More Evidence that Atheism Makes You Stupid

Richard Dawkins is a fool. If you don't believe me, see Psalm 53:1. It is a scandal that such a willful ignoramus should hold a chair is a prestigious university such as Oxford. Only a decadent, declining society could honour such a man.

There is no excuse for treating him with kid gloves. He is actually a totalitarian who would love to make it illegal for Christians to raise their own children in their own faith and he deserves to be marginalized and ignored by the media. That his books sell well and he gets rich throwing bombs at Christians is more of an indictment of the low level of education in our society than a reliable gauge of anti-Christian sentiment in our society.

In his Daily Telegraph blog today, Rev. Peter Mullens has this to say about the Elmer Gantry of atheists:

Richard Dawkins says that David Cameron is “not really a Christian”. The fact is that it is only God to whom all hearts be open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid. So Dawkins has no means of telling whether Cameron is a genuine Christian or not.

We can, however, know that Dawkins is not a proper atheist – that is an intelligent atheist – from his own puerile writing and pathetic attempts at philosophical theology. For example, he writes: “Either God exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question. The existence of God is a scientific question, like any other.”

This is idiotic. Science investigates material phenomena, observable entities in the universe. No competent theologians or philosophers – not even the atheist ones – have ever declared that God (if he exists) is an object in his own universe. Perhaps there is no God, and intelligent Christians readily admit that there may be some legitimate doubt. But if the Judaeo-Christian God exists, then he is the maker of the universe and not an entity within it

It may be that Christians are tragically misled and that there is no God. But before you rush into atheism, you have to know something about philosophical reasoning and how theology works. In other words you have to know what it is about and what it is not about. When he discusses religious belief, Dawkins does not know what he is talking about. And to fire off ignorant opinions is only the first mark of a fool.

To say that the existence of God is a scientific question (in the narrow sense of science as the investigation of empirical reality by experimental methods), is the worst sort of scientism. Scientism is the elevation of science to the status of a religion by saying that only empirical science can discover truth and any truth not within range of empirical science is not important and unreal. Scientism is a heavily freighted philosophy which depends on highly controversial and not empirically demonstrable axioms. In other words, it rests on a foundation of what Richard Dawkins wishes were true.

Dawkins cannot tell the difference between metaphysics, science and religion and so he simply asserts that they all come out to the same thing. In his atheist tract, The God Delusion, he treats the metaphysical arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas in 2.5 pages and actually imagines he has debunked the arguments for the existence of God. In an age of low educational standards but almost universal literacy, he gets away with it so long as he is not called on his stupidity. So it is necessary for those who know how much he does not know to say so openly and loudly.

Mullens goes on to compare Dawkins to David Hume, who was an atheist but not a bitter, old, hate-fulled campaigner against Christians. Anthony Flew was an atheist for most of his life, but he never descended to the hatefulness and spite of a Dawkins. There just is no need of it.

Atheists and Christians alike should join in denouncing Dawkins for his bigotry and stupidity. This intellectual charlatan is merely a poorly-educated, angry, old man with an ax to grind and little intellectual firepower with which to grind. It is very sad to watch.

Carbon Credits For the Tender Conscience

Matt Labash at the Daily Caller has an advice column. Here is a humorous excerpt on advising the tender green conscience.

[Warning: What you are about to read, dear reader, is gentle satire, not a serious discussion of a serious issue by a serious person. These days, it is best to be ultra clear about such things; in the Green movement the line between wide-eyed, moralistic seriousness and off-the-wall idiocy is so thin as to be invisible most of the time.]

Last week, I ran over (on separate days) a chipmunk

and a squirrel. Does the fact that I did so while driving a Prius in Eco mode offset the environmental damage done? Thanks. – Jason, Baltimore

That really depends, Mr. Baltimore, or Jason, if I may. First off, we should offer condolences to the families of the deceased chipmunk and squirrel. At least they can take comfort knowing that their loved ones died cleanly and greenly.

Second, if you were driving in Eco mode, you probably know that you were maximizing fuel savings in all driving conditions, that you were modifying your air conditioner’s operation, and that you reduced your fossil-fuel consumption

by anywhere from 10-20 percent. So I don’t have to congratulate you. You’re a Prius driver, meaning you already congratulate yourself.

But not so fast. You neglected to say what became of the squirrel and chipmunk carcasses. Did you just leave them on the road? Or did you gather them up and compost them, or at least dispose of them in a biodegradable trash bag? If you just left them, the vultures probably got them. And if they’re gassy vultures, that means they released harmful methane emissions into the environment after eating your kill. So the next time you hit something, you might think about contacting your Prius dealer to purchase vulture-fart carbon credits. We can’t save all the chipmunks of today. But we can save the environment for the chipmunks of tomorrow.

How many of you think that if you tried to buy vulture-fart carbon credits from your local Toyota dealer, it would sell you some? I think they would be crazy not to; every revenue stream helps in a recession. I know GM would.

Birth Control is Not Green; Nor is it a Solution to the Problems of the World

The Green Movement, aka the Environmentalist Movement, has been infiltrated and taken over to a large extent by Communists and their fellow-travellers and apologists, who have seen their dreams of world revolution dashed by the triumph of freedom in Eastern Europe and the USSR. They have siezed on the Global Warming issue as one that is closely related to the anti-pollution movement that has been gaining ground in the West over the past two or three generations.

Being in favor of caring for creation, recycling and cleaning up (and preventing) air and water pollution is something all people of good, including most Evangelical Christians, support. But the Global Warming issue has been siezed on by the Green Leftists as a way of drumming up support for their anti-Capitalist, anti-growth, anti-people agenda. The methods are fear-mongering and propoganda; more on that in a moment.

Their game is given away by two facts. First, you note that the politically correct now speak of "climate change" rather than "global warming." Why? Well, the fact is that the earth has been cooling, not warming, since 1998. Even the BBC, for crying out loud, is now questioning the myth of global warming by asking questions about this "inconvenient truth." So the name of the problem is changed to "climate change," which pretty much makes its claims unfalsifiable. When something is not falsifiable, as Richard Dawkins keeps reminding us, it is not science.

Second, predictions of the population explosion leading to the apocalypse have been around since Thomas Malthus published his gloomy musings on how starvation is imminent since humans always breed faster than the food supply could possibly grow. Paul Erlich's 1970 The Population Bomb predicted widespread famine in the 70s and 80s of the Twentieth century and its predictions were so wrong that if he had been an ancient Israelite prophet they would have had to stone him since his prophecies were false. So when you read the heavy-handed anti-child, anti-human Green Movement gurus predicting the apocalypse any year now if we don't severely cut population, you should be properly skeptical.

With the upcoming "climate change" talks in Copenhagan, it is to be expected that we will see as spate of anti-people propoganda. A recent editorial in the Washington Times gives a summary:

"From the London School of Economics and Optimum Population Trust (OPT), a
British think tank, comes a paper that explains that birth control is a very
inexpensive way to combat climate change. For every $7 spent on birth control,
one metric ton of CO2 emissions could be cut, the OPT study says. If all
unintended births worldwide could be prevented for 40 years, 34 billion tons of
carbon dioxide could be prevented. Hence the headline, "Fewer Emitters, Lower
Emissions, Less Cost."

Another report, from the Center for Environment and Population in New
Canaan, Conn., argues that population issues (i.e., family planning) must be
included in any plan to save the environment. Population and climate change are
"inextricably linked," says the report titled "U.S. Population, Energy &
Climate Change."

Finally, a study from two Oregon State University professors, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, showed how the descendants of each person swamp Earth with their emissions, and it's better to have one child than two."

Now, this propoganda is designed to do three things: (1) make you support abortion and birth control programs in the West, (2) make you support the export of the Western promiscuity ethic and the contraceptive mentality to the Third World and (3) deceive you into thinking that further reducing world population is good for you.

The fact is that 59 countries already have falling populations and that world population is already going to level out by 2050 at around 9 billion, which is not too many people for the planet to support. The big problem is going to be the failure to maintain the population and the resulting economic disaster as the population ages, economic growth slows and violence becomes a more and more plausible scenario as groups fight over their share of a shrinking economic pie. (See my previous post on demographer Philip Longman's book, The Empty Cradle.)

It is time to oppose the Green Movement and to de-legitimize its dangerous and harmful ideology. It will cause much pain, suffering and hurt if it is allowed to dominate public policy and implement the Malthusian mistake on a world scale.