Priest Ties New Atheists in Logical Knots

Exposing the incoherent nonsense of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, & Sam Harris...

"It is to the glory of religion to have for enemies men so unreasonable..." — Blaise Pascal

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I have made significant progress writing a new book, exposing the embarrassing errors and logical inconsistencies of the so-called “New Atheists”. A sample chapter is included below. Very soon, we may be starting a crowdfunding project to bring this book to publication. If you would be interested in bringing this new book to completion, please provide your input and encouragement in the comment section below…

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Introduction

Irrational as they are entertaining, the world’s leading atheists have earned their reputations as great showmen, not as great thinkers or philosophers. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, the late Christopher Hitchens, and Peter Singer, not to mention blasts from the past such as Karl Marx and Bertrand Russell, have shown themselves to be petty, prideful, dramatic, immoral, sex-obsessed, grandstanding performers who shy away from good sense and reason, hoping to dazzle the gullible masses with their rhetoric of self-indulgence and wishful thinking. The top names in this group, sometimes exaggerated as being the "four horsemen of atheism"¹, are easily comparable to four circus ponies — small, cute, attractive to children, and always eager to travel to the next town so they can perform. Their leader², Richard Dawkins, promotes his views via books such as "The God Delusion" and "Unweaving the Rainbow", and for fans of the "four horsemen" who also watch My Little Pony, the dismantling of atheists’ arguments can feel a lot like Unweaving the Rainbow Dash.³

Not merely wrong, their arguments are often incoherent, lacking the internal consistency that would be necessary for their positions even to be considered intelligble. In comparison to the range of great philosophers, both ancient and modern, these so-called "new atheists" can properly be ranked somewhere between used car salesmen and P.T. Barnum. Yet, by all accounts, they are not being intentionally deceptive — they have succumbed to their own rhetoric. "Atheism" thus is properly the name, not for a philosophy, but for a peculiar form of mental illness.

As an intellectual exercise, responding to atheists can be somewhat unfulfilling, for the same reasons that math professors tire of correcting students who insist that "2+2=5". It is one thing to correct a well-formed argument that merely makes minor missteps along the way. It is quite another thing to slap the hands of sloppy thinkers who completely abandon rational thought. It’s not my job to teach introductory logic, and they really should know better.

As a social service, however, this sort of critique has its place. Not everyone has the time or energy to respond to atheists, subjecting them to public embarrassment. For many, it is more efficient to consult a convenient resource which clearly exposes the irrationality of atheists, and provides the most reasonable responses to their ravings. This presentation is just such a resource.

In this presentation, we will consider the arguments for atheism which are set forth by these four circus ponies and their associates. We will witness their breakdown in rational thought, we will ponder their logical inconsistencies, and we will review their possible motivations for descending into such stunning levels of sophistry and wishful thinking.

These authors have composed quite different books, with wide variations in literary style. Christopher Hitchens, the demagogue journalist, wrote God is Not Great, providing significant entertainment value by ranting, raving, and roasting his opponents, cementing his reputation as an indominable wit and engaging storyteller. Richard Dawkins, the bland British biologist, penned The God Delusion, inciting the irreligious to materialistic meditation and Darwinian devotion, conceived and consumed over a proper cup of English tea. The flippant philosopher, Daniel Dennett, has broken philosophical wind and dubbed it Breaking the Spell. He takes readers on a tour of his fertile imagination, suggesting tenuous solutions for nebulous problems, thus providing an effective benadryl alternative to insomniacs everywhere. Letter to a Christian Nation was penned by Sam Harris, the constipated neuroscientist, griping, hissing, grunting, and lacing every sour argument with the bitter signature of one likely raised on a diet of lemons, tree bark, and CNN.

In this presentation, though I will point out various reasons for believing in God’s existence, my primary goal is something a little different. I'm not here to defend God from the atheists. I don't think He needs defending. Rather, I want to take a skeptical look at the atheists themselves. Is their worldview internally coherent? Can their beliefs hold up to scrutiny?

What if we actually took atheists seriously? What if we crowned these fools, and made them our kings? Hypothetically, if we tried to follow their teachings consistently, would it even be possible? Or would we be led into a hopeless mire of self-contradiction?

If atheists are right, then their belief system should rest on a reasonable foundation, and adoption of their worldview should not lead us into any absurdities. But if atheists are wrong, that means they deny the existence of the very One who is the source of all science and the foundation of all rational thought. If they are in touch with reality, then their reasonings should bear a ring of truth. But if they are living in a materialist fantasy world, out of touch with both reason and reality, then their arguments should quickly unravel into an irrational quagmire.

A common canard in atheistic apologetics is to push the burden of proof onto Christians. Clarence Darrow arrogantly once said, "I don’t believe in God as I don’t believe in Mother Goose."⁴ Atheists pretend that belief in God is equivalent to belief in fairies and leprechauns, and they claim that Christians alone bear the responsibility of presenting evidence to support their claims.

For example, consider the following rant from Sam Harris. He says,

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astrologer” or a “non-alchemist.” We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.⁵

We don’t expect anyone to present evidence of the non-existence of unicorns and fairies, so why should we expect atheists to present evidence proving the non-existence of God? — This type of question is a trick often used by atheists, hoping to avoid the difficulty of defending their far-fetched beliefs.

The logical disconnect easily becomes apparent when considering the fundamental differences between God (who is the source and foundation of all reality) and fairies (which are the source and foundation of absolutely nothing).

We all know that the universe is here, and that it had to come into being somehow. But what are we able to say about the cause? Was the universe brought into existence through intelligence, or through unintelligence? Was it made according to a specific purpose, or according to a blind, unguided process? If there was a big bang, then who lit the fuse?

Only two options stand before us, and to reject one is automatically to accept the other:

1. The universe was brought into being according to the purposes of a superior intelligence — God exists.

2. The universe was brought into being without purpose, by blind, unguided processes — God does not exist.

When a person says, "There are no fairies," he is not making a significant claim about the world we live in. But when a person says, "There is no God," he is simultaneously saying that "blind, mindless, unintelligent forces brought the entire universe into existence, made it habitable for life, brought the first life into existence, and every human being is the result of this purposeless, unguided process."

When atheists make such claims, they bear the burden of proof. They have a responsibility to demonstrate that energy, matter, and life all came into existence through the blind workings of physics and chemistry, unaided and unguided by any intelligence.

This is an unscientific, far-fetched claim, unsupported by any evidence. Yet atheists hold to this claim with dogmatic fervor. No matter what wonders they encounter in creation, they reject theistic explanations out of hand, always desperate to find some way that it happened "naturally" — that is, blindly, mindlessly, and unintelligently. Without proof, and without evidence, they always favor explanations that exclude intelligence and purpose from the origin and foundation of the universe. Thus, the blind faith of the atheist rivals that of any religious zealot.

So, let us look closely at their arguments and see how internally coherent they are. If they constantly lead us into absurdities and contradictions, then we will not have to refute the atheists, for the atheists will have succeeded in refuting themselves.

While our primary focus will be on the errors of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, & Harris, we will also give some space to the missteps of other well known atheists, such as Bertrand Russell and Peter Singer.

Through this presentation, we will observe how today’s leading atheists tend to be incoherent, illogical, immoral, self-indulgent, intellectually dishonest, unscientific wishful thinkers who undermine the very possibility of rational thought.

Here are some of the atheist illusions that we will be exploring in the next several chapters:

• The Wishful Thinking of Atheists

• Atheists Undermining Rational Thought

• Atheists Proposing Intelligent Design (by Space Aliens)

• Intellectually Dishonest Atheists - Pascal’s Wager

• Self Indulgent Atheists - The Problem of Suffering

• Immoral Atheists Lecturing Christians on Morality

• Atheists Promoting Pseudoscience

• Atheists who are Bad at Math

• Atheists Tripping on the Origin of Life

• Atheists Swooning at Cosmic Fine Tuning

• Atheists Ignoring History & Archaeology

• And much more! . . .

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I have made significant progress writing a new book, exposing the embarrassing errors and logical inconsistencies of the so-called “New Atheists”. The above chapter is a sample. Very soon, we may be starting a crowdfunding project to bring this new book to publication. If you would be interested in bringing this new book to completion, please provide your input and encouragement in the comment section below…

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¹  The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution, Random House, 2019. Also see: The Four Horsemen HD: Hour 1 of 2 - Discussions with Richard Dawkins, Ep 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DKhc1pcDFM, accessed July 14, 2023.

²  Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, has sold over 3.5 million copies, dwarfing the book sales of his colleagues: Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris.

³  Rainbow Dash is a female Pegasus pony and one of the main characters in My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. She maintains the weather and clears the skies in Ponyville. Her contributions to modern meteorology and climatology are comparable in value to the contributions that the "four horsemen of atheism" have made to modern philosophy and science.

⁴  Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

⁵  Harris, Sam. Letter to a Christian Nation (p. 51). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.