Do Atheists Exist?

Tuesday, March 22, In the year of our Lord 2011
My House, Caronport Saskatchewan
Making Supper, 5:39PM
Weather = Windy, Overcast, Melting / Freezing

"I’m an Atheist… Rawr"

Over the past week I have had the pleasure of running into several people who, when they hear that I or one of my friends is from Caronport, introduce themselves as Atheists. After listening to them for about ten seconds I was convinced that they were actually not Atheists at all. After spending six years studying Christian Theism I am convinced that real Atheists are kind of like the dinosaurs in that they are extinct and occasionally sighted by people or organizations who have little understanding of the topic or have little credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Now I don’t want to get the card carrying members of the Hitchens / Dawkins New Atheist crowd in a tizzy by supposedly saying that their beliefs are invalid and am therefore a dogmatic oppressive [insert label here]. I think there are many reasons why ramming religion down peoples’ throats is a bad thing and why belief in God can be pure ignorance and conforming to social religious structures. I am aware of the pattern of the human mind to rationalize things that it cannot understand. Some of these ideas I even agree with. I think that there are many people who create an idea of God and then write books about it and create an oppressive religion that goes around to convert everyone because they are short sighted dogmatic fools with inferiority complexes and some of them would fall under the religion of Christianity which I adhere to. I think there is validity in arguments that show that religion causes far more strife, suffering, and damage than anything else in the whole world. Yet for all these things we have not entered into what real Atheism is.

Atheism, real Atheism, is the belief in “no Theism.” You might think that that is what I just described above, but it is not. It is one thing to be anti-religion or pagan or agnostic, these are rational logical options but real Atheism is not. Why? Because it is incredibly difficult to prove that something does not exist, far harder than it is to prove that something does exist. Unless there is some sort of rock solid proof of something’s nonexistence it is impossible to be justified in that belief. The popular "I hate religion because I had to endure living in a Christian School / Home," doesn't count.

[Note to any readers who think they are Atheists: when beginning a conversation on this topic do not begin with “well I’m an Atheist and I think that it’s wrong to stuff religion down people’s throats,” because in doing so you are being the exact same confrontational religious throat stuffer that you despise. You do not need God to have a religion and loudly proclaiming you opinion about God is no different than anyone else loudly proclaiming their opinion about God.]

I hear the challenge from self-proclaimed Atheists to scientifically prove that God exists. [sarcasm]Hmm, that sounds like a good challenge… attempt to prove the existence of a non-material entity using a system that is utterly restricted to evaluating material things.[/sarcasm] Failure to achieve this impossible task will somehow prove that God does not exist. If anyone who considers themselves an Atheist happens to read this, I’m sorry, but this challenge is ridiculous. Can I bake a cake using only a hammer? Do I cease to believe in the existence of cake because it cannot be baked only using a hammer? Science is a useful tool, but it is not the only tool used in acquiring knowledge of reality and restricting yourself to only one tool designed for a particular purpose is very shortsighted. Other tools for understanding reality are Philosophy, Mathematics, and the Dialectical Method. If you are going to restrict yourself to Science then here’s some homework, scientifically prove the validity of the Scientific Method assuming that it does not have validity. Science itself only receives its validity from the same methods that give validity and proof for the existence of God.

Let us make an example. Say someone firmly believed that unicorns did not exist. In fact, I’m sure that most people believe that unicorns do not exist. We have never in any scientific study discovered a real unicorn. I have never in my entire life seen a real unicorn, nor have I ever heard of one being spotted. Let us say that I have somehow obtained complete knowledge of the entire human experience of every human being that ever lived and ever will live, and I still could not find any unicorns, it would not be enough to prove their nonexistence. What I would need is knowledge of all things of all times, which I do not have, to prove that unicorns do not exist. That, or find a logical contradiction in the existence of unicorns. Trying to disprove God is the same way, having never seen one or thinking that they are a dumb idea does not disprove anything. Any Atheist argument I have ever seen has boiled down to “I have never seen any proof for God” or “I think that the idea of God is a bad idea.” Both of these are completely valid arguments in their own right, but the conclusion can never be “therefore God does not exist.” Even demonstrating how all the things we attribute to God (creation, morals, concepts of God, etc) could instead by attributed to something else is little more than imagining our own little worlds and does absolutely nothing to proving God’s nonexistence. At best one can be agnostic with a hostility towards Theism.