifference is an elegant word for ignorance." The reason for having an open mind (like the reason to have an open mouth) is eventually to close it--because it has been filled with something good. Tolerance, on its own, is a weak virtue that eventually turns on itself with a suicidal bent. This is because the one thing tolerance cannot tolerate is intolerance, and the more tolerant a person becomes the more every little bit of intolerance becomes intolerable. So the person who puts tolerance as the highest and only virtue, finally is incapable of tolerating anyone or anything or any law that limits or defines anything because to limit or define any behavior or any sort of person is perceived as a form of intolerance. Relativism becomes the only rule. The only dogma is that there can be no dogma. The only discipline is that there must be no discipline. The only ultimate authority is that there must be no authority. The one thing that has meaning is that no thing has meaning. As a result the only virtue left is tolerance. As a result the 'tolerant' person will endorse the most draconian restrictions on those he perceives as being intolerant, and because the intolerant will be with us always, those laws against intolerance have to become increasingly restrictive, and the tolerant society turns into the most intolerant of societies. So in the name of tolerance freedom of speech will be curtailed, freedom of religion will be ended, freedom of association will be restricted and freedom of conscience will be violated... _______________________________ Thomas and Athiests close in opinion? An interesting statement by Brian Davies from Timesonline: "Atheists make a great fuss about how God does not exist. This claim, they think, is at odds with what those who believe in God hold. But is it? What kind of God do the atheists have in mind? And can someone who believes in God not actually feel happy to say that God does not exist? Ordinarily, of course, we think that something either exists or does not exist. So we say that the Eiffel Tower exists while the Colossus of Rhodes does not. And if, like some, we presume that belief in God is a scientific hypothesis, or that God is a top, invisible person, a celestial consciousness (with or without a beard) living alongside the Universe in time while learning about it from on high, then, presumably, He, too, either exists or does not exist, just like you and I. But there are other, and more traditional, ways of thinking about God. Take, for example, what we find in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. He never thought of God as an entity seriously comparable to what we find in the Universe. He took God to be the cause of everything real and imaginable to us, the cause of all natural kinds and their members, the reason why there is something rather than nothing. Aquinas, of course, realised that when we talk of God we are forced to make use of words we have come up with to name and describe what we find in the world in which we live. And since he took people to be higher forms of being than anything else around us, he naturally ascribed to God what we most value in ourselves — such as intelligence. But Aquinas was equally keen to emphasise that God is not a creature, not a member of the world, not a being among beings, not, in this sense, an existing thing. God, he says, “is to be thought of as existing outside the realm of existents, as a cause from which pours forth everything that exists in all its variant forms”. For Aquinas, there is a serious sense in which it is true to assert that God does not exist. He would readily have agreed with Kierkegaard’s statement: “God does not exist, he is eternal.” Or we can put it another way. There is a sense in which Aquinas holds that only God really exists. Creatures are there, right enough, but, for Aquinas, their being is derived or dependent. All that they are and do is God’s work in them. They have no reality from themselves. Creatures are temporal, finite, and caused to exist, while God is none of these things. Aquinas puts all this by saying that God’s existing does not differ from his substance, that God, and only God, exists by nature, that God is “subsistent being” while everything else “has” being — has it as given to it. You can find a similar line of thinking coming from St Anselm of Canterbury. God, he declares, is “the being who exists in a strict and absolute sense” since with Him there is nothing temporal and nothing received. Traditionally speaking, therefore, it makes sense to say both that God does not exist and that only God exists, which means we should be careful when it comes to what we mean when we declare ourselves atheists or not. And there is surely a further sense in which all Jews, Muslims, and Christians can be thought of as atheists. For they do not believe there are any gods. They believe there is a Creator of all things visible and invisible, not that there is a class of gods to which the Creator belongs. The first of the Ten Commandments tells us to have no gods. It effectively tells us to be atheists, to stop being interested in extremely powerful creatures and to focus instead on the unfathomable mystery behind and within the world that we can, to some extent, fathom. God the maker of all things cannot be a part of what He brings forth. He belongs to no category. He is not a god. There are no gods." _____________________________ Truth, assumptions and logic As we all know, an argument can be logically correct in its form, but not truthful. Discovering truth is more important than logical correctness, and Chesterton has great way of putting it when he says that reason alone is insufficient. The starting place for reason is never reasonable. You can never prove your first statement, or it would not be your first statement. Logic is a process which can be performed after an assumption is made. You can only find truth with logic, if you have first found truth without it... The agnostic or skeptic makes no real use of reason, since they refuse to accept a starting point. They claim they are relying "only on reason" but they equate reason with doubt, and nothing is reasonable about that, to being by doubting from the start... But reason has to have a starting point from which to use logic to build a case, but that starting point has to be a given, a given that is simply accepted. As Aristotle said, first principles are shown but not demonstrated. So truth really is stranger than fiction. We have made our fiction to suit ourselves, but we have not made the truth. See Common Sense 101, Lessons from G.K. Chesterton. _______________________________ The Galling Godless (Taken from Ignatius Insight blog, a good statement, especially after I have looked at Daniel Dennett's new book and been less than impressed with his level of logic or argument, and his juvenile way of thinking he has settled a debat by simply stating (poorly) his opinion... and his understanding of theology and his "opponents" positions is rudimentary at best and non-existent at worst.) Sam Schulman, publishing director of the American, has been following the work of The New Atheists — Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Steven Weinberg, Brooke Allen, etc. — and is not impressed. Writing in the Opinion Journal, he states: What is new about the new atheists? It's not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won't encounter a single point you didn't hear in your freshman dormitory. It's their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote--both of which, the new atheists assure us, they do in lockstep with the pope and Jerry Falwell. For them, belief in God is beyond childish, it is unsuitable for children. Today's atheists are particularly disgusted by the religious training of young people--which Dr. Dawkins calls "a form of child abuse." He even floats the idea that the state should intervene to protect children from their parents' religious beliefs. For the new atheists, believing in God is a form of stupidity, which sets off their own intelligence. They write as if they were the first to discover that biblical miracles are improbable, that Parson Weems was a fabulist, that religion is full of superstition. They write as if great minds had never before wrestled with the big questions of creation, moral law and the contending versions of revealed truth. They argue as if these questions are easily answered by their own blunt materialism. Most of all, they assume that no intelligent, reflective person could ever defend religion rather than dismiss it. The reviewer of Dr. Dawkins's volume in a recent New York Review of Books noted his unwillingness to take theology seriously, a starting point for any considered debate over religion. The faith that the new atheists describe is a simple-minded parody. It is impossible to see within it what might have preoccupied great artists and thinkers like Homer, Milton, Michelangelo, Newton and Spinoza--let alone Aquinas, Dr. Johnson, Kierkegaard, Goya, Cardinal Newman, Reinhold Niebuhr or, for that matter, Albert Einstein. But to pass over this deeper faith--the kind that engaged the great minds of Western history--is to diminish the loss of faith too. The new atheists are separated from the old by their shallowness. ...in Schuman's concluding words: The new atheists fail too often simply for want of charm or skill. Twenty-first century atheism hasn't found its H.G. Wells or its George Bernard Shaw, men who flattered their audiences, excited them and persuaded them by making them feel intelligent. Here is Sam Harris, for instance, addressing those who wonder if destroying human embryos in the process of stem cell research might be morally dicey: "Your qualms . . . are obscene." The atheists say that they are addressing believers. Rationalists all, can they believe that believers would be swayed by such contumely and condescension? They seem instead to be preaching to people exactly like themselves--a remarkably incurious elite. _____________________________ From Ignatius Press blog... Nietzsche, who in some sense brought modernity to a close by exposing its own inner incoherence, is always interesting to read. Pope Ratzinger, good German scholar that he is, will cite him rather often. A sense of poignancy hovers over the reading of Nietzsche. We sense the disappointment that he felt over Christians themselves who, in his strict view, do not, as he thought, really believe what the faith holds to be true. This practical disbelief in the truth of Christianity, however, is increasingly prevalent in Western societies over a century after Nietzsche's death. The only alternative open to him, in Nietzsche's own mind, was the famous "will to power." This much-pondered principle was in fact a license to construct our own world, to declare our freedom precisely by rejecting all previous explications, particularly those stemming from Plato and Christianity, from natural law or faith. We should, Nietzsche thought, have the "courage" of our mind, something, alas, only a few have. He insisted that everyone, including himself, be "intellectually honest" and accept the consequences of no truth. This "courage" to be honest meant that we should live as if, whether true or not, God were dead. We should bravely take the consequences. Truth simply did not exist. We should create and live by our own definitions of man, of what we want him to be. We should not be bothered or weakened by small things like virtue or right or doctrine. Of course, Nietzsche was overly strict and sanguine in what he expected of Christians. If they were not exactly like Christ, then it followed, he thought, that Christ was a failure. He had no followers. Imperfect Christians were hypocrites. Nietzsche seems not to have read that Christ came to save sinners, even recalcitrant ones. This too-high standard would expect all Christians after Christ to be simply perfect. Perhaps Nietzsche maintained this high standard as a justification for his own theories of a world solely dependent on the will of his new man. Nonetheless, Nietzsche's agenda or inspiration, in many forms, can be found at the roots of much of modern culture, particularly academic culture. We live with a dogmatic relativism that empowers us, so it is claimed, to depend on neither nature nor grace, on nothing but our own willed social and personal constructs, whatever they are. In the end, in this cosmos, we find nothing but ourselves, a thought not a few find consoling. Our "dignity," it is said, is to live accordingly. This living our own formulated truth is what "intellectual honesty" meant to Nietzsche.