New Atheist Case Padding

A while back I wrote a piece called “Padding the Case for the New Atheism“. My point was that there are two and only two reasonable arguments for atheism. The first is “Life sucks, so there’s no God” and the second is “Thing seem to work fine without God, so there’s no God”. St. Thomas states them in slightly less colloquial terms this way:

Objection 1. It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.

Objection 2. Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God’s existence.

The thing is, the New Atheist find it virtually impossible to stick to these two arguments. In addition to restating them repeatedly under different guises, they also tend to lard on a bunch of fallacious arguments–as though they sense that simply repeating these two objections ad nauseam gets a bit boring and unconvincing.

Case in point:

After the long padding opening, we get to the first question. Note the overall strategy: Ask question, not to find anything out, but to keep from finding anything out.

In the case of Question #1, the strategy is to ask a question which no mortal can answer with any certitude while ignoring the evidentially verifiable question “Do miracles happen?” For, of course, the world is chockablock with documented cases of incredible healings, astonishing and inexplicable occurrences and so forth. The guy simply ignores all this because he has an a priori dogma that wavers somewhere between “God does not exist” and “God is evil”. So instead of asking about all the evidence for miracles that is on file at say, Lourdes, he simply focuses on why God doesn’t perform miracles according to his standards (and, by the way, I’m not at all confident there are no records of amputees being healed, but I serious doubt he has ever tried to find out. Indeed, if there were, my bet is that he would simply reply “Why doesn’t God heal *all* amputees?”)

Note also how he follow it all up with a straw man answer and then rejects that answer. Eventually, he doesn’t even bother with the straw man. He simply tells the phantom Christian with whom he is “arguing” that whatever they say is a “weird rationalization”. It quickly devolves to monologue in its purest form. As to question 1, the sole kernel of plausibility in his argument is that it relies on Thomas’ first objection: The existence of evil (in this case, amputated legs) seems to show the non-existence of God.

Question #2: Repetition of Thomas’ Objection 1 coupled with long distance psychoanalysis.

Question #3: Repetition of Thomas’ Objection 1 coupled with fundamentalist misreading of Scripture and even more insistent long distance psychoanalysis.

Question #4: Fundamentalist misreading of Scripture and even more insistent long distance psychoanalysis.

Question #5: Fundamentalist misreading of Scripture and long distance psychoanalysis.

Question #6: Repetition of Thomas’ Objection 1 and long distance psychoanalysis.

Question #7: Fallacious argument of the “If God doesn’t do what I want then I won’t listen” variety and long distance psychoanalysis.

Question #8: Fallacious argument of the “If God doesn’t do what I want then I won’t listen” variety and long distance psychoanalysis. Also, of course, it’s a foregone conclusion that he would scoff at, say, St. Faustina, to whom Jesus did appear. At the end of the day, this is yet another appeal to Thomas first Objection. The logic is this: If God is the ultimate good for each person, then God should appear to each person. His not appearing to each person is a form of evil. Such evil is common since God does not appear to each person. The existence of evil proves there is no God. What he has not really shown is that an appearance of Jesus to each person is really ordered toward the highest good of each person. But then, he’s not really interested in answers, is he?

Question #9 is yet another fallacy, basically consisting of an appeal to good old fashioned 19th Century Fundamentalist polemics, with a whiff of polemics. No attempt whatsoever is made to understand the libraries full of eucharistic theology that exist. Because, you know, he’s really interested in using that college education and those reasoning skills.

Question #10: Yet another appeal to Thomas first objection, with a whiff of the fundamentalist tendency to mistake grace for magic mixed in. Why does the evil of divorce happen? Why doesn’t grace magically cancel free will?

After this, we get the swift interation of sundry atheist dogmas. “All scientific evidence” is against miracles? Really? Starving people are caused by a non-existent God? (See what I mean about the curious ambiguity of whether the guy is arguing against the existence or goodness of God). And so forth.

My question: Has this guy ever thought about using his college education to think about his atheism? Clearly this is another example of intellect worship vs. intellect use. It’s not as if Thomas hasn’t responded to the two objections.