tt.humanist :: forum :: articles :: baldeosingh :: philosophy

The Atheist's Argument

Kevin Baldeosingh • 04 January 2001• 809 words

"Most atheists become so because they see the contradictions between what religions preach and what actually obtains in the world. Atheists thus tend to be persons with a low tolerance for contradiction and hypocrisy (hence the reason they are such a tiny minority in the world)."

Persons who suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy often develop a condition called hyper-religiosity, in which all events, large and small, are imbued with cosmic significance. In other words, whether an earthquake kills a thousand people or a stand collapses at a soca concert or the roast chicken burns in the oven, it must be the hand of God at work.

I don't know whether this country has a higher-than-average number of people with temporal lobe epilepsy, but we certainly seem to suffer some sort of societal equivalent of that malady. It is virtually impossible to open the newspapers on any given day without seeing some reference to God. And not God merely as metaphor or social reality, mind you, but God as empirical fact and logical explanation.

I get more irritated at this than perhaps I should. Within the limits of my intellect and the avenues open to me, my purpose in life is to combat ignorance. And, whenever I hear someone invoking God as ready fact, I feel as though I'm encountering a mind that has abandoned its best gift of reason, and a psyche which has taken the coward's - or hypocrite's - path.

This is why I have written quite a few columns, mostly in the Independent, pointing out the contradictions, errors and barbarisms that are so rife in the Bible, Bhagavadgita and Qu'ran. It is perfectly obvious that, if you believe in a God who is omnipotent, loving and just, then you cannot logically accept any of these holy books as God's word.

(The counter-arguments that God changes His laws, or that men made mistakes in writing down the texts, place the believer on a slippery slope: in either case, who's to say that the entire book isn't wrong?)

Most atheists become so because they see the contradictions between what religions preach and what actually obtains in the world. Atheists thus tend to be persons with a low tolerance for contradiction and hypocrisy (hence the reason they are such a tiny minority in the world).

However, the argument that religion's errors prove there's no God contains an inherent paradox: the argument works only if you grant that religion has some special insight into the existence of a Supreme Being and, religion being wrong, that such a Being therefore doesn't exist.

All arguments which rely on the errors of religious texts are therefore negative. Atheists who base their disbelief on this ground stand on a foundation only slightly less shaky than that of true believers. There are, however, some positive arguments which show that the existence of a Supreme Being is highly unlikely.

Most of these arguments are, naturally, scientific. This is because science is the most effective way of interpreting reality that has ever been created. If God existed, scientists should have found some evidence of His handiwork in the laws governing the universe, the Earth and, indeed, ourselves.

Not only has this not happened, but the reverse has occurred. In cosmology, for example, scientists have discovered that the total amount of energy in the universe is exactly...zero. This is one consequence of Einstein's equation e=mc2, which shows that matter and energy are intrinsically the same.

The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. This matter is attracted by gravity, which means you have to expend energy to separate matter against the gravitational force that pulls it together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy.

In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, it can be shown that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy of the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.

The metaphysical implication of this is obvious: if there was free energy in the universe, one could argue that it had been created by a Supreme Being. However, the universe appears to have had no such need for an outside agency.

Coming down to Earth, we find that Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection has similar implications for the role of a Creator in the existence of life. Darwinian evolution shows that design in Nature is the outcome of the blind forces of natural selection and genetic mutation, with no need - or evidence - for an Intelligent Designer.

Like all great theories, Darwinism could be disproved by a single exception. In the 142 years since The Origin of Species was published, no such exception has been found.

There are lesser arguments on this issue that can be drawn from chemistry, chaos theory, linguistics, and probability theory. This is why one finds a greater proportion of non-believers among scientists than any other given group.

I am not a scientist. Still, I'm sure there are many people who believe I'm headed straight to Hell or chamar-dom for writing this column.