Atheism is not a belief “in” anything. It is not proof or even argument that God does not exist. Atheism is a denial of merit to any claims for the existence of God. The standards of proof are the same as those known from science or law: evidence must be consistent, repeatable, explicable, and falsifiable. So far, no religionist has offered any evidence for the existence of “God.”

Several to perhaps many here on Galt’s Gulch Online apparently believe in God and even accept Jesus as their Savior. How many is not clear. Such statements do appear often enough that is hard to dismiss them as a few outliers, or even an insignificant minority. Moreover, while some metaphysical margin might be found for a theological discussion, the leading posters who admit to regularly attending church are not speculating in philosophy.

Some atheists have taken various religionist claims to task. The easiest is that if God is omniscient, then he (she or it) cannot be omnipotent. Other logical fallacies have been exposed. Miracles such as the Shroud of Turin have been exposed as fakes, but nothing can shake the faith of the believer because faith does not require evidence. Ultimately, say the atheists, the entire pantheon of spirits, saints, and gurus, and their holy bones and holy stones are just holdovers from a primitive time, vestiges of tribal totems and animism.

Of course, religion has come a long way since Abraham was ordered to sacrifice Isaac, especially in response to these challenges. The Catholic Encyclopedia (www.newadvent.org) points out that when we say that a brave man is a lion, we are speaking in an analogy. So, too, when we say that God is all-powerful, all-loving, infinite, eternal, etc., are we analogizing. God is so far beyond our comprehension that no statement is anything more than analogy. Moreover, citing ancient authorities, the Catholic Encyclopedia easily dismisses the metaphysical contradictions, such as “Can God make a stone so large that he cannot lift it?” The religionist reply is that God cannot contradict himself; and it is childish to think that word games reveal understanding.

To me that comes down not to statements of belief but claims of profound ignorance: not only do we not know, but we can never know.

So, when Jacob, Jesus, Mary, Mohammed, and others ascended into “heaven” even though they apparently went straight up into the sky, we know that they did not stop at the clouds. We fly above the clouds. We have been to the Moon, and beyond – and still no evidence for heaven. Religionists dismiss these mythical stories as admittedly the attempts of simple people from ancient times who understood as best they could the miracles that they perceived. Heaven is “beyond the stars” they say. Why did these divines not move at right angles to our space-time continuum and just grow hugely large or sub-atomically small as in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland? Is heaven “beyond dimensionality”? The easy answer is that Flatland was written in 1884, so no divine saint or religious scholar before then had reason to think in those terms. In every way, religion is just another human artifact that advances as all knowledge makes progress: it is not divinely revealed truth.

Serious, sophisticated religionists have serious, sophisticate replies; but why do they have them now and not 2000 years ago? In his many debates with Christian and Jewish religionists, Christopher Hitchens pointed out that as we have become more intelligent, religion has seemed to become so as well. That is to be expected of chemistry, but not of divine revelation. You would expect advances in arts and crafts, but the Revealed Word of God should be something more – if it is indeed that, and not just the imaginings of some persons long ago, constantly re-cloaked in the fashions of the time. Today –even here in The Gulch – religionists now probe the big bang and dark matter and the missing term in the gravitational constant… All of which would have been known, addressed, and answered if any holy book at all – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Mormon, Jain, Sikh, Buddhist, Mayan… - were in fact a revelation of superior knowledge.

In a debate with two rabbis where he was joined by Richard Dawkins, Hitchens nodded to the civilized, amiable, and open dialog on stage – and then pointed out that such a discussion would have been impossible at time when religionists actually held political power.

That is a moral argument. Hitchens allowed that religion gave some people (perhaps most) a code of ethics for proper behavior. Ayn Rand disagreed. Unlike other atheists who accepted the morality of altruism and only wished that religionists truly practiced it, Rand rejected altruism because she rejected the epistemology of faith and the metaphysics of mystery.

For Ayn Rand, atheism reduces to a single syllogism: The universe is everything that exists. Anything outside of existence does not exist. Therefore the universe had no creator.

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