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Why Atheism is Illogical

 

 

Atheists would like to claim that they’re taking a cold, logical view of the universe. They’re wrong. They’re just as much religious zealots as Christians and Muslims and anybody else. Agnosticism is the only perspective on God that is logical.

 

Which is not to say the Atheists don’t know what they’re doing. I like their methodology. But their conclusion rests on an assumption that is logically flawed.

 

Let’s start from the beginning:

 

The central question is this: Is there a God? Derived from it are numerous other questions: Do we have souls? Is there are purpose to our existence? Is morality purely a social question, or is there a higher moral authority? The question of God’s existence permeates through every layer of our lives, and into every corner of our society. Our answers to those questions determine who we are and how we see the world.

 

Now, a question occurs to me: Is cold logic the correct way to examine these questions? I don’t know for sure. But I believe it’s the most natural place to start. I think for starters, at least, we have to look at the question the same way we do all other questions. We gather the evidence in front of us and see where it leads. That’s logic—that’s the scientific method.

 

So what do we know? What evidence of God do we have? The answer, as any Atheist will tell you, is that there is no evidence. No conclusive evidence, anyway. We can’t see God, can’t smell God or touch God. We can’t point to anything in the known universe and say, with scientific, logical certainty, “God did that.” Yes-yes, the religious folks tell us there’s evidence of God everywhere, in everything. Fine, but from a cold, logical, purely scientific point of view, there is no proof of God.

 

And the Atheist says, “There is no proof of God, therefore there is no God.”

 

This type of conclusion makes logical sense in virtually every context except this one. Here it is flawed—more obviously than many might realize.

 

When you’re talking about physical realities, this line of reasoning works. If I say, “There is an apple on your kitchen counter,” that statement can be logically proven or disproven by gathering evidence and examining it. In this case, that means walking into your kitchen and looking at the counter. Say you do that, and you don’t see an apple. There is no evidence to support my claim that there is an apple on your counter, therefore there is not an apple on the counter. That makes sense.

The reason this doesn’t work with God is that God, by definition, is not a physical reality. He is purely a concept, with no physical existence. That which does not have a physical existence cannot have physical evidence. God, by definition, exists beyond our perception. Since perception is the building block of science, no scientific conclusion can logically be drawn, because no evidence can exist.

 

Let’s try this with my analogy again:

 

Before, I posed that there was an apple on your kitchen counter. Now I’ll pose this: There is an apple on my kitchen counter. Prove or disprove my claim.

 

You can’t. It’s not possible.

 

Why? Because my kitchen is beyond your perception. You don’t know who I am. You don’t know where I live. It’s impossible to gather any data about my claim. So what conclusion can you draw? Only one: “I don’t know if there’s an apple on your kitchen counter or not. I can’t answer that question.”

 

You can’t see it, therefore, you don’t know one way or the other.

 

That’s where the Atheists have this wrong. Applying their reasoning, they would argue, “I have no evidence of an apple on your kitchen counter, therefore, there is no apple on your kitchen counter.”

 

Which makes no sense. That’s like me saying I have no evidence that you own a car, therefore you don’t own one. If it’s impossible to gather the necessary information, then it’s impossible to draw a logically sound conclusion.

 

And since the very definition of God excludes the possibility of tangible evidence, we can’t draw conclusions about that, either. The only answer we can arrive at is that we simply don’t know.

 

I admit I have a problem with ideas like this. The concept of God is scientifically invincible only because the definition makes it so. You could make up anything you wanted to…as long as your concept doesn’t have physical features, it can’t be scientifically disproved. God may be made up whole cloth, just like the apple on my kitchen counter. Still, if we’re being purely logical about this, we can’t logically disprove God’s existence simply because there is no evidence. Atheism, then, is faith. It is the belief that there is no God, and it must be belief, alone, because there is no evidence, and can never be any evidence, to prove that God does not exist.

There are, of course, any number of perfectly reasonable perspectives in favor of Atheism. You can suppose, for instance, that if there were a God, he would want to show himself in the physical universe. Why exist if it’s impossible for anyone to verify it? That’s a perfectly good argument, but it still isn’t proof. If you use that argument to justify a belief in Atheism, fine—it’s still faith. It still rests on assumptions that can’t be proven.

 

This is why I’m agnostic. There’s no way to conclusively answer the core question about God’s existence. If there were, we wouldn’t have so many perspectives on it. Nobody questions whether or not the earth revolves around the sun, because we can see it. We can answer the question. If it were possible to answer the question of God, we would do it—we’d have no need for this debate.

 

To note: I take no issue with Atheism. It is as potentially valid a perspective as anything else. They could be right. There might not be any God. But they can’t prove that beyond a reasonable doubt, and I think that needs to be acknowledged.

 

 

 

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