Outside of the nihilists, atheism is simply the act of anointing yourself as God. It's all theist logic with the scale many, many orders of magnitude smaller. And it's utterly pathetic.
This time, when I engaged these guys, I took their position completely and asked them to explain where They lived in it all. You know, "so how did you make any molecule in your body do something against the laws of chemistry?" They had nothing, of course. There's nothing to be had. They'd been so busy insulting theists that they'd never considered the question and it took them by surprise.
The God of the Gaps is the idea that God exists, doing those things science can't explain. Well, thanks to advances in science, the Gaps keep getting smaller to the point where many slay this proof of the Almighty by saying there are no Gaps at all. Of course, if there are no Gaps for God, there are no Gaps whatsoever for you. Indeed, your Gaps disappeared a long time ago.
Pointing this out caused one of three reactions.
1. Hand waving. "I control the Rabbit Hole." In a logical sense, that response wasn't even hand waving, it was more of a total, unconditional surrender.
2. Complaining that my choice of scale (the molecular level is my favorite) is absurdly reductionist. That's idiocy, of course, since they are making themselves into the Easter Bunny. Below an arbitrary scale, reality is reductionist and absurd. Above that scale, the person magically appears and hands out treats in the form of free will and moral choice.
3. Genitalia and sex. I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove, but they do like their genitalia and sex. It gets mentioned, I suppose, as some kind of attempt to shock the prude. Whatever.
Like I said, it's pathetic and depressing. They've got absolutely nothing at all except sneering and snark, deconstructing civilization down to the point where they can rush about in orgasms of self-worship. #2 is the intellectual's version, where they simply replace God with themselves in Aquinas's proofs of God's existence.
By the end of the whole affair, I simply lost all my patience and blew one of them away with logic. After that, I asked him a pair of simple questions:
Why did he believe in something that could be proven to not exist? Was it because it just made sense?
Update: The last conversation ended with the atheist claiming that advancements in science do not eliminate uncertainties and he trusted that science would find his free will some day. I told him there was no light at the end of that particular tunnel. He took it to mean life after death and trotted out a cliche.
Sigh.
Update 2: I just picked up Beyond Good and Evil on Audible. It should be refreshingly nihilist after a series of conversations with these self-theists.
4 comments:
"Outside of the nihilists, atheism is simply the act of anointing yourself as God."
I would argue that it is appointing no-one as god. And it isn't saying there are no gaps, simply that the gaps are more likely to be the result of unknown, perhaps even unknowable processes, rather than some supernatural being.
Anonymous,
I would agree.
I would more recommend the Genealogy of Morals.
So you don't have any reply at all, do you? No explanation of the chemistry? I thought not.
Here's your Genealogy of Morals in a much more consumable form than Nietzsche's ravings.
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