Tuesday 7 October 2014

No Atheist Lives Consistently With Their World-view

First up, I can already hear the cries of "atheism is not a world-view, it's just a position on the question of the existence of God".

Right... atheists believe that God does not exist. Theists who believe that God exists see the world with the knowledge that he has an effect on things and there are consequences to his being around. An atheist would have to be the opposite of that and so (whether they realise it or not) believing that God is not real or not accepting his existence is going to shape their world-view.

So having dealt with that, let's get to the point: no atheists live consistently with their world-view.

Without God there is no objective moral standard. There's no thing that is defined as 'good' that we can compare other things to beyond our own opinions. Which actually means that doing the washing up is morally equal to torturing people.
No one believes that. No one behaves that way. Everyone agrees that some actions are morally better than others.


Without God and the promise of an eternal afterlife, everything people do in their lives is ultimately meaningless. There is no purpose to any of it. It might be useful or helpful for the generation they exist in and for a few following, but eventually the Sun will burn out, the planet will die, and the human race will be extinct. What was the point of doing charity work for a few years when there will be an eternity of nothingness?
We agree that helping people and doing good is the way we should live, but atheists have absolutely no reason to beyond immediate satisfaction. In their world-view, they might be better off killing and stealing to make their own lives richer and more enjoyable.

Without God there is no source of free-will. Evolution can only explain how our bodies mutated gradually over millions of years changing from bacteria into full sized meat robots. Everything we do is like a computer. Information is fed in, our brains compute it, and our programming makes us act on it in the only way we can. We're not able to break the programming without free-will to do that.
So if we are all meat robots, then we never really think, or choose, or analyse anything. Our brains do it all automatically and we have no control over it. Reasoning and logical thinking don't exist. We have no ability to study science. We can never really know if anything that we think we know is true, because our brains only keep what helps it to survive.
Nobody lives thinking that way. Everybody feels like they're making choices. We have courts of law and a justice system that holds people accountable for the things that they do wrong. If people are just programmed to go bad, then we have no right to punish them for doing things they have no control over.

That one doubles up with there being no morality anyway. If there's no absolute morality, then it's our opinion against the 'criminals' and again, we don't have any right to judge them for not being in line with what we think.

If we aren't in control of our thoughts and emotions, (i.e. they are just our robotic programming playing out) then there is no such thing as love. No one really cares about the people they are with. They just have a chemical reaction in their bodies that tells them it's a benefit to be around some other person.
Atheism is world-view that has no room for love.

Nobody lives this way. We all agree that morals exist, thought and logic exist, and love is real.
Only theism allows for these things to be true. Atheists have to lie to themselves about all this stuff and pretend that they aren't robots just to avoid accepting that God is real.

Is it worth living with a world-view in mind that you can't actually live out in reality?