I ran across the following comments elsewhere on the web:

An atheist has to believe what he does irrationally.

Here is why: if there is no creative intelligence responsible for existence, then all existence, life, mind, and reason itself are the result of mindless processess.

Science can not explain the origin of existence…the Big Bang for example only deals with a period immediately after the appearance of matter and energy, not with its appearance itself.

Science cannot create life, either, and if it ever does it will certainly not be done by a mindless process. There are no examples in nature of life appearing from non-life…NONE.

Existence, life, mind, and reason have thus not been demonstrated to occur by mindless processes.

Atheists don’t know that such demonstration can ever be made…they must simply declare this to be so.

Until such demonstration is made, I reject atheism.

These comments embody several mistakes in reasoning that I tend to see quite a bit. Let’s break it down a bit:

An atheist has to believe what he does irrationally. Here is why: if there is no creative intelligence responsible for existence, then all existence, life, mind, and reason itself are the result of mindless processess.

One thing that I need to get out of the way immediately: There cannot be a creative intelligence responsible for existence because such a creative intelligence would itself be a part of existence, broadly conceived. Now, maybe this individual did not mean existence in general but meant our existence, or the existence of life as represented here on Earth. Fair enough. In that case, it is of course true that it is possible (whether plausible or not) that a creative intelligence is responsible for our existence. However, this person is insisting that it is irrational to think that life, mind, and reason could be the result of mindless processes.

There is nothing inherently irrational in the idea that life, even intelligent life, could be the result of a blind process (such as natural selection). Nevertheless, there is a conundrum here: if the only rational conclusion is that an intelligent creator must be responsible for the existence of intelligent life - then what the heck is responsible for the existence of the intelligent creator - also an intelligent life? This problem is so obvious and yet so commonly overlooked. Intelligent creators cannot simply exist as if they are some kind of a given. As Richard Dawkins has written, any intelligent life must itself be a product of either another intelligent life or an evolutionary processes.

Science can not explain the origin of existence…the Big Bang for example only deals with a period immediately after the appearance of matter and energy, not with its appearance itself.

This is true, but the fact that science does not have an adequate explaination for the big bang is not evidence for theism.

Science cannot create life, either, and if it ever does it will certainly not be done by a mindless process. There are no examples in nature of life appearing from non-life…NONE.

Here we go again. Origin of life research has certainly made more progress, I think, than ‘what caused the big bang’ research. But again, the lack of a complete understanding of how living replicators could have been produced from a combination of non-living material is evidence of our ignorance, not evidence for a creator.

Existence, life, mind, and reason have thus not been demonstrated to occur by mindless processes. Atheists don’t know that such demonstration can ever be made…they must simply declare this to be so. Until such demonstration is made, I reject atheism.

Here is where his biggest blunder is made. To reject atheism is essentially to embrace theism, yet this individual has offered no positive evidence in favor of theism. Essentially, he is arguing that the failure of scientists (and atheists in particular) to explain certain aspects of the natural world somehow automatically makes God a plausible answer. It doesn’t anymore than our ignorance makes Shiva, Zeus, or Baal the plausible answer.

This comes back to the ‘burden of proof’ that contributer Peter wrote about in the previous post. The fact that such demonstrations cannot yet be made requires us to suspend our judgement. In other words, we do not know how life began on this planet. This under no circumstances translates into God did it. Before rejecting atheism, this person must be able to demonstrate positive evidence that God did it. That’s where the burden of demonstration lies.