Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Responses to Atheist Objections

I received the following comments on my earlier post, "Away with the Atheists!" I assume that the person commenting is an atheist, and I am going to use "A" to designate his comments below, but whether he is an atheist or not is not central to the matter:

Objection 1 - Atheism Misclassified as Faith
A: "Um... atheism isn't a faith, it isn't focused on death and damnation."

Answer: Of course atheism is a faith. It is a humanist faith. It may not be a well-organized or systematized faith, but it is a faith. Everyone believes something and trusts in something - even atheists who believe in and trust in themselves.

Objection 2- God Misclassified as "True"
A: "Also God isn't "true and living". This isn't "God doesn't exist" but more "if he did that wouldn't be a good description". If there is only one God, than by definition there can't be false gods; the only way to get a true version is to have fakes. You might say the ones belonging to other religions are false gods, but to be false, you'd also have to admit they exist."

Answer:

(1) If a deity has to exist to be worshipped, then this objection is the shortest, clearest proof of the existence of God. Since I doubt the objector would grant such a proof, then the objection is itself absurd.

(2) Saying that God is not the True God because he is the only God is a bit like saying that real dollar bills are not real dollar bills unless someone has actually made counterfeits.

(3) Connected with (2), saying that God is not the True God because by definition he is the only God, is a bit like saying that the currency of the land is not true currency, because it is by definition the only currency, and counterfeit money is not currency at all. It doesn't follow. The fact that God is the only God, does not mean that there are not counterfeits, things/people passed off as though they were God or "a god."

Objection 3: God Misclassified as "Living"
A: "As for living... God isn't a living thing. He is immortal, remember? He fails the criteria to be qualified as a living thing because of that and several other factors. You can't be considered alive if you can never truly die. "

Answer:

I reject the objector's criterion of mortality. Things can be alive without being able to die. Where the objector got this idea from is a mystery. Perhaps he simply imagined it. I don't assign any particular weight to this objection. It's important to note that God is a spirit - I'm not sure whether the objector has taken that into account or not.

-TurretinFan

2 comments:

John said...

It seems that by trying to find novel objections to God this atheist, if this person is an atheist, has only made a fool of himself. But then again, what else should we expect? Psa. 14:1

Turretinfan said...

It is easy for us to classify this sort of thing as foolishness, because we see the truth. I hope God will open the eyes of this particular objector, so that he too will come to agree that it is foolishness to say that there is no God.