mpride1122
One Star Member
Number of posts : 31
Registration date : 2011-03-25
Location : NY
 | | Subject: A Case for God Tue Apr 05, 2011 11:13 am | |
| A Willing Suspension of Disbelief
On the first Thursday of every February since 1953, members of the United States Congress host the National Prayer Breakfast. Every year, including this past February, international invitees from over 100 different countries, along with American political, social, and business leaders assemble together in an open forum centered on expressing the importance of faith in private (and yes, in public) life. The event symbolizes solidarity in a principled belief in God.
And yet, the rise of secular progression in American society has crossed in recent years a delicate line between passive tolerance and active resistance. Led principally by Christopher Hitchens, modern-day members of the New Atheists movement have called for active resistence against religion and an outright rejection in a belief in God, crediting varies institutions of religion as the sole source of human suffering for thousands of years. In a 2006 CNN profile of the movement, correspondent Simon Hooper stated, "what the new Atheists share is a belief that religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises."
One of the most principled tenets of New Atheism is the absolute severance of church and state and the eradication of institutional religions. The National Prayer Breakfast, as a result of the attendance of political and national leaders, has come under considerable attack as a defilement of Article VI and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. However, though church and state remain separated in America (and rightfully so), faith in God is in-severable from the moral foundation of America's conception, a foundation grounded foremost in Christian values. There exists no secular substitution for historically (and traditionally) religious principles that will preserve in its original intent the meaning and purpose of the founding documents that constitute America. Furthermore, President George Washington, in his farewell address Sept 17, 1796, said:
"Of all dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indespensible supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who would labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens... [L]et us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of the refined education on the minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." Yet I imagine New Atheists would claim that there exists instead of God, a delusional, illogical, and above all, willing suspension of disbelief in the minds of the faithful. This suspension of disbelief lead to the creation of a fictional reality that constitutes of a scripted faith which buckles when tested against reason and logic. To New Atheists, the institution of religion is indefensible to support a claim in a Deity against the institution of science, and as such, should be vigorously attacked.
Recently in 2009, President Obama addressed the graduating class at Notre Dame, stating:
"In this world of competing claims about what is right and what is true, have confidence in the values with which you've been raised and educated. Be unafraid to speak your mind when those values are at stake. Hold firm to your faith... But remember too that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen... [t]his doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open and curious and eager to continue [a] moral and spiritual debate..." New Atheists conjecture that the preponderance of evidence and the burden of proof rests with believers to prove God. In other words, one needn't do anything to prove something isn't true. However the lack of a proven atheistic alternative to account for such mysteries as the origin of life, while not proof of God, certainly provides as much reasonable doubt as faith in Him. Any competing alternative to God requires as much faith to sustain as that found in the hearts of believers, but without hope and moral guidelines that drive varies human institutional laws.
To hold as true that God does not exists requires a willing suspension of empirical faith in circumstantial evidence that reasonably suggests a Higher Being. While presumably oxymoronic, the term empirical faith in the context of this discussion is evidence of the unseen as reasonable. It is a faith in an empiricial nature of scienctific theory driven by observations and reasoning, such as for instance, gravity. Though you cannot touch and smell gravity, its effects are part of everything and felt everywhere. And so, let us hypothesize through the lens of traditional atheists on the great mystery of the origin of life to demonstrate how it requires a necessary suspension of empirical faith:
Imagine yourself holding a small bag of marbles four feet above a granite tiled floor. Within the bag, there are five blue marbles, five red marbles, and five green marbles, all equally weighted and equally sized. Now imagine that you turn the bag upside down and release the fifteen marbles. You watch as they freely fall to the tiled floor. Now, what do you think is the probability that the marbles would eventually come to rest separated in order by color, evenly distributed and spatially symmetrical throughout the system within a close proximity to one another? What is the possibility that the system will organize itself? It's fair to assume the probability of that outcome is near, if not completely impossible. In my example, the marbles hitting the floor produced a forceful burst of energy bringing about a scattering effect, sending the objects across the boundless floor. In accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, when you add energy to a closed system, especially one principally driven by extreme heat as in popular atheistic theories of creation (the big bang theory), unless otherwise constrained, the system should move infinitely closer to chaos, rather than order. This concept is called entropy. How is it reasonable then to assume that within an unconstrained vacuum, similar, if not exact to the conditions measured in outer space today, an immeasurable spontaneous combustion released an indeterminate force of energy which instantly (or at least eventually) brought about order, organizing matter according to like qualities and distributing substances evenly and spatially symmetrical (in simple terms, think about the symmetrical properties of the molecule H2O for example). Futhermore, not only did matter happen to spontaneously come into existence and then accidently organize within a close proximity of other matter (in most cases, microscopically close), but then the system was spontaneously constrained by the laws of nature we observe today essential to maintaining order and necessary for perpetually propagating new sub-systems within the larger system. Simply put, there is no other smaller similar example of this anywhere in nature.
And yet suppose scientifically the link is established. Suppose scientists somehow establish a reasonable linkage between the ignition of cosmic stardust billions of years ago and the formation of coastlines and the stratosphere we see today. Scientists cannot, and will never explain the link between igniting stardust and the inspiriation for Van Gogh's Starry Night. It is unfathomable that an erupting burning ball of fire would ever result, in however length of time, to an eruption of thought and reason, philosophy and poetry, and the abstract essense of human nature. This soulful nature of humanity may never be explained away by formula and scientific equation.
The nature of God, the reason for our existence, and the purpose for life has burdened the collective heart of humanity since the dawn of the age of reason. Who God is depends upon what tradition or what faith an individual was raised believing, but to dismiss the existence of God due to a human failure to establish unanimous consensus on His nature is simply erroneous. The fact is there are not multiple truths, but one truth. As we enhance our scientific technology to detect that truth and improve our understanding of the universe, I am certain the knowledge we obtain will compel our reason to accept in greater consensus the possibility of a Higher Being, if not through overwhelming evidence, then at least through tempered passions and a wary self-righteousness by the many more unanswerable questions we raise.
New Atheists yet yearn for an American culture and society in which complete secular social liberties will foster a human landscape premised on individualism. This proposal may potentially destroy all respect for life and universal mutual companionship. America is free by design, but constrained only by a mutual respect and understanding that all of humanity is created to co-exists as we contnue to progress towards a more perfect union. Our union is built on a moral foundation grounded in Christian values and a profound understanding and belief in a Creator.
By the way, if you found the odds of my above example impossible, imagine how impossible the odds are of hunderds of billions of microscopic particles within an infinite amount of space forged into existence after "nothing" spontaneously combusted at the exact location, the exact distance, and at the exact moment necessary to start formational processes without at least some level of control (ie: holding some variable constant among the infinite amount of possible variable conditions, like for instance, gravity- which, oh by the way, is constant).
Nonetheless, I suppose if one held the above notion as possible, a belief I argue is necessarily sustained as a deep and reassuring faith in the unknown, well then anything is possible. |
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