Word Salad

A phrase we often hear when speaking to fundie atheists is 'word salad'.

The usual routine is something like this:

Fundie atheist: **Question about scripture/faith/religion.**
Believer: **Reasoned but perhaps complicated response with examples and evidence.**
Fundie atheist: "Word Salad!"

What 'word salad' actually is is when somebody talks a lot, but doesn't really say anything. They might seem to be skirting around the issue and giving anecdotes in order to actually avoid answering a tricky question.
This is rarely what is happening when the fundie atheist calls "word salad" though. Usually, when they call it, it actually means that they don't understand what's being said, and because they don't understand, they think the question hasn't been answered.

Ironically, one of the masters of word salad was one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism: Christopher Hitchens. In pretty much every debate with a studied philosopher/theologian (e.g. William Lane Craig, John Lennox, or Frank Turek to name a few) you'll see him being asked a straight forward question (sometimes only needing a yes/no answer) and him heading off on an irrelevant tangent so that he could get in a jab about genital mutilation.

What Might Hell Be Like?

There are three most common views of what Hell is. I'm not going to go into which one I think is right here, but just going do a run down of the options.

Eternal Torture

This is probably the image that most people have. Fire and brimstone, demons with pitchforks, lava and torture devices.

What Do Christians Have To Believe?

There are plenty of people out there who will tell you that if you don't believe such and such then you're not a real Christian. Depending on what the 'such and such' is, they could be very wrong.

Here's a brief rundown of needs and don't needs to believe:

Need to Believe:

• God exists.
• God is transcendent.
• God is the most powerful being that exists.
• God is good.
•  God created us.
• Jesus was God incarnate on Earth.
• Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected.
• Jesus is our role model.

Don't Need to Believe:

• Whether or not the Earth is thousands or millions of years old.
• Whether or not Darwinian evolution is true.
• Whether or not homosexuality is a sin.
• Whether or not we have free will.
•  Whether or not we have an immaterial soul.
• Whether or not extra-terrestrials exist.
• Whether or not there was a historical Adam and Eve.
• Whether Hell is a fiery pit, an empty wasteland, a mental state, or complete destruction.

The 'need' list is what many would call 'Mere Christianity'. The basic stuff that's needed to call yourself a Christian. All this stuff in the 'don't need' list is stuff that is debated by Christians but doesn't have any bearing on the truth of Mere Christianity. You can take it or leave it. 

What Is Atheism?

You might think that to say "I am an atheist" is a stand alone statement. You might think that to say that draws a line where your stance on the existence of God is and that's it. You'd be wrong.

Firstly, let's be clear. Atheism is different to agnostic non-theism. Atheism is to believe that the statement 'there is no God' is true.

You might be one of those that sees agnosticism as a type of atheism, and all right whatever, stick with that if you like, but just for the sake of this article, let's go with the proper definition. Let's do that simply because this article has nothing to say about agnostic non-theism. It only speaks to atheism. If you're an agnostic non-theist who (mistakenly) calls themselves an atheist, then this isn't about you. Some of it might cross over, but generally it's about atheists.

Right so the start point is that atheism is the belief that there is no such thing as God.

A lot of people will stop there and say 'end of story'. That's not the case. If you believe that there is no God, who have to believe that the universe can get by without one. So you have to be a naturalist or a materialist.

A naturalist might be able to somehow believe in a spiritual or immaterial dimension, but it would have to have an explanation that came through physics, biology, and chemistry.
A materialist is someone who only believes in physics, biology, and chemistry with no possibility of spiritual stuff.

Which is why the above meme is pretty accurate. Atheists have to believe that the universe was somehow created from absolute nothing. Well, they don't have to, they could go against scientific and philosophical consensus and believe that the universe has always existed.
For atheists, as there is no divine intelligence to guide, create, and design, everything that has ever happened has to be the result of time plus random chance. No purpose, no meaning, no reasons. Just blind luck.

I'm not saying any of this is false (I don't believe it is for several reasons), I'm simply saying that atheists have to choose between these options.

So once an atheist has chosen to be either a naturalist or materialist, and decided if they think the universe created itself or is eternal (or is withholding judgement until one makes more sense than the other), there's one more thing that they have to accept.

To be an atheist, you have to be a moral nihilist.

Now this is one a lot of atheists hate hearing, but unfortunately not liking something doesn't make it untrue. Have a look over The Moral Argument to see why. Without God there is no possible perfect moral standard and so that would mean moral values are all subjective - down to individual opinions. Opinions don't actually have any truth value. So atheists can have the opinion that murder, theft, and rape are bad things, but it doesn't amount to much more than that they don't like them. To build a society atheists could come up with rules that they all agree on and maybe try to base them on the best way to survive and that might be practical and actually work out fine for them. But behind it all they have to admit that all the rules and laws are just things that they have chosen and there isn't any actual real thing that makes them really 'right' or 'good'.

So to sum up. An atheist must believe that the universe either created itself or it has existed forever. They have to believe that the elements and atoms randomly arranged and by pure luck formed into stars and planets. They have to believe that elements on those planets randomly arranged into something we call life. They have to believe that seeing as everything is run on time and chance, that nothing has any real meaning or purpose beyond opinions.

A materialist further has to believe that there is no such thing as intelligence and we are all just advanced robots that follow our natural programming that was randomly generated through evolution. A naturalist could be working under the assumption that immaterial intelligence could somehow arise from unintelligent matter.

It's all bleak, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

I think it's not true because of a few absurdities, but if a materialist or naturalist can find a way to fill those gaps I'm happy to hear them. To me atheism comes from the assumption that everything in the universe has to be explained bottom up. Theism lets you explain some things, if not everything, from the top down. Atheistic science is limited to breaking everything down to smaller, more basic parts until you get to nothing. Theistic science can start with everything being there that was needed to get it all going. It leaves more doors open. Methodologically it's better.
So as a final thing to think about, I'd love to know how atheists even begin to explain these things:

• Existence from Non-existence
• Life from Non-life
• Intelligence from non-intelligence

Saying "science will figure it out" is not answer. That's called 'naturalism of the gaps' or 'scientism' and we're not interested in fallacies.

Finally, I'll restate that this doesn't apply to non-theists. If you're undecided about your answer to the question 'is there a God?' then you don't have to commit to naturalism or materialism. However, it might be worth considering the absurdities atheism offers that you have to face if you were to reject God.

Cos you know, Christians have to believe that God incarnated himself as a man and proved it by walking on water, healing the sick, and raising himself from the dead, but atheists have to believe that a mud puddle got struck by lightning and came to life.

Reading The Bible With A Study Guide

It's surprising how often some atheists make this suggestion. (Or is it? A lot of them are trolls. I doubt a reasonable atheist would ever do this).

They tell you it's a good idea to just read the Bible from front to back, without any study aids, with the condition that you can put it down when you're sick of it and announce yourself an atheist.

They'll tell you it's so full of immorality and prejudice that you'd have to be crazy to think it deserves the nickname 'the good book'.

What they don't realise is that they're simply showing how weak their intellectual hand is.

Sure you could read the Bible without a study aid. That would be fine. You'd just have to figure out the bits you didn't quite understand for yourself, which might be fairly difficult without any knowledge of things like ancient Hebrew cultural history, or how to recognise literary differences between poetry, prose, and historical texts, or to take notice of contexts and references.

Before diving any further into this, I'd also simply have to question whether or not the atheist making this suggestion had read the Bible themselves. My initial suspicion would be that they had been visiting an atheist-infidel type website who enjoyed taking Biblical quotes, pointing, and saying "Haha, look how bad and stupid this stuff is". Precisely the kind of people that study guides are for! Not that I'm exempt from that. There's been plenty of passages I haven't understood and needed someone with more training and expertise to explain for me.

Belief Based On Faith

Another commonly heard thing from atheists is that 'faith is an irrational reason to believe in anything'.

What they mean is that it's mad to believe something when there is no evidence for it.

Right. That's what a Christian calls 'blind faith'. 'Faith' is a completely different thing altogether. The word 'faith' comes from the Latin word 'fides' which means 'trust' or 'confidence'.

So when a Christian says that they have faith, it means that they trust God and Jesus. Trust and confidence is something that is earned, which means it requires some amount of evidence. Christian faith is based on evidence. It's the complete opposite of what Dawkins and his followers think it is.

Everyone has faith in something as Christians use the word. Faith in your family, faith in your spouse, faith in your leaders, faith in yourself.
We agree that blind faith is irrational, which is why we don't have it.

Auschwitz and God

I'm so far removed from this. My parents generation were born well after the wars were over. I'm in the UK. I'm a Christian. So it's hard to really get to grips with an understanding of what happened at Auschwitz. The best I can do is watch the movies, the documentaries, hear the testimonies. Even then I doubt I can fully grasp the horror of the death camps. I wonder if even those who were there to suffer in them had a full picture of the terrible place they were in.

I've been a little flippant dealing with the Problem of Evil. My only defence there is that generally I treat it as a logical problem. A philosophical argument that gets a thorough debunking. What I (and I'm sure I'm not the only one) often forget is that the strength of the Problem of Evil and Suffering is not in its philosophy, but in its emotional weight.

When you see, or worse, suffer hurt, sadness, loneliness, let alone the horror of being reduced to whatever subhuman category the Nazis treated people as, it's very understandably difficult to keep a level, logical, philosophical head about it all. It's no surprise whatsoever that a person who has gone through a bad time is going to struggle with looking at their situation with the passionless outlook of Mr Spock.

Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? - Matthew 6:27

It's so easy to ask "Where was God when I needed him?", "Where was my guardian angel?".
It's so easy to think that the answer to the question is that he was never there to start with. And it's very understandable to not be comforted at all the by the answer "God has a sufficient reason to allow this".