After watching tons of atheist videos and reading tons of atheist blogs, I am struck with how ineffective their arguments are. While atheism has been around as long as theism, the atheists remain a small minority of the population.
Commonly. a statistic of somewhere near 16% is quoted by most atheists. However, that number is actually the number of non-religious people. If you dig deeper, you will find that about half are theists and half are atheists. So the reality is that atheists only make up about 8% of the population.
Considering the placebo effect, that makes atheism only slightly more effective than homeopathy. Even if we are generous and grant 10% to the group, that means that 90% of the time people do not find the atheist arguments to be convincing.
Maybe it’s just me, but when I am trying to make an argument and find that it is ineffective, I attempt to figure out what the weak points of my argument are and adjust to compensate for those weaknesses.
However, in the so called atheist community, it’s virtually never considered acceptable to actually criticize atheist positions. As an atheist, I have many times been criticized as a closet theist simply because I have brought up weaknesses in some atheist’s argument.
It’s almost as if the atheists are so unsure of their position that even the slightest hint that their arguments are flawed MUST mean that the theists are correct. I guess I should expect this because so many of the atheist arguments are based on the idea that if one minor thing about a theist argument is wrong, that is accepted as proof the entirety of the theist’s position is wrong. Of course, in those cases, the atheist is making a common logical fallacy so it’s really undeniable that their argument is weak.
Another common tactic of atheists is to use some variation of the traditional ad hominem logical fallacy. They attempt to paint their opponent as some uneducated fool so therefore the opposing position is wrong. As any honest person knows, this is not a fair tactic, so once again the atheist looses on grounds of being a douche bag.
A significant number of atheists attempt to use science to refute their opponent. And yes, quite a few theists do use science incorrectly to defend their position. However, the atheists are much worse at this intellectual offense.
To begin with, the phrase “scientific proof” is one of the greatest oxymorons of all time. Nothing in science is ever proven. In fact, if anything in science is ever proven it immediately becomes an unscientific idea. One of the hallmarks of scientific thinking is that all ideas are falsifiable. However once an idea is proven it is no longer falsifiable so therefore it is no longer a scientific idea.
Along with the logical inconsistency of “scientific proof” is the idea that scientific evidence is somehow anything more than just evidence. And as anybody with a lick of sense knows, evidence is also not proof of anything. Put in legal terms, evidence may be accepted or rejected by the trier of fact. Nobody is under any obligation to accept any evidence. So demanding that your opponent accept your evidence is just another sign of a weak argument.
In general, atheists claim there is no evidence that god exists and they are correct in that assertion. However, on the other side there is no evidence that god doesn’t exist. Attempting to use a scientific argument for something that has no evidence supporting or refuting a position is misguided at best.
By the time the atheist is demanding proof or even evidence for a god’s existence, they have already lost the argument and are just acting like a whiny little kid that isn’t getting their way. The best they can do it retreat to a position of describing how they believe, without being able to convince their opponent.
Which leads to the idea of what an atheists believes. Many atheists will claim that they don’t believe a god exists and they don’t believe a god doesn’t exist. While this is a very pure definition of atheism (i.e. being without god) it does beg a real tough question.
If you truly don’t believe a god exists and you don’t believe a god doesn’t exist, how could you possibly justify a position where theists are wrong? At best, you could claim that theists have not proven their point, but then again the atheist has not proven they are correct either.
Taking the approach being used by many atheists, since the theists have not proven their position and the scientists have not proven their position, believing science is somehow better than religion is just another religion in itself. Something based on unproven assertions.
If atheists want to ever be more than a marginalized group of religious kooks, they need to stop making weak arguments and begin to focus on the problems with religion without bring up the existence or lack of existence of god.
beechgrovejoe
