Hello

My name is Stan and I am a recovered Atheist.

It is an honor to be invited to contribute to this blog. Some background on myself: For 40 years I was an Atheist. During those decades I never bothered to analyze the Atheist position from a logical point of view. It seemed so obvious, so simply derived and easily maintained. It was not until my retirement that I took the time to think these things through. I discovered that despite my degrees and my career in R&D, I did not have a complete education. So I set about studying, first the source and use of logic and rational thought. Then I applied that to my chosen belief, Atheism. What I found, I now post to my own website and blog, as an analysis of Atheism from a logic and rational thought perspective, without recourse to theism or deism. If Atheism is a robust, logical philosophy, it should welcome and readily withstand such self analysis, should it not? Of course it should, but does it?

First I'd like to share some of the things I have learned about Atheism.

What is Atheism, Really?
Atheism is not just “absence of belief” in a deity, nor is it just “belief in the absence” of deity. Some Atheists have redefined Atheism to fit their own needs, just as some BOB Christians have redefined Christianity to fit their own needs. Atheism has more aspects than just these basic definitions.

I’m not here to fence an endless semantic duel with foils of definitions. I will, however, tell about Atheism from the inside and the outside. Hereafter I will assume that the term Atheism refers to an absolute knowledge that there is no deity, and that agnosticism refers to any doubt concerning the probability of the matter of a deity. But agnosticism in not the subject; Atheism is.

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Reasons for Atheism
Atheism can be handed down just like Boogie-man theory and leprechaun tales. But it is usually acquired as a result of adolescent rebellion against authority. This normal youthful rebellion, when gone astray, leads to long term rejection of all sorts of authority including ecclesiastical and theological. Rebellion can become endemic and work its way into a life-long worldview. This can be accompanied by the pride of elitism and the denial of first principle based logic, resulting in logical inversion(1). So there exists a push-pull, where the push is away from authority, and the pull is elitism; the movement toward rejection is lubricated with inverted or non-rational thought processes. This is seductive to the young and impressionable because it seems to help implement their desires and overcome their insecurities. It worked well for me, on that superficial level of non-examination.

The logical inversion starts with declaring the once valued protectors to now be evil. The inversion continues through the use of rationalization in lieu of logic, where the conclusion is determined first and evidence is selected to support that conclusion. This is the point where the unspoken presupposition drives the logic, inverting it. It is irrational.

Atheism and the Developmental Environment
The protracted rebellion is especially true of the progeny of missing or weak fathers, as shown by the historical analysis done by psychiatrist Paul Vitz, in his work, “Faith of the Fatherless”. This review of famous Atheist philosophers revealed the rebellion / rejection principle at a rate of 100%: Famous Atheists(2) had weak, defective or missing fathers, and were raised under the auspices of females. The resulting feminization of the child results in anger at both the feminizing mother, and the absent father (male role model). The child angrily rejects these two authority figures and continues to reject authority throughout life. The attempt to justify this rejection of authority results in evangelical fervor in the resulting Atheism and in their lifelong anger: misery loves company. Some schools of thought relate Asperger’s Syndrome with Atheist behavior, and an informal, non-binding, non-scientific on-line poll found a higher degree of such behavior amongst self-proclaimed Atheists than non-Atheists. (3)

Atheism and Science
Atheism is camouflaged in an aura of logic from which it derives a faux respectability. Science is a favorite lever for Atheists because the voluntary materialism to which empiricism subjects itself is so similar to the philosophical materialism of Atheism. So Atheism co-opts science for its own sub-worldview and tries to act as if its own philosophy is scientifically verifiable. In actuality, science has nothing to say about those things which it cannot measure, including deities. So science does not reject non-material reality, it merely does not pretend to investigate it. It is Philosophical Materialism that rejects non-material reality.

Atheism itself is not verifiable using any empirical technique; Atheism is merely a disreputable parasite on the respectable pursuit of material knowledge, which is science.

Philosophical Materialism
Materialism as a philosophy claims that there exists no reality beyond material existence. The Philosophy of Materialism fails immediately, imploding in self-refutation. Philosophy itself is not material. How can an all-material reality require a non-material entity to describe it? So using a philosophical, non-material restriction to require an all-material reality is a self-contradiction, a paradox; it self-refutes. And never mind the “material mind” cover, claiming that ideas are material things. That one self-refutes also, choking on the issue of free will existing in a hardwired brain-mind. A hard-wired material brain-mind cannot freely produce non-material things such as philosophy, or even the abstraction of "free will".

Atheism and Hard Evidence
So we conclude that Atheism is not supported logically by either science or by materialism. What about hard, physical evidence? Well, even Atheists acknowledge that a negative existence cannot be proven. So in the total absence of supporting hard data favoring Atheism, the argument here falls back on Russell’s orbiting teapot, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, elves, faeries and other obvious constructs serve to prove that there is no deity. Is it enough to create these strawmen and then by demolishing them, to claim that to be a verification of “no first cause for the universe”? Of course not, but there are other straw men, such as the “who created god?” issue.

Who Created God
This issue invariably resurfaces ever since Russell was convinced by Mill’s argument. While it is a transparent dodge to avoid the issue of a sentient first cause, it merely diverts the argument into a disputative cul-de-sac. The “who created God” strawman purports to be unanswerable and therefore proof of “no first cause for the universe”… an obvious Red Herring diversion but worth destroying. So here we go:

Since space-time and mass-energy were created at t=0 (roughly) of the Big Bang, then time, for example, did not exist at t=0(-). However, the first cause did exist then, and in a sense not comprehensible to those of us trapped in space-time. Now if time as we know it did not exist before t=0, then neither did “cause and effect” as we know it, because the principle of cause and effect contains a necessary time relationship where the cause occurs first in time, then the effect occurs later in time.

So without “cause and effect” as we know it, it is meaningless to discuss what caused what in the prior existence to t=0(-). There is no need or even way to successfully posit a prior creation, in the empirical sense with which we are familiar.

The first cause existed at t=0(-). And for all we know, in perpetuity, in the sense of timelessness. The famous “who created…” dilemma does not even exist. It is a Red Herring.

The Pathway of Logic and Rational Thought
When I discovered the logical path to thinking these problems through, I rejected Atheism on a logical and rational basis. Moreover I recognized my own history of rebellion and attempts to attain elitism through rejection of authority. And I recognized the anti-rational behaviors of Atheists in general, including the advocacy of abortion (irrational on all levels) while denying involvement in eugenics, along with attacks of all kinds on the social fabric.

The logical inversion that accompanies rebellion is obvious in the thought processes of Atheists, each of whom subscribes to his own brand of logic and morality. Since no two Atheists believe the same things, there is no case to be made as to which Atheist is right. The departure from traditional logic is apparent.

While the same case can be made for religions in general, that is beside the point: the point is that Atheism is not rational, because it has no absolute first principles to guide its thinking. In fact, that greatest of Atheists, Friedrich Nietzsche, overtly rejected all first principles in his work, “Beyond Good and Evil”. First Principles are not provable empirically; so they are rejected, and by doing so rational thought is also rejected. Thus Nietzsche derived anti-rationalism, and although it might be denied by some modern Atheists, it cannot be removed from their worldviews, despite the rational camoflage used to hide it.

This is the reason that atheists are exceedingly difficult to engage in discussions using traditional logic; they do not use traditional logic: they invert it and rationalize their presuppositions. And because the rationalized presuppositions do not connect straight on with traditional logic, the conversation rapidly devolves into ad Hominem from a position of presumed superiority and elitism on the part of the Atheist. I choose not to go there.

Atheism is not only not rational, it is also anti-rational.

Footnotes
(1) The first principles of rational thought are the bedrock truths upon which logic and rational thought are based. These include the principle of cause and effect, the identity principle, the non-contradiction principle, and the excluded principle as well as others. These principles cannot be proven to be true empirically; they are known to be true by inspection and discernment. So both the principles and the method of recognizing the truth value of the principles are non-material, transcendental, abstract meta-realities. These must be rejected in order for Philosophical Materialism to be valid; or Philosophical Materialism must be rejected if these principles are accepted without material proof.

(2) Except for John Stuart Mill, whose education was driven by his Atheist father. Mill was intensely force fed classical education and utilitarianism until he had a mental break down in his late teens. He never rejected his overbearing father’s teaching of Atheism. This father was defective in a different sort of manner.

(3) http://voxday.blogspot.com/Vox Popoli, 2007.