Dear atheist, knocking down the cardboard cutout of an opponent is easy. It makes you smug to win against a comic book superhero or super villain (atheists won’t mind) of a God. It is easy, it really is. Incidentally, you fight against a doddering, sluggish opponent and that does not make you the strongest. Not your fault, that. Divine command, hell, debt, atonement and sin, the more ludicrous the proposal, the more ludicrous will be your replies. Simple propositions will evoke simple objections, and simple counter arguments. Naturally.
Image Courtesy: Brainiac punches Superman. DC Comics
Uneducated believers apart, you beat even the foremost religious apologists in the world with your supreme logic. Dr William Lane Craig, the immovable Christian apologist may be a big intellectual step-up from the blind, no- questions- asked believer, but you, the beefy atheist, are pounding him to pulp too. Both he and you make your case with all kinds of ‘rational’ arguments; the cosmological and the quantum ones; the cutting-edge science variety. Both of you run to the wide, beautiful arcades of science to refute each other’s arguments in tremendous detail. The irony however is that with whatever argument you make; the ontological, the cosmological, or the teleological, the results seem strangely close.
Neither the informed theist nor the intelligent atheist can decide the matter of God unequivocally. Once and for all. Why is that?
Frederick Nietzsche, a non-traditional philosopher, had different views about rational debating, termed as ‘dialectics’ by Socrates. Nietzsche believed rational debating between two or more parties gives less sophisticated positions and thinkers undue popularity, leading to ‘absurd rationalism’. This is exactly what modern debates about God seem to have become; absurd. We have already talked about why logic may be futile for debating about God and other existential questions. We saw that almost any point can be proved or disproved by deductive logic; hence we cannot trust it.
Maybe we will never be able to solve the matter of God and of existence by logic and rational argumentation. Maybe we need empiricism. Neo-empiricism at that, beyond what we currently understand as empirical. Hold on to that thought, for now.
There is another important point you are not considering, dear atheist. Let us say you prove that God does not exist, with the help of cutting- edge science and superlative logic. So what? How will that affect our lives? Suppose I believe in God one day, and the next day I do not because you knocked down the joker and his comic show with your intelligence, will I suddenly begin to lead a happier, better life? Say we agree that God was not the first cause of the universe and that it emerged from the first quantum fluctuation. So what? Will my psychology resolve itself, will the fears and uncertainties that plague my life vanish automatically? Will it help with my existential angst? Will it suddenly provide more meaning to my life? God might have served as a crutch, even if a broken one, to help me find a firmer footing in life. But will knocking down my crutch help at all? I speak not for myself alone, but for our civilization, our species, because existential conundrums and fears plague all of us. We may be a largely comfortable civilization today, with life becoming less and less about survival. We may be at the top of the food chain, having conquered the planet. We are thriving, it seems. But are we? Are we fulfilled, are we happy? Or is that too personal a matter to be of any consequence for science, logic and to atheism?
Ask around, please.
In my world alone, I see friends, family and acquaintances at various points on the spectrum of existential questioning. In fact, the instances of existential depression increase every time I look. Many keep busy in the business of acquiring more luxuries to care, but increasingly more are searching for meaning in less soul-crushing work and less traditional relationships. Some are closet nihilists, feeling acute emptiness, unacknowledged even to themselves. They fill this emptiness with beautiful distractions of all types. A rare few are at the brink, sinking in acute pointlessness. There are many people in these various psycho-mental states all around us.
I am sure around you too. The recent suicides of successful celebrities like Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain are poignant examples of this paradox; of lives which are full, yet empty.
Ok, so you revolt and accuse, prove to yourself and others there is no such thing as a moral fact nor God. So what? Then what? Does the atheistic position offer an answer to existential questions? About who we are, how to lead life, or what life’s purpose is. Does atheism soothe each man’s fears of death and uncertainty? Does atheism give him a framework for making sense of life? Look, an intellectual acceptance of a Godless world will not solve life’s problems. It might act as a placebo, a short-term palliative, and only that. Suffering is suffering, all kinds. One wants to avoid it but it’s unavoidable, don’t you see?
Can we deal with it differently, without God? Does atheism have a philosophy, a framework for it? Can atheism fill the vacuum created by God’s demise?
The Gods of our current religions may go, the ‘Twilight of these idols’ may have turned into night, but new idols are replacing them. Christianity is leaving, but Satanism has arrived in the West. It is an atheist movement with a new idol, a real idol of Satan. It has its own ten commandments too, a secular manifesto, but nothing we already don’t know.
Image Courtesy: YouTube, Fox News Channel
Atheism is offering us nothing new or greater.
This is because atheism is just a position of revolt even if a rightful one. Revolt is an immature position, it is half developed will. It is a necessary, intermediate position, but only a temporary one. You need to get somewhere else from here.
“I still live, I still think … and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year – what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth? I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati [love of fate]; let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yea-sayer.”(Gay Science IV 276).
Even Nietzsche felt that, acutely, till the end of his life.