Professing Wisdom, Manifesting Childishness

The Absurdity of Materialistic Atheism

David Berlinski writes:

Ever since the great scientific revolution was set in motion by Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, it has been a commonplace of commentary that the more that science teaches us about the natural world, the less important a role human beings play in the grand scheme of things.  "Astronomical observations continue to demonstrate," Victor Stenger affirms, "that the earth is no more significant than a single grain of sand on a vast beach."  What astronomical observations may, in fact, have demonstrated is that the earth is no more numerous than a single grain of sand on a vast beach. Significance is, of course, otherwise.   Nonetheless, the inference is plain: What holds for the earth holds as well for human beings.  They hardly count, and scientists like Stenger are not disposed to count them at all.  It is, as science writer Tom Bethell notes, "an article of our secular faith that thee is nothing exceptional about human life." . . . .

Neither scientific credibility nor sound good sense is at issue in any of these declarations.  They are absurd; they are understood to  be absurd; and what is more, assent is demanded just because they are absurd.  "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,"  the geneticists Richard Lewontin remarked equably in The New York Review of Books, "in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories." [Author's emphasis. David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 8f.]

It is truly baffling how those secularists who, by profession scientists, can proceed in such a confused, irrational, illogical, and absurd manner.
 In fact, it is so baffling that the ordinary auditor or reader assumes that it must not be so.  We all tend to extend the benefit of the doubt, and assume there must be more foundation, more warrant for the prognostications of these "great minds".  However, in reality the more one pokes and prods, the more one is led to recall the judgement of Holy Writ upon the pagan mind when it refuses to acknowledge the eternal, immortal, invisible God: "professing to be wise, they became fools" (Romans 1:22).

A recurring schoolboy error in such cases is the enormous basket of gratuitous assumptions these fellows bring along with them--assumptions which stand in direct contrast to, or in contradiction of, their fervid assertion of materialism, on the one hand, and evolutionism on the other.  To cut to the chase these worthies declare that there is nothing other than electrons and sub-atomic particles which exist.  Moreover, the fundamental animus of these particles is brute chance.  Stochasticity is the order of the day.  But somehow, magically, in superb contradiction they proceed as if this were not the case with respect to existence as we "practise" it and experience it.  In particular, and especially, it does not apply to them.

Here is Richard Dawkins in full flight--implicitly contradicting all his professed materialistic atheism, blissfully unaware, if would seem, that he and his pronouncements are a whirling mess of stochastic contradictions.  In other words, Professor Dawkins proceeds as if all along his emphatic declarations of materialism and atheism were just so much poppycock.

You don't get your moral compass from religion.  If you did you would be stoning adulteresses to death, and you would be executing people for breaking the Sabbath, and for making graven images and that kind of thing.  We clearly do not get our moral compass from religion. Our moral compass in the 21st century is a 21st century moral compass and it's changed.  It changes by the century, it changes by the decade.  I call it the changing moral zeitgeist. And the shifting moral zeitgeist has nothing to do with religion. . . .

The other way in which religion might give a moral compass is if people behave in a moral way because they are frightened of God, because they want to go to heaven, or don't want to go to hell.  That's a rather ignoble reason for being good.  I would rather meet somebody who is good for the sake of being good, rather than for the sake of sucking up to an imaginary friend.  [uk.businessinsider.com/richard-dawkins-religion-morality-2015-10]

The child's rejoinder to such sentimentality is to require Professor Dawkins to define "good" from the presupposition of his cosmos in which only matter-by-chance exists.  Truth and lies, good and evil, morality and immorality have to operate in a void of nothingness.  They do not exist, nor have they any meaning.  They, when they do appear to appear, are only the chance collision of some sub-atomic particles somewhere, and in the next nano-second will have changed.

But notice how Dawkins suspends his materialistic stochastic atheism when it comes to Dawkinsian morality and foundations for ethics.  A true believer would have qualified all his vacuous appeals to authority--such as a cherry-picked consensus of moral philosophers--with a qualification: "That's what I think this instant, but I might think something entirely different in five minutes or five seconds.  It all depends on how the electrons roll."

Or maybe Dawkins has assumed all along that he is not an enslaved subject to his own cosmology--that somehow he is something more than a random collage of balls of energy.  Maybe he has assumed that he is separated from his cosmological speculations--above them, beyond them, higher than his random materialism.  Maybe Dawkins regards himself as a demi-god.  Maybe his atheism is of this variety: "there is only matter; there is no god--but me".  Who knows.  But we do know this: that Dawkins, professing to be wise, has become the silliest of fools.

Like all his fellow atheists, he has cloaked himself in absurdity.