Atheists Want You to Have a Personal Relationship with “Reality”
Atheists are always trying to be clever but rarely are. Their new advertising campaign carries this line:
“Atheism: A Personal Relationship with Reality.”
What’s real in a materialistic, evolutionary, and amoral worldview? These atheists are begging the question. That is, they are assuming what they first must prove. They are assuming there is no God, that God is not real. Their idea of reality is godless. Knowing this, let’s force them to live consistently with it.
They are also assuming that there is a “personal” side to reality. The world’s most powerful computer is not a person. An atom is not a person. Two atoms do not make a person. A group of atoms is not a person. So how do trillions of atoms make a person? What is it about all these additional atoms that makes matter a person?
Some will say that it’s the human’s ability to reason that makes something (that’s what you are if you are an atheist) a person. How do atheists account for reason? All that a scientist can measure is electrical activity and the stimulation of parts of the brain. Where is the mind in all that matter? A pathologist can put a dead person’s brain in a pan, but no doctor has ever done the same with the mind. If the brain is the mind, then there is no guarantee that it’s actually thinking anymore than electricity going through the mother board on a computer is thinking. It’s simply processing 1s and 0s. That processing ability was put there by someone with a mind. Where is it?
How does an atheist account for the personhood of humans in a purely materialistic cosmos?
Debbie Allen, coordinator for the San Diego Coalition of Reason, said the following in a statement about the new campaign:
“We want to express how using intelligence to free oneself of the god idea can open the curtain to an inspiring new outlook. Atheism is positive and offers grounding in the real world.”
How do atheists account for intelligence given materialistic assumptions about the origin of what they call “reality”? Show me intelligence. Show me the mind. Show me the qualifications of intelligence based on a fixed materialistic standard. Remember, atheists are materialists. There is nothing above or beyond matter. Intelligence requires a mind. Electricity is not the mind.
There’s the larger problem of sorting out what’s positive and negative in this thing called reality. A thief, a designation that assumes morality, believes that not working for a living and stealing for a living are positives.
Adolf Hitler believed he was doing positive things for the German people and the German nation. Where in the material cosmos are there commands that say, “Thou shall not steal? . . . Thou shall not murder”? I’ve never seen any. Are they imprinted on our DNA? Can we see them? And even if they were, who says anybody has to obey them?”
If we go back many millennia and followed the claims of evolutionary theorists through the incremental ticks of time, we would see the strong taking advantage of the weak. Was this positive or negative? Right or wrong? Moral or immoral? What we are today, what the atheist calls “reality,” got here by the strong killing then eating the weak. There were no moral judgments then, so why are there moral judgments now? By what standard? By what ultimate judge?
All atheists can say is “that’s reality.” Stuff happens. Embrace it with gusto! There are no fixed standards of judgment to say whether any action is good reality or bad reality. It just is.
Atheists can’t see in the future. Maybe Hitler was ahead of his time. He could have been what evolutionists call a “hopeful monster,” a surviving radical mutation that moves the evolutionary ladder up several rungs instead of painfully incremental steps. Who’s to say that what he did was bad? All an atheist can say is the end result is “reality.” It existed. It happened in a certain time and place. It was real. We have pictures and eye-witness accounts of what we call atrocities, but for the atheist, it was reality. Have a relationship with it.
There are Jews who survived the holocaust, the killing fields, and the Gulag. It was very real to them. So let’s take the new atheist campaign and substitute the word reality with real reality:
- “Atheism: A Personal Relationship with the Holocaust.”
- “Atheism: A Personal Relationship with the Killing Fields.”
- “Atheism: A Personal Relationship with Slavery.”
- “Atheism: A Personal Relationship with Rape.”
These were all reality to those who experienced them.