timeimmortal

This inspires a great deal of confidence, really. If, per the testimony on the join page, Richard Dawkins considers Why Won’t God Heal Amputees to be a “splendid Web site,” he’s not nearly as intelligent as he presents himself to be.

And if that website represents “the most important question that we can ask about God” (and thus, by implication, the best attempt at refuting God that atheists have available to them), religious folk of most stripes have very little to worry about. Unless these guys manage to get in power…the text of the join page would seem to imply a desire to formally invoke a ban on religious worship, akin to modern bans on smoking.

I must be confused…here I thought atheists were all about the freedom of thought. Or maybe freethinking means something entirely different, and more akin to groupthink. Who can tell these days?…what with agnostics, naturalists, humanists, secularists, atheists, brights, and the like, there are almost as many denominations of non-believers as there are of believers.

I think Mark Shea’s rebuttal is about as much as needs to be said to people who actually believe that God’s not healing amputees is a sufficient basis for an argument against the existence of God:

Likewise the chief priests with the scribes and elders mocked him and said, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. So he is the king of Israel! Let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusted in God; let him deliver him now if he wants him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”

The revolutionaries who were crucified with him also kept abusing him in the same way.

From noon onward, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Some of the bystanders who heard it said, “This one is calling for Elijah.”

Immediately one of them ran to get a sponge; he soaked it in wine, and putting it on a reed, gave it to him to drink.

But the rest said, “Wait, let us see if Elijah comes to save him.”

But Jesus cried out again in a loud voice, and gave up his spirit.

I think that’s the supreme irony of this atheist website, really: on one hand, they have numerous pages devoted to telling believers that God doesn’t exist, and that this is just the way things are, and that this is okay. And yet, their very argument against the existence of God is that God is basically saying the same thing to amputees in regard to why their legs don’t spontaneously re-grow.

But I suppose that, pace Chesterton, if a person chooses not to believe in God or in gods, he or she does not believe in nothing, but in anything that comes along. No bigot like an atheist, and all that. It’s so funny how atheists tend to forget themselves when the discussion turns to religion.

Mind you, I guess I shouldn’t expect miracles from people who are still chained to the outdated idea that the “problem” of evil (or, relatedly, the “problem” of suffering) can somehow be used to “prove” that God doesn’t exist or that religion is false. It keeps turning out to be the case that the “rocks” of atheism are but pebbles.

~ by Kenneth on November 16, 2007.