That title alone is bound to set off some triggers. Which is a shame, because it would be nice to get into the meat of this without having to first lay down some grounding to explain where we're coming from.
That well-rehearsed scripted cry rings in my ears as I write, "Atheism isn't a worldview! It's just an answer to the God claim!"
I take this to mean that the atheist saying it is really an agnostic non-theist. As such, they are sat on the fence with an "I don't know if God exists or not and am withholding judgement until more evidence comes in".
An atheist on the proper definition either believes, or feels certain that the claim "God does not exist" is true.
Following from the belief in that claim is an obvious basis for a worldview. An atheist who believes there is no such thing as God, must necessarily believe that everything in existence operates without need for one. While a theist believes God created, moulded, designed, sustains, and has plans for the universe and everything in it, an atheist requires other explanations. Hence, worldview.
Going back to the agnostic non-theist for a moment. It would be smart for them to consider the logical implications of an atheistic worldview. Rather than solely look at the claim "God exists", they should study and apply similar scepticism to the alternative claim "God does not exist". Perhaps they'd then see a clearer picture of which worldview makes more sense.
So. The following will be going through various claims made by atheists about their worldview. These are common claims made by many. We will see that a number of them are incompatible. Fortunately not every atheist holds to all of the claims, and so not every atheist is living with incompatible beliefs, but for those who do spout these contradictory ideas, they should really re-examine their worldview, and at the very least, choose between the contradictions.
If you ever find that you believe two statements that are in contradiction with one another, you have no choice but to drop one.
Of course he does. He believes that he has no beliefs. If he thinks something is more likely true than it is false, then he believes that the thing is more likely true than it is false.
There are many many things he believes. When he's out at work, he believes that he has a bottle of milk in his fridge at home. He believes his car is where he parked it. He believes he put his socks on before his shoes.
These things he believes will have varying levels of certainty, and it may be the case that he doesn't claim to know for sure if these things are true, but the statement "I have no beliefs" is as self refuting as they come.
So choose:
a) You have no beliefs.
b) You believe that you have no beliefs. Therefore you have at least one belief.
Dawkins makes a mistake that is extremely common among atheists. Although many atheists may not be aware of half of the problem.
The atheistic worldview has no room for objective morality. There is no such thing as right or wrong, or evil or good. There are only the opinions and feelings of the creatures in the world.
But if it's the case that there is no such thing as good or evil, then atheists have no right to be calling things by those names. Faith, religion, and even God often come under fire for being evil in the eyes of atheists. I've even heard people call Jesus evil, which is some crazy cognitive dissonance.
But on the atheist worldview, if religion does things that atheists do not like, then they are not doing evil, they are just behaving differently. It's exactly the same as if atheists were to be outraged that theists preferred chocolate to vanilla.
So choose:
a) Good and Evil do not exist.
b) Evil exists, but so does God.
A freethinker is someone who doesn't feel constrained by others and uses information to form their own ideas and opinions. There's no reason why this should exclude theists, but quite often atheists frame the debate as between 'freethinkers' (themselves) and 'sheeple' (indoctrinated religious fools).
Nonetheless, it seems that the atheistic worldview doesn't have room for freethinkers anyway. While on theism, God endowed his creations with a mind, self awareness, and the ability to think and create and invent, on atheism the process of evolution is all we have.
Seeing that there is no way for mindless matter to become a thoughtful mind, it becomes a problem for atheism that freethinking is an illusion. No matter how many times you bang two rocks together, it's not going to come to life and invent a sports bra.
On the atheistic worldview, by a mostly random process of chemical reactions and mutations, coupled with natural selection, what was once nothing more than dirt, dust, muck, and water, has somehow over billions of years managed to reform itself (without meaning to) into what we are today. On atheism, we are simply a bag of chemicals continuing to function in this way, and everything we do is no more due to freedom than the actions of a preprogrammed computer. If we have an original idea, it must be a chemical imbalance of some kind. People don't believe things because they are true, or make more sense, they believe them because their programming won't have it any other way.
If there is no God, then all that exists is time and chance acting on matter. If this is true then the difference between your thoughts and mine correspond to the difference between shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically. This means that you do not hold to atheism because it is true , but rather because of a series of chemical reactions… … This means that we have no reason for assigning truth and falsity to the chemical fizz we call reasoning...
~ Douglas WilsonSo choose:
a) Free thought
b) Acceptance that you are no more than a meat robot
