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Does God exist? That is the question that so many scholars, peasants, governments, and individuals have been trying to answer from the beginning of human civilization to the present and beyond. Every group in the history of mankind, from Taiwan to Jamaica, from the top of Russia to the bottom of Chile, has said yes to a form of divinity. Their religions have ranged from one God to one million Gods to no God and these religions have defined culture, tradition, lifestyle, and the society of the place; they have ruled nations and defined nations, inspired nations and controlled nations. Not every person has been a believer but every culture has had a belief. Yet somehow, despite this vast evidence that there must be something or else everyone …show more content…
In Answering the New Atheism, Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker examine his most recognized book: The God Delusion. Is God a delusion? Or are atheists? Many have said “it takes more faith to be an atheist that a theist. “ Hahn and Wiker prove this in their description of Dawkins: “The problem with Dawkins is his against-all-odds insistence that chance be the blind God who brings everything about” (Hahn 50). To phrase this in a more scientific way: “If the odds [of a chance rise of DNA] are this bad [20100] – so bad that they amount to the closest thing next to impossible that’s possible – what could account for Dawkins’ incalculable faith in chance?” (Hahn 31). Dawkins believes fully in chance, but if even a strand of DNA has a one in twenty to the one-hundredth power, how on earth did humans come about in such a short time? Hahn and Wiker explain this idea: “The more complex an effect that the brain produces (such as Pride and Prejudice), the more complex the brain itself must be. The more complex the brain is, the greater number of Mount Improbables evolution would have to have climbed to have produced it, and so the longer it must have taken. But we only have so much time before we bump into the 3.5 billion year barrier when the first cell appeared. The only way around the predicament of time, is to speed up evolution, so that, quite literally, evolution is happening by leaps and bounds. That is …show more content…
All of these head-turning, mind-twisting, western ideas have been explain. What seems like solid evidence to many is dissected and found to be nothing but a façade. “A good part of Dawkins’ urgency and undisguised animosity in The God Delusion arises from his conviction that Christians are under a moral delusion. For him, Christians are fundamentally irrationally, and the fundamental irrationality plays itself out in the public sphere…[Dawkins is worried] about Christians attempting to push through the legislation against abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and so on...Christianly is morally pernicious…He is just as worried about mild and moderate forms of faith as he is about religious extremism” (Hahn 143). This is what so many atheists believe. Is Christianity ruining the world? Perhaps. Feasibly, religion could be both the savior and the destroyer of the world. Religion can be saving people spiritually and making them peaceful, yet religion is the cause of so many wars and conflicts as seen in the Middle East, Japan, India, Africa, China, Russia, and South America. This does not allow atheists to persuade people to flat out stop believing based on false conclusions and straw-man conclusions. This does not give non-believers the right to dismantle Christianity based on the idea that God refuses to be tested as any natural cause would. Answering the New Atheism explains this very clearly.
Coherence is an essential part of the theist’s belief structure. The individual arguments when joined collectively hold just that, coherence. While individually they do not point to evidence together they do. This coherence forms a basis of truth, supporting each other in their claim and not contradicting them. In this manner they establish truth where facts are lacking. If we examine independently the arguments presented by McCloskey they too lack adequacy to establish the nonexistence of God.
The United States is commonly thought to be on an inevitable march towards secularization. Scientific thought and the failure of the enlightenment to reconcile the concept of god within a scientific framework are commonly thought to have created the antithesis of religious practice in the rise of the scientific method. However, the rise of doubt and the perception that secularization is increasing over time has in actuality caused an increase in religious practice in the United States through episodic revivals. Moreover, practice of unbelief has developed into a movement based in the positive assertion in the supplantation of God by the foundations of science, or even in the outright disbelief in God. The perception of increasing secularism in the United States spurs religious revivalism which underscores the ebb and flow of religious practice in the United States and the foundation of alternative movements which combines to form the reality that the United States is not marching towards secularism but instead religious diversity.
The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski uses clever and unique critiques of militant atheism and its devotion to scientism. Ten in depth chapters shed light on the dogmatic stance of many of today’s popular “new atheists.” According to Berlinski new atheism poses itself as the sole holder of truth through science, “And like any militant church, this one places a familiar demand before all others: Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (10). Berlinski (a secular Jew) approaches ideas with his own mixture of intelligence and thought filled logic; exploring the world as well as important philosophical questions pertaining to “new atheism”. Thus providing the information needed to explore the sides for both and existence and nonexistence of God.
In today’s culture, the idea of there is perfect and divine designer that made the earth and everything that entails with it, really pushes people away. Not only has this idea been conflicted about in today’s culture. It has been especially trivial in past decades, an example of this is seen by H.J. McCloskey. McCloskey wrote an article about it called “On Being an Atheist”, which attempts to defeat the notion that there is a God. McCloskey first addresses the reader of the article and says these arguments he is about to address are only “proofs”, which should not be trusted by any theist. He then goes and unpacks the two arguments that he believes can actually be addressed, the cosmological and teleological argument. McCloskey also addresses the problem of evil, free will, and why atheism is more comforting than theism.
Throughout our short time on Earth, a very common thought and feeling that many people have is, “What’s out there? Why are we here? What made us?” etc. This natural human tendency to ask these questions lead some people draw conclusions that may or may not be there. A belief I’ve held for years is the atheistic one. Christians, as well as many other moral institutions would refer to an atheist as someone who doesn’t believe in God. Where this may be the case, I feel as though this definition is a lazy and non-intellectual one. Rather I tend to believe that atheism is the lack of a belief in a given higher power. To that, I will reference a quote from Richard Dawkins, “I am an atheist with respect to around 2700 Gods, you (a christian) on the other hand are an atheist with respect to around 2699 Gods.” This is a quintessential and distinguishable difference between the two beliefs, or lack there of. What’s interesting in what Dawkins was saying was that you could infer that with this definition, Christians are statistically about as atheist as atheists are. Now with that being explained, one would start to bring in to frame the probability and the odds that maybe in fact the Christian God is the one real God vs. the chances that maybe another factor has been played into this belief.
The Canadian philosopher J.L. Schellenberg has recently put forward an argument for atheism based on the idea that God is supposed to be perfectly loving and so would not permit people to be deprived of awareness of his existence. If such a deity were to exist, then, he would do something to reveal his existence clearly to people, thereby causing them to become theists. Thus, the fact that there are so many non-theists in the world becomes good reason to deny the existence of God conceived of in the given way. I first raise objections to Schellenberg’s formulation of the argument and then suggest some improvements. My main improvement is to include among the divine attributes the property of strongly desiring humanity’s love. Since to love God requires at least believing that he exists, if God were to exist, he must want widespread theistic belief. The fact that so many people lack such belief becomes a good argument for atheism with respect to God conceived of in the given way. Some objections to this line of reasoning are considered, in particular the claim that God refrains from revealing himself to people in order to avoid interfering with their free will or to avoid eliciting inappropriate responses from them or some other (unknown) purpose. An attempt is made to refute each of these objections.
Charles, T. (n.d.). A Response to HJ McCloskey’s “On Being An Atheist”. Retrieved from Carry your cross: http://charlestinsley.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/a-response-to-hj-mccloskeys-on-being-an-atheist/
Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve, 2007. Print.
“As of 1994 there were an estimated 240 million atheists around the world comprising slightly more than 4 percent of the world’s population, including those who profess atheism, skepticism, disbelief, or irreligion”(Michael). Disbelief in God might be considered arrogant, but as you can see the group we refer to as atheists includes not only simple-minded imbeciles, but also the great American diplomat, Thomas Jefferson. “Atheists are frequently asked what atheism has to offer as opposed to religion. To answer this question, I need to assume that there are no gods or supernatural entities to reward us with a peaceful eternity if we follow some established morality. If the reason for this assumption is proven false, then the question is meaningless, as atheism ceases to exist”(Goluboff). A strong one-sided statement that gives little attention the fact that we presently...
5. Smith, J. M. (2011). Becoming an atheist in America: Constructing Identity and Meaning from
Religion is the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods, a particular system of faith and worship or a pursuit or interest followed with great devotion (Oxford Dictionary, 2014). From religion, many new groups, communities and further derived religions have formed. Closely related to religion and with endless controversies surrounding it’s classification as a religion is the concept of Atheism- which is defined as the disbelief or rejection of a deity. Descending from this is a social and political movement in favour of secularism known as New Atheism. Understanding the historical content concerning the emergence of atheism, this essay will then address how various aspects within the field inclusive the goals, structures and approaches have emerged and developed over time in comparison to the original atheist ideals.
2) Gollwitzer, Helmut. The Existence of God: As Confessed By Faith. Philadelphia: The Westminister Press, 1965
6. Bohdan R. Bociurkiw and John W. Strong, Religion and Atheism in the U.S.S.R. and
The term ‘atheism’ first emerged in the 1500’s, based on the Ancient Greek vernacular used for ‘godless’. From the very beginning, there were a distinction in the way that people would choose to reject the notion of deities; positive atheism and negative atheism. Negative atheism, also know as ‘soft’ atheism, is when a person does not believe in deities but does not make the assertive claim that there are none that exist. The counterpart to negative atheism, positive atheism, is not negative atheism’s opposite but its more assertive variation. Positive atheism, unlike negative atheism, asserts with full confidence that deities cannot, have not, and will not objectively exist in ways that actively initiate real-word events. Negative atheism was coined by British philosopher Antony Garrard Newton Flew (February 11th 1923- April 8th 2010). Positive atheism’s publicity predates the coining of the term ‘negative atheism’ by a couple of centuries. Negative atheism was first coined as a term in 1976, and positive atheism was first...
Habermas, G. R. (2008). The plight of the new atheism:a critique. Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 813-827.