Why David Spero is an atheist

David Spero has a guest blog post at Pharyngula explaining why he's an atheist. His post is below, with my commentary.

Why I am an atheist – David Spero

December 4, 2011 at 9:48 am PZ Myers

Dave Niose, president of the American Humanist Association, posted recently over at Open Salon a copy of a letter he received from an atheist friend.

The president of a tiny loud claque of litigious atheists has a last name that sounds like "noise". I love irony.

The friend wrote the letter to his own 11-year-old daughter, who was “very upset about her father’s non-belief” — particularly his refusal to pray for her (something apparently advocated by the friend’s wife, who is a Christian).

I won’t comment on a family situation I know next to nothing about, but it did remind me of the very issue that began the unraveling of my own faith: prayer. About 20 years ago, I was on a path to ministry. I was in the middle of co-founding a fellowship organization on my college campus and had just finished drafting the group’s constitution (as required by the school to be an official student organization and thus receive activity funds) when I had a moment of clarity while praying for guidance. Yes, I appreciate the irony.

The path I was on would have led me to fervent proselytizing. I was 19 years old, post-Catholic and in training to present the Word to non-believers. I studied the Bible with an ordained mentor and doggedly researched apologetics. I was going to provide irrefutable answers in defense of Christ in debate.

But there were no irrefutable answers.

The classical demonstrations for God's existence-- Prime Mover, First Cause, Necessary Existence, Greatest Good, Final Cause-- are irrefutable. Critics have tried for several millennia to destroy these arguments, and no one has laid a glove on any of them.

Unlike the arguments for God's existence, knowledge of Christ is not the result of irrefutable logical arguments, and was never intended to be. Knowing Christ is a knowledge of the heart, as Pascal observed. It is a deep kind of awareness, like coming to love the person you will marry. It is a powerful kind of knowledge, but different from logical proof. So many of the things we know are knowledge of the heart. No one "reasons out" his love for his spouse or child. Yet that love is one of the things of which we are most sure.

Very few things that we believe in life are logically proven. The existence of a Prime Mover, First Cause... is one of them. Most of what we know is knowledge of the heart.

It doesn't seem as though David was intellectually prepared for the ministry.

I decided to keep on it — after all, I was just getting started and I had faith more would be revealed as I continued in my studies. But each revelation was more suspect than the last. Every question I had was answered with circular reasoning (e.g., why believe in the Bible as the inspired word of God? Because the Bible says so.).

No one makes the argument that we should believe the Bible is God's word because the Bible says so. Logical nonsense is the provence of atheists ("everything came from nothing"..., "there is no objective moral law, and it's immoral to believe that there is..."), not Christians.

Christians believe that the Bible is God's word because the Bible reveals deep truths that lead us to see that its ultimate Source is God. Augustine said it best: "I believe in order to understand". The Bible casts light on life in a way that is so profound and hews so closely to truth that we conclude it is God's word.

David's assertion that we believe the Bible because the Bible tells us so is an idiotic caricature of real Christian belief. Thank goodness he didn't become a minister.

Finally, while praying to understand God’s will, a giant hole ripped in the fabric of my belief: Who am I praying to? Why? Why does God require me to pray when he is supposedly omniscient? What does that say about the nature of the god I’m praying to?

It says, David, that God wants you to know Him, personally. Prayer is for you. He doesn't need prayer. You need prayer, and He loves you and wants to bring you to Him. It's analogous to when a father accepts a penny from his toddler as a "gift for Daddy". The father doesn't need the penny, but he delights in his child's love and gratitude. The meaning of prayer is the relationship it fosters.

Prayer is God's gift of Himself to you.

You don't understand that, David, and you were going to be a minister?

The God I believed in was supposed to be perfect. Too perfect, in fact, for mortal minds to fathom. Ultimate love. True goodness. Omniscient. Omnipotent. Omnipresent. The whole nine yards and then some. Whenever something about God didn’t make sense to me, I countered myself by saying my definition of God must simply be too narrow. But because of that, God soon became just an infinitely broad but paper-thin abstraction.

That's because you never met Him, in prayer or otherwise. Christ is many things. "Paper-thin abstraction" isn't one of them.

It was then a very small step to the realization that the concept of a personal God was absurd. Eventually, I came to understand the fallacy of the “God of the Gaps“. There was no chance I’d turn to another religion; it was clear they’d all fail the litmus test instantly.

The "God of the Gaps" fallacy is an idiotic argument. The inference is that science is continuously explaining things previously attributed to God. This foolish argument confuses primary with secondary causes. Science sheds light on secondary causes. It is silent on primary causes, which are the domain of philosophy and theology.

Scientists are, for the most part, grossly incompetent philosophers and theologians. Like you, David.

I claimed to be an agnostic throughout my 20s. I left open the door to the idea of a higher power but, again, was pretty sure the matter was too complex to be comprehended. It wasn’t until my 30s that I faced the issue head on and realized I had been making the same weak excuses.

David, you never understood Christianity and never met Christ in any way that you understood.

A sequence of events and introspection ultimately left nowhere for my intellect to hide. Once I allowed myself to practice skepticism honestly, the absurdities appeared everywhere I looked. There was no God.

Your intellect still hides, and your simplistic caricature of Christianity doesn't count against the existence of God. None of your skepticism is honest, or really skepticism. You need to understand what you are rejecting, which you don't. Rejecting something without understanding it isn't skepticism, but its opposite. You are a credulous atheist, willing to believe in God's non-existence without really engaging the issue.

And it quickly became clear that many of civilization’s messes — either directly or indirectly — were catalyzed by some form of religion.

Right, David. Embracing the metaphysics of Marx and Stalin and Mao is such a rational response to civilizational messiness. You just jumped from the greatest source of good for mankind (Christianity) to the most malignant evil (state atheism). As I said David, you're no skeptic.

My eyes were opened, and I was faced with one big question: Now what? It didn’t take long to understand that the only sane response to an insane world was to roll up my sleeves and try to make it a better place. All alternative responses were (and remain) unacceptable. Ultimately, I discovered my ideals matched those of organized Humanism.

If God doesn't exist, whence your passion for human betterment? How very un-Darwinian. If there is no God, there is no source of objective morality, and no objective good or evil. Merely animals struggling to procreate. "Atheist benevolence' is an oxymoron.

So yes, you could say that prayer accidentally provided me with guidance. It was exactly the spark I needed to put me on the right path.

Your service to mankind, David, was that you did not become a minister, and thus you could not destroy the faith of people who trusted you. I encourage you to become a real skeptic. Learn real Christian theology. Pray earnestly.

And apply your skepticism to your own atheist pabulum.