Five unavoidable problems for atheism

[Michie]

Non-believers often complain that if God exists, He ought to make His existence more obvious. While I don’t deny this complaint can come from a sincere place, it seems to me that the people who make it are typically guilty of a twofold error.

First, they don’t actually want God to exist, and so they’ve never searched for Him with any real enthusiasm or urgency. And second, they’ve rarely taken the time to think through the intellectual and moral costs that are incurred when we conclude that God does not exist.

While the believer can admit that divine hiddenness is mysterious, the non-believer must face the fact that his unbelief is at once terrifying and absurd. To see why, let’s consider five worrying implications of atheism.

First, atheism means we can’t trust our own reason. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga has famously argued that if atheism is true, then naturalism is self-defeating. This is a problem for atheists because they are almost always committed to both evolution and naturalism (ie the belief that everything that exists is part of the natural world).

Plantinga’s argument is simple. If we evolved with no direction from a higher power, then our mental perceptions, memory and ability to draw inferences are all inherently unreliable, because these cognitive faculties are hardwired for survival rather than truth. Hence if evolution and naturalism are true, then we can’t trust our own reason when it tells us that we should be atheists.

Second, atheism means we’re quite possibly living in a simulation. One of the deepest challenges for a purely naturalistic world-view is explaining the origin of consciousness. If reality consists only of mindless physical processes, then somehow those processes must give rise not only to life, but to self-awareness – to beings capable of abstract thought, reflection and reason. At the very least, this requires the claim that, under certain conditions, non-conscious matter can produce conscious minds.

Continued below.

Five unavoidable problems for atheism

From reason and free will to morality and consciousness, atheism struggles to account for some of the most basic features of human existence

thecatholicherald.com

 

[Mark Quayle]

Non-believers often complain that if God exists, He ought to make His existence more obvious. While I don’t deny this complaint can come from a sincere place, it seems to me that the people who make it are typically guilty of a twofold error.

First, they don’t actually want God to exist, and so they’ve never searched for Him with any real enthusiasm or urgency. And second, they’ve rarely taken the time to think through the intellectual and moral costs that are incurred when we conclude that God does not exist.

While the believer can admit that divine hiddenness is mysterious, the non-believer must face the fact that his unbelief is at once terrifying and absurd. To see why, let’s consider five worrying implications of atheism.

First, atheism means we can’t trust our own reason. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga has famously argued that if atheism is true, then naturalism is self-defeating. This is a problem for atheists because they are almost always committed to both evolution and naturalism (ie the belief that everything that exists is part of the natural world).

Plantinga’s argument is simple. If we evolved with no direction from a higher power, then our mental perceptions, memory and ability to draw inferences are all inherently unreliable, because these cognitive faculties are hardwired for survival rather than truth. Hence if evolution and naturalism are true, then we can’t trust our own reason when it tells us that we should be atheists.

Second, atheism means we’re quite possibly living in a simulation. One of the deepest challenges for a purely naturalistic world-view is explaining the origin of consciousness. If reality consists only of mindless physical processes, then somehow those processes must give rise not only to life, but to self-awareness – to beings capable of abstract thought, reflection and reason. At the very least, this requires the claim that, under certain conditions, non-conscious matter can produce conscious minds.

Continued below.

Five unavoidable problems for atheism

From reason and free will to morality and consciousness, atheism struggles to account for some of the most basic features of human existence

thecatholicherald.com

Can you re-post this on a forum where it can be debated, and link me somehow so I don't miss it? I would like to play devil's advocate. I am not Catholic, though I am a believer, so I can't argue here per the rules. But I don't believe that all those points follow logically, for an atheist.