Dear Athiest: An Open Letter

Dear Atheist: An Open Letter

February 16, 2009

By Joel Riley

Dear Atheist,

I have read your attacks. They are admirable. You make good points. You tell me there is too much suffering in the world for there to be a perfect God (after all shouldn't perfection only begat perfection?). You tell me there have been far worse done to humanity in the name of God than of any godless people, but yet shouldn't it be that the ones who have belief in God that should act better and help humanity and not hurt it as Christians, Jews, and Muslims consistently have done throughout history (the atheist here points to the terrors executed by the Jews in the Bible such as in Judges and the history of the Kings, to the tyranny of the Catholics in the Spanish Inquisition, to the Recent attacks by Islamic extremists)?

You tell me that if one were to make God a hypothesis in the scientific method, it would be failed to be proven many times over (especially under Occam's razor)? And perhaps the most stupid assumption of all that you make, because there is evolution, there must be no God.

Atheists, who taught you logic? Was it Richard Dawkins? Was it Darwin? Was it Hitchens? Because, I expect more out of you. Supposedly you are the intelligent ones, yet your anti-God rhetoric fails so badly in the sphere of reasoning and logic that I think it best you remove yourself from such an arena and find a different approach to attack God, because it's not here—and here's why:

Reverse Logic
Let’s pretend I am an atheist. I believe in science and evolution. I believe that man is just a process of selection through billions of years of trial and error. Of course, I believe there is no God, just chances via nature.

If there is no meaning behind our existence or no creator, why should I trust my own intellect here that tells me there is no God. On what grounds? What makes my cognitive reasoning skills so trustworthy if there is no platform to base our trust in truth on? If we are an ever-evolving species in an ever-evolving world, surely we must realize that we cannot even trust our own thoughts because it is full of corrupt mechanisms that evolution has taken us through. Such corrupt mechanisms that have allowed billions of our human peers to believe in some kind of spiritual world through the course of history.

There is simply no grounds for truth in atheism because our minds cannot be proven to hold the power to grasp truth as our own existence is based on coincidences in biological morphology that allows our species to be alive today as it is and will continue to allow us to evolve to a further, more intelligent species in the future. And sure, maybe you have a right to have your own belief system in this world where there is no God, but what right in this godless society do you have to put your own intellect on a pedestal to be able to tell others so affirmatively that your beliefs are correct over those who may believe in God? How can you trust yourself? How can you trust reason?

Science as Absurdity
Now surely you fall here to the scientific process of objectivity and that you must believe whatever can be proven scientifically, and should not believe whatever cannot be proven based on science and the scientific method, but on what logic can you use to say that all truth should be and has to be measured by the scientific method? It is an impossibility to prove that the scientific method is the correct way to measure what is right and what is wrong; so now the same leap of faith that people who believe in God have, you have to make this same leap of faith in proclaiming that the world must be measured by the scientific method and reason. Once again, no foundation to base your belief system on except by trust and faith in the system by which you came to believe in. You atheists despise faith but yet you are equally guilty of it.

Welcome to our world.

Fondly,
Joel “The Fighting Theist” Riley

ninetyandnine.com

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Joel Riley is a recent graduate of U of M and is currently attending UGST for his MTS. He spends his free time arguing with atheistic philosophers in his head, fixing the difficulties of our century and engaging in formal picnics.