Atheism, and the experience of the exile

Currently we are seeing what could be described as an offensive being launched by proponents of the philosophy of atheism. Richard Dawkins book ‘The God Delusion’ is at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Christopher Hitchens is releasing a book and it sounds like it will be a hyperbolic diatribe against religion (the theme of the book from what I can tell is that religion is the source of nothing but evil in the world).

Dawkins is a scientist and as a scientist he wishes to know why people cling to a delusion (their belief in a fictional god being) when there has never been any scientific evidence to support such a belief. Even if such a god being was ‘supernatural’ it would still be possible for this god being to impact the physical world in such a way as to cause effects which could then be measured and quantified by science.

Even though it has been said that it is impossible to prove the existence of God by employing the scientific method, for God, it is said, is ‘supernatural’, and thus ‘beyond science’, it is supposed to be possible to prove the validity of atheism using the scientific method. The means for accomplishing this feat is to employ Darwinism to demonstrate that life is the result of random material processes. In this way it is demonstrated that a god of any kind is made redundant and then following the principle known as ‘Occam’s razor’, which dictates that a complex explanation is not required when a simple explanation is sufficient, it is then possible to validate atheism by demonstrating that a god was not required. What is known as ‘theistic Darwinism’ is an example of philosophical position that contains such a redundancy for the god being is not required and is not included for justifiable scientific reasons for it is impossible to justify a redundancy.

Religious people have always found it impossible to respond to the pointed criticisms of such scientists as Dawkins. Miracles, we are told, are happening on our television screens everyday, but there is never any science. Instead we here ‘testimonials’. Now given that science is on the attack, and given the acerbic nature of that attack, one would think that religion would have answered long ago and crushed science under the weight of her scientific evidence. Instead we get delusions, and such delusions are then justifiably questioned by a scientist such as Dawkins who sees these delusions pumped out everyday on our television screens and then responds by composing a polemic such as his best selling book, ‘The God Delusion’.

Religion relies on ‘testimonials’ and must stay far away from science for science would only prove that either she was deluded or that she was in exile. These are the two choices confronting religion. Delusion or exile. If she is merely deluded then we should expect to see her sinking deeper into her world of delusion until the day she finally dies and both she and her delusions disappear. If it was the case that she was in bitter exile, cut off from the presence of God, and then handed over to her enemies to face defeat at their hands, in this case we would expect her to be deluded for a time, after which the exile would come to an end and then scientists such as Dawkins would begin to get the evidence that they require. Such evidence would never be produced during the time of exile since to produce evidence would be a violation of the state of exile, and consistency is required.

Religion is incapable of confronting a scientist such as Dawkins because the theology of religion consists only of the denial of exile, and without acknowledging the reality of the exile it is impossible to explain the lack of empirical evidence proving the existence of God. The ‘doctrine of original sin’ is one of these apologetics for exile. This doctrine acknowledges the reality of exile from the presence of God and does so by excusing religion and placing the blame upon ‘born sinners’ who are in exile from the presence of a very, very holy God. Religion it not to blame for this state of alienation but rather is presented as a kind of bridge between a sinful world which exists in a state of alienated exile and a very, very holy God. If we had a very, very holy religion and a very very holy bible such an argument might make some sense, but instead we see that we have a very, very holy God and a very polluted Bible and since religion is based upon the Bible it is hard to see how we could then have a very, very holy religion. It would be our very, very holy religion that produces and distributes unholy Bibles, and that has never been a very, very holy act. It is also our religion that denies the obvious and insists that we have an ‘infallible’ and an ‘inerrant’ and very, very holy Bible, and this leads me to conclude that the ‘original sin’ must have been found in religion and therefore we have a world full of original sinners, cut off from the presence of God, and we also have a religion cut off from the presence of God, for to justify religion would be to justify sin and as religion herself argues it is impossible for God to justify such sin.

At the moment it is proving to be almost impossible to get religion to acknowledge the reality of her exile or to confess that, yes, long ago her ancestors were rejected and that the exile began at that time and has lasted to this very day. There are a number of reasons for this phenomenon of stubbornness, one of which is that people are very stubborn and no one is ever wrong on this planet. You can see the same behavior pattern exhibited by Darwinists, as just one example, for although Darwinists are wrong they will never admit they were wrong because no ever does. This is not an exclusively religious phenomenon. A second reason for the denial of the exile among the religious is that religious people experience ‘mortality salience’ whenever they confront the reality of the experience of exile, for given the nature of exile it is impossible to determine whether an exile is an exile or whether there is just no such thing as a god. The experience of ‘no god’ is the same as the experience of ‘exile’ and for this reason she reacts to exile in the same way she would react to the sudden realization that there really is no such thing as a god after all. She is religion, so she then goes into denial. She sinks into delusion. She flees from science and turns to delusive testimonials. She invents theology. She resists. She turns away from the darkness of the eternal pit and she flees. This behavior is also a product of the experience of exile.

For this reason she cannot engage in a debate with her critics for a scientific question requires an answer which satisfies the requirements of science, and such an answer can never be forthcoming during a time of bitter exile.

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