Think

To Be Or Not To Be ... Part 2

One of the worrying facts about atheism is that it has never offered an alternative to mysticism. Beside the denial of divinity, atheist philosophy has never proposed positive statements or beliefs that could coherently replace the gods.

The concept of divinity appeared as a mean to explain the unexplainable. No matter how comfortable our life may be, when it comes to our built-in curiosity and need to know, these are attributes of the human nature that cannot be stopped.

As over the millennia it has never disappeared, our urging need to search for answers of the deep mysteries of today and the many more to come will continue to exist. Therefore, as long as there will be unanswered questions the shadow of an "intelligent arrangement" will continue to be an explanation for many of us.

Would that mean that a new form of religion may emerge upon us?

Antony Flew is said to have been the world most famous atheist. For decades Flew was a prominent spokesman for unbelief.

Nevertheless in 2004 he shocked the world when announced that he had come to believe in God. Without embracing a particular religion, Flew said he started to believe in an Aristotelian conception of God.

Aristotle believed that God exists necessarily, which means that God does not depend on anything else for existence. He never changes or has any potential to change, never begins and never ends, and so is eternal.

In 2007, he published a book titled "There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind".

Interviewed by Strange Notions contributor Dr Benjamin Wiker on his reason for conversion Antony Flew said:

„There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself-which is far more complex than the physical Universe-can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical."

In a future where the current religions will have dwindled it is very likely that not atheism, but the awareness of new gods may grow into new forms of faiths.

Atheists at their turn will probably try to change their strategy and aim to oppose at last the very existence of divinity, not the religious doctrines.

But is this change really possible? What if the current "hit mainly religious doctrine" tactic is actually a result of accepting that atheism cannot conceive a "true denial of divinity" strategy?

So far, in the current arguments with the theist, atheist have barely dented the religious doctrines at a fundamental level. Almost every argument they put on the table is questionable to the point it is either irrelevant or on the contrary, endorse the existence of divinity.

Let's go back to the questions philosophers say we may never find an answer for: how, why and by whom the Universe was created?

For religions, there is no debate; the universe, in its immense and incomprehensible complexity, is the undeniable proof of the endless power of their divinities.

On the other side of the barricade, the today's atheist philosophy deny divine existence for more or less the opposite reason: a being or beings so mighty so they could create our universe in all its unimaginable complexity and sheer size are impossible to accept.

For atheists there is a catch, though: the simple acknowledgement of non-existence of superior beings, master puppeteers, actually defines them at least as a theoretical concept. And theoretical theories, thoughts for example, even if they cannot exist within our objective reality we already bring them into the subjective existence in our minds.

So by denying divinity, the atheists do not do anything else than shape the divinity into a virtual existence more or less similar to that of the religious believers.

Because both denial and acceptance of gods are two symmetrical constructs supplementing each other. Symmetrical, because for both groups any argument can be counterbalanced by an equal argument from the opposite side.

Whether they like it or not, atheists and theists are doing, in a way, each other's work. The further each of them go in their quest to proclaim deeper and stronger their convictions, their results also serve equally the opposite side.

Let's take the so-called presumption of atheism, which claims that in the absence of evidence for the existence of God, we should presume that God does not exist.

Yet, there are logical ramifications of this presumption. For theists the world itself is the proof of God's existence. Therefore an equal and opposite dilemma should arise where atheists would have to demonstrate that the world could exist without gods.

On the other side, many theists, by their own admission, structure their beliefs so that no evidence could possibly disprove them. Just to make sense of their religions' incoherence, they learnt to be overly concessive in order to accept the way their religion portrays divinity.

Theists would make tremendous efforts to convert the atheist to their religion. Most of them are very altruistic in their intent as they consider atheism a regretful choice, which if not corrected the result would be disastrous.

Take Catholicism, currently world's most spread religion. Its Holly Bible states quite clearly that atheism is a sin. Disbelieving God means that you are rebelling against God's commands and therefore sinning. Nevertheless to certain degree the religious believers ignore they are, at their turn, atheists.
Due to the multitude of religions, every theist is in fact an atheist who denies all the existing gods less one.
Their God.

End of To Be Or Not To Be ... Part 2