Occam and Atheism
Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2016 7:59 am
This is kind of a long read BUT, IMO, one of the best articles I have read in some time:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2016/09/occa ... more-16727
Excert:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2016/09/occa ... more-16727
Excert:
My point here is not to argue Christianity is true and atheism false. I will thank any uneducated yahoos in the audience not to direct comment toward those points. I am speaking specifically to the argument by the atheist that says the Christian worldview is not based on reason like any other. I am comparing the number of ad hoc and epicycle-like assumptions needed by the atheist model to save the appearances, compared with the common sense assumptions of the Christian.
Of particular note is every single ad hoc explanation which presupposes that the human brain actively deceives the human using it, or which dismisses large multitudes of men as gullible fools, or which turns heroes into cads, martyrs into lunatic masochists, geniuses into halfwits.
Note again that no modern philosophy, all of which were made in the absence of theology, fails to contradict itself in a blatant way (with the exception of Objectivism). Note also that unlike the theology of Thomas Aquinas, or the philosophy of Aristotle or Plato, the modern philosophies all propose common sense is illusion, and that reality is sharply other than what common sense proposes. Unlike Christianity, the stories told by the modern philosophers are ugly, ungainly and pointless.
Again, this ugliness certainly does not prove one model is wrong and the other is right, but it is one more thing that is rather awkward for the atheist philosopher to explain away.
For the truth in the atheist worldview is bitter and astringent: it is Lovecraftian truth, truths to drive all but the hardiest cowering back in awe at the magnitude of hostile nothingness the endless aeons of nonbeing, the bottomless chaos of uncaused cacophony, which stands behind the fragile appearances of order and beauty in nature.
There should be no philosophers in the Lovecraftian world of the atheists: because truth hurts, demeans, and destroys the meaning of life. They should rightly be called phobosophers.
But why? If we were created by blind natural processes alone, and polished by the harsh culling of natural selection, our race should be a suited and fitted to live life as mortal men on earth as fish as fitted to live in the sea. We could not yearn for immortality or union with the divine any more than fish could yearn for outer space.
If Darwin is right, the members of our race that see ghosts and regret the passing of loved ones and that deceive themselves with fairytale stories of life after death, we should all have been wiped out by remorseless competition by the more rational and more efficient atheist man-apes, who waste no time with tears or tombs or telling tales of ghosts and gods.
Again, the only reasonable atheist explanation as to why evolution failed to make us fit in with the harsh reality of real life is that our brains are wired for self-deception, and, yet again, that leads to the question of why the atheists and them alone are free from the wiring.
And as an ex atheist who converted, I’d like to know why I was free of the wiring for 42 years, and then fell so handily back into it, despite being forewarned and on my guard?
In the Christian worldview, some facts can be harsh, harsh as hell, but truth itself, the eternal truths of the immortal things, such truth is lovely as a bride, bright as a lightningbolt, sublime and awesome, and so the proper response to seeing the light of truth is love.
Our explanation for this is simple and clear: truth, like love itself, comes from God and is God, and he made us to serve and love him, hence to love truth.