Thread: Atheism is nonsense and atheists are irrational in their claims

I'm just going to quote some words of mine from some recent correspondence I had with one of the forum members here. When writing, I realized what I wrote didn't just apply to his positions as an atheist but to the positions many other atheists adopt as well. I've reworded it to refer to the general position of the atheist now.

From what I've seen many atheists and their positions are brought on clearly from their emotional hatred towards organized religions and belief that evolution somehow debunks God (it doesn't). Others reason that atheism is the "default position" and therefore requires no argument or evidence and that theism solely has the burden of proof. Then you have "emotional atheists" who reject all notions of reason and logic and simply argue that a god could not exist because bad things happen. Finally there are those who say "I examined the natural world and concluded God could not exist" not realizing their own conclusions are based on faith. There is nothing in the natural world to positively affirm that a god doesn't exist.

• For the first argument, religion means nothing really here when we're arguing about theism. The refutation of all the world's religions would still mean nothing since theism itself as a concept exists independently of religion. Evolution simply explains the origin of species and their variation, nothing more and so has no bearing on the existence of a god.
• For the second argument, saying atheism is the "default position" is a cop-out. Voltaire reasoned against this long ago, the true default position is nothing. A baby has no knowledge of theism, atheism or god to either believe or disbelieve. To disbelieve in God, you first must become aware of the concept and make an decision on the matter (either consciously or unconsciously) therefore atheism is not the default position. To make this claim simply shows the intellectual cowardice and dishonesty of the atheists who claim it. All positions require the burden of proof whether negative or positive. Saying "God doesn't exist" requires evidence or an argument just like saying "God does exist."
• The third argument is an argument I often see from atheists against God's existence, they say that bad things happening disprove God which is the classic emotional argument that just doesn't work. From deism's viewpoint especially, this emotional argument is just chucked out of the window. God's non-interaction proves nothing here if you can't formulate a model / prove how the laws manifested themselves from nothing or how matter originated from nothingness. Debunking God would require some proof to declare that we didn't need a god for the origin of all matter.
• For the forth argument, you still have your burden of proof to bare especially when you go around making claims like "the universe arose from nothing" and "the laws assembled themselves, this is likely because of the hypothetical infinite monkey theorem which of course has no evidence but I believe it anyway..." either back these claims up with empirical evidence or at least some observational evidences. To date no atheist can because this atheist position is based on nothing more than faith. If you make the claim that nothing in nature affirms God's existence and this proves he doesn't exist, then the theist can make the same argument as I have above about there being nothing to affirm the positive atheist's position of a uncaused universe from nothingness which could form the laws by itself as well as manifest matter from nothingness.

Most of atheism's arguments seem to be truly based on emotion or fallacious reasoning. Worst are the ones that employ cowardice and ask the theist to affirm their position as if they have the sole burden of proof. Atheists try to escape from this burden by religiously declaring "you can't prove a negative" but many proofs exist for where you can, asides from things like models and formulas proving this (such as Arrow's Impossibility theorem), there is also a practical example of a cat in a room. The positive claim would be "the cat is the room" the negative claim would be "the cat is not in the room" opening the door and going into the room to find that the cat is not in the room would prove the negative claim.

Much of atheism's position is based on "absence of evidence" but as the saying goes, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" and in a universe where we haven't even left our own solar system yet, a universe that is constantly expanding, a universe that might as well be infinitely big to us, a universe that might just be a tiny bubble in an even bigger bubble with all different dimensions, it's ridiculous for the atheist to try to use observational evidence to debunk God here. To say "God does not exist" based on him not physically appearing in our limited view of the universe is as ridiculous as saying "life on other planets does not exist" and to truly be sure of this position on God, we would need to explore every inch of the universe and beyond. If the multiverse is real then that will be impossible since you're looking at exploring an infinite set of universes and dimensions.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. To quote Marcellow Truzzi, "In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new "fact". Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of "conventional science" as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis—saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact—he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof." Likewise the negative hypothesis that "there is no god" requires proof something atheists cannot provide because there is no good proof or arguments against a god.

Of course at this point the atheist uses the classic and childish "flying spaghetti monster! invisible pink unicorn!" argument to try and reason that if you believe in God then you cannot deny anything not realizing that the these two concepts simply do not compare to God. These arguments argue about the possibility of these law-defying and biologically impossible creatures existing in our universe (which as the phrases I used to refer to them suggest, they are law defying so could not exist on their own in our universe) whereas God is a concept, used to explain the origin of matter. Also, I might add, that with science far into the future, who knows, we might be able to create a living creature with food and inanimate material, we could also find a one horned animal (perhaps a deer that suffered a mutation), paint it pink and use technology to turn it invisible (and invisibility remains something that is nearly very possible in current science). Really, the first explanation I gave was enough to explain why involving these two creatures is stupid in itself but the second argument I came up with just says if these things are possible within science and remain plausible as far as science is concerned then the atheist cannot deny God using these fallacious concepts.

With this all said then, the atheist should really be taking an agnostic position instead of the position many atheists on this site (and web wide over who are part of the "new atheism" movement) take. The agnostic position obviously being "I don't know" instead of the atheist position "there is no god" because as my arguments have proved, this claim in itself requires omniscient knowledge of the universe and beyond or empirical evidence which no one has ever provided. Atheism too has the burden of proof to provide which it cannot and at the very least, it should be able to prove its counter-claims to prove how a universe could truly come from nothingness (it hasn't).

And please don't use that silly "atheism is just a lack of belief in a god" nonsense. By now we all know atheism is on a spectrum and that here I'm explicitly arguing against the atheism that declares "there's probably" or "there's no" god.

So I don't care about how much you hate religion or The God of The Bible and I don't care if you have dreams of The God of The Bible running over your cat in a Ferrari that was paid for with the blood of a million goats. With religion out of the way, I want you atheists to tell me, a non-religious theist, others of my type, deists and agnostics why we should deny that a god could exist and accept atheism? Because by all the means I have argued here, you shouldn't be that type of atheist unless you have evidence no one could possibly possesses. If you can't prove your claims, then it's about time you admit your atheism is an irrational position and that you're irrational for claiming the position as truth.

My post may not be the most elegant but then I'm not a pseudo-intellectual like many atheists, so I'll just break everything down here.

If you want prove that your atheistic position is right then do the following things:

• Give empirical evidence that proves how the universe, matter and space could truly originate from nothingness as Lawrence Krauss speculates in his faith-based model. It wouldn't debunk God but it could certainly set atheism up with scientific foundations since it shows the universe could arise without a god and arguably establish it truly as the default position. It was also change the landscape of physics as we know it. To date there is no empirical evidence that has been provided to support this position that atheists persist with and what's more, from our current standpoint, observational evidence is against matter arising from nothingness. Many physics illiterate atheists argue that the example of particles arising from the vacuum of space is proof but fail to realize the vacuum is not truly empty, it is devoid of matter but contains energy so it is not empty.
• Show how the laws of the universe could truly formulate themselves without a mind. The properties we observe within this fine tuned universe are consistent with one another to a remarkable degree that is impossible for nature to replicate.
• Give a real model of the infinite monkey theorem that can prove that "given enough time the universe will create itself with perfect conditions" not just your faith that this is possible.

These things most be proven for the materialistic atheist ideology of many atheists to be true. Using atheist logic, I can now say theism is right on account of the absence of evidence for these beliefs above, much more so when the beliefs above also fail scientific method.

In the end what real argument or evidences does the atheist have against the First Cause God (that is mentioned solely in philosophy) other than emotional gibberish? With this god we have something that agrees with many observational evidences of the world such as causality making theism then the more plausible scenario. It's the classic argument but still yet to be refuted by atheists who use red herrings to avoid it. You know the argument: the universe has a beginning, all beginnings have a cause therefore the universe came from something, that something probably being a god (a life force, something intelligent) on account of the fine tuning of the universe and that something being eternal because you cannot have an infinite chain of self-creating gods/universes because without a beginning there is no start and therefore there would be nothing.

I've lurked on this forum for years and for years all I've seen is atheists attacking religions and the religious and demanding the religious to answer their questions, all while spewing venomous nonsense and insults revealing their irrational anger towards religion and the religious (which only reinforces my belief that most atheists are atheists for emotional reasons and aren't rational at all).

It's about time you answered questions and proved your philosophy and ideology instead of resorting to intellectual cowardice and claiming that the theist needs to prove their position alone. Since I've done away with the "absence of evidence" and "burden of proof" you atheists are so fond of yelling to avoid defending your own position, you now have to give a real reason about how your position is likely and why all the world should turn atheist.

Somehow I doubt I'll get anything productive but if I see something worth responding to, I will.