The Clock is Ticking, Dudes...

Once in a great while, some atheist takes it upon himself to point out how stupid and ignorant I am, either in person or blogospherically.

I'm always a little amused in a sad sort of way. I don't particularly want them to wind up where they're headed, you know. But I'm still a little amused, somewhat bemused, really.

Because the clock is ticking.

When I tried selling life insurance back around '95, one of the things I was taught is that one out of three people does not make it to retirement age. If you make it to sixty-five in this country, the odds are excellent that you will live to about eighty-five or so. That's why the average is about 73-74. The oldest man in the world--the titleholder changes every few months, you know--is usually around 115 years or so old at time of death, so that seems, at this point, to be the outside limit to man's earthly life.

So, 115 years of earthly existence, max, and quite probably much of that in a state that you may not particularly care for. I deal with the elderly quite a lot, you know. It's true that if you have good genetics, take care of yourself, and are quite lucky, you may not wind up in a wheelchair with COPD and/or diabetes, stewing away in your own juices courtesy of an unchanged Depends undergarment, but then again, that just might be how you spend the last ten years of your life. Rather a lot of people do.

And, for the atheist, what, after that? Nothing. No consciousness, no nothing. No seeing what has happened to your descendants. No caring about anything. No existence. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Zip. Nada. In an atheistic universe, the dead cannot care. Therefore, any caring they may do must be done in this life, the only life they have.

And why might they care? About anything? To whom do their lives matter? And for how long? Does the cold, atheistic universe into which they arrived by complete accident care? Does that same universe have a purpose for them? The very thought provokes laughter. Even if someone misses them once they're gone, that will matter for less than a hundred years, too, probably less than fifty, since those people will die and not care about anything, either. And eventually, their country will pass away, then the planet, then everything, and none of it will have mattered, none of it at all. Their morality, such as it is, will have served no purpose other than to perpetuate the species before the planet is scorched when the sun turns red, and that, for no reason at all, it simply being what happened by sheer accident.

Atheists have a limited, very limited window of opportunity, a very short time in which to enjoy the accidentally-animated sack of protoplasm they walk around in, and absolutely no reason whatever not to do whatever they please, as long as they can get away with it.

And what do they choose to do with that limited period of time? An astonishing number seem to have arrived at the absurd conclusion that the best, most enjoyable (apparently) use of their limited time is to try convincing theists that they're wrong. That's right: their mission in life seems to have become convincing people about whom they will shortly cease to care, people who will, in turn, shortly cease to care about anything themselves, that there is no God.

Good luck with that one, atheists. Last time I checked, though they disagreed on much about God, you have a couple of billion people, at least, to convince of His non-existence. And for what? So that they will have--you think--better lives in the short period of time remaining to them on this miserable mudball? In the most literal sense possible, why care? It will matter to any particular individual for a maximum of 115 years, and then--poof.

In the meantime, the clock is ticking. I hope you enjoy your time. Because, as far as you know, pretty soon it's poof! for you, too.

Borrowed Morality

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Welcome, atheist readers!

Wow.

You know, most of the time, my little blog averages about sixteen hits a day. Recently, it spiked to about thirty-five readers a day for a few days, principally as a result of a couple of links from a blogospheric friend of mine.

But you people--you people take the cake, I must admit. At time of writing, I was up to 49 hits today, far and away the most this blog has ever had. And I have you to thank for it.

Well, like I say, welcome. Even to the people that think I'm a "loathsome person." I don't take offense.

'Cause, as I've noted elsewhere already today, who cares what an accidentally-animated bag of protoplasm thinks?

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I was googling on a tangentially-related subject, and almost accidentally came up with the post from which this material comes. Emphasis is mine:

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God has truth—it stands or falls with faith in God.

In this quotation, many of my readers will immediately detect the echo of Van Til, or Bahnsen, or some other related apologist infused with “worldview,” or presuppositional thinking. Such a guess comes close in content, but misses widely. The surprise: this quotation flows candidly—and insightfully!—from arch-atheist Friedrich Nietzsche. This is not, of course, to say that Van Til derived his ideas from reading Nietzsche—highly unlikely. The point—completely lost on modern atheists—is that when you strike down Christianity, Christian morality necessarily goes with it. Nietzsche candidly professed this, as did his earlier French counterpart Marquis de Sade: no God, no moral imperatives; no “thou shalt,” and no “thou shalt not.” Only, “I will.”

But modern atheists have not only ignored this logical conclusion, they have actually attempted to attack Christianity in the name of Christian morality, calling the Christian God cruel, bloodthirsty, racist, sadomasochistic, etc. Richard Dawkins’ now famous book begins an early chapter with such accusations and much more. Whence the moral outrage?

Time and again, I have pointed out that atheism has no morality, not unless you want to call the law of the jungle "morality," only to have people say that they know atheists who are very moral people.

They miss the point. It is not that atheists necessarily act immorally. Many don't. The point is that an atheistic worldview simply cannot intellectually justify any sort of morality. In an atheistic universe, you arrived here completely by accident, via an unthinking, uncaring process that results in a progressively more complex arrangement of biological matter (said process utterly violating the second law of thermodynamics in the process, by the way, but that is a mere side-issue as far as this post is concerned) that has no purpose whatsoever. You do not matter to the cold, uncaring universe that accidentally produced you. You winked into existence and in less than a hundred years, you will wink out of existence. What happens to your progeny will be of no concern to you, for you will not exist to care about them. What you do to yourself and to others matters to no one that has ever existed and will not matter to you after you have vanished from this earth. The only thing with which you can possibly have any concern is your own life, and, there being utterly no eternal purpose for your life, your concern has to be limited, in the rawest terms, to what you can get out of this life.

In short: a logical application of "atheist morality" dictates that you do whatever you can to make your own life more enjoyable to you, provided only that you can get away with it. All pretensions to the contrary are logical nonsense, as Nietzsche pointed out. Atheists with "morals" have borrowed them from a theistic worldview, and they either lack the integrity to admit it, or they don't have the intellectual candlepower to understand it, or they have simply not cared to consider the logical implications of their worldview.

A Favorite Schaeffer Passage

Because of a conversation that's come up at Oklahoma Lefty, it struck me that this might be a good time to quote one of my favorite passages from Francis Schaeffer's The God Who is There:

One day I was talking to a group of people in the room of a young South African in Cambridge University. Among others, there was present a young Indian who was of Sikh background but a Hindu by religion. He started to speak strongly against Christianity, but did not really understand the problems of his own beliefs. So I said, "Am I not correct in saying that on the basis of your system, cruelty and noncruelty are ultimately equal, that there is no instrinsic difference between them?" He agreed. The people who listened and knew him as a delightful person, an "English gentleman" of the very best kind, looked up in amazement. But the student in whose room we met, who had clearly understood the implications of what the Sikh had admitted, picked up his kettle of boiling water with which he was about to make tea, and stood with it steaming over the Indian's head. The man looked up and asked him what he was doing, and he said with a cold yet gentle finality, "There is no difference between cruelty and noncruelty." Thereupon the Hindu walked out into the night.

Do you understand what happened there? It is often said that all the world's religions are basically the same, and in some senses, this is true, or at least partially true. Pretty much everyone teaches that there are things you shouldn't do and things you should do. But it's not unfair to say that the dissimilarities begin there, which is awfully early in the discussion. The reality is that the religions of the world have radically different presuppositions on which they base their thinking, and have tremendously different answers to such questions as: What is Man? Where did he come from? Does he have a purpose? If so, what is it? Is there such a thing as an objectively identifiable good? Is the material world real or illusory? Etc. Etc. Etc.

The problem people run into--and in my experience, they run into it all the time, they just don't know it, or think about it--is that they want to live in a world reflecting presuppositions that they, or their worldview, actually deny. Atheists are often a terrific example of this, Richard Dawkins being one of the most notorious. He'll say that it's "wrong," morally "wrong" to teach children that there is a God, despite the fact that in an atheistic universe, children and teachers both have no moral status or purpose. They all arrived at their place in existence by sheer accident, without purpose, being, in fact, nothing more than meaningless machines that accomplish, bluntly, nothing more than eating and defecating and talking, all the while holding the same moral status as a rock, a tree, a dodo, a tiger, or any other accidentally-arrived-at eating-and-defecating mechanism. In such a universe, "morality" is nothing more than a survival mechanism.

In my experience, such people have a very plastic morality. When they wish to deny Judeo-Christian mores, they will deny that there is any basis for morality, following much the same line of thought as I have given. One blogger quotes Dawkins as saying, in his River Out of Eden:

...nature is not cruel, only pitiously indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose...

But when they wish to shape human behavior, they will--somehow!--find a way to label behavior and opinions they don't like as immoral--in Dawkins' case, "immoral" being more or less equivalent to being detrimental to the survival of the species. But to the question of why the species should survive, Dawkins can give no substantive answer. His "morality" ends up being a sort of purposeless utilitarianism.

I pick on atheists because they are such easy targets as to make excellent examples, but the same line of thinking can be found elsewhere. For example, I recall--will recall forever--a video clip I saw several years ago, which was shown to the people in our church as the Southern Baptist Convention was starting a period of outreach to Hindus. The clip showed a Hindu man engaged in various acts of worship, but what stuck out to me was the man's resolute insistence that it was "wrong," "very bad," a "very bad thing" for someone to say that someone else was a "sinner."

"Well," I thought, "Exactly what do you call someone who has done a 'very bad thing'?" The man wanted to live in a universe wherein there was no such thing as a sinner, but couldn't even articulate the thought without contradicting himself at a very basic level. And this sort of thing goes on all the time.

Schaeffer said elsewhere in his works that when it comes to the really big questions, there are really very few possible answers. Those answers are not the same from religion to religion; it is only wishful thinking on some peoples' part that makes it seem so.