Pope Benedict of the Catholic Church is trying to mask the fundamental dangers of faith in small, innocuous doses of reason. Desperately attempting to revitalize the Scholastic tradition of Aquinas in the Catholic Church, and rid itself of mysticism and enigma, the Pope is defending Christianity–and God–by an appeal to a return to Reason! As Aquinas had argued, so now does the Pope, that Reason and Faith are complementary; that the essential nature of God is rational and logical, and that the man has been endowed with the same apparatus of reason and logic that we share with God.
It is most dangerous when one blurs the very crucial line between reason and faith; because faith is a form of force, and force is utterly incompatible with reason. In any mixture of or compromise between good and evil, as Rand said, the good suffers and the evil wins out; in any compromise between reason and faith, reason suffers and faith (force) wins out.
Therefore, in light of this, I wish to highlight my own unique arguments for atheism against the claims that reason and faith are complementary.
First, the very idea that God has endowed man with reason and logic contradicts Christianity’s very cherished Book of Genesis. Read my “God’s Original Plan for Humanity.” Excerpt:
The Devil liberated human beings from the state of ignorance and animal-like existence. The Devil gave us the glimpse of immense possibilities, of achievements, of the concept of happiness, joy, love, of the higher meanings of morality, choice, freedom, failure, etc.
The Devil made the world we live in, possible. The Devil free-ed humans to build our own heaven, here in Earth.
Next, the Pope says the Christian idea of God is essentially rational in nature–that God’s nature does not subsume the contradictory, for example, even God cannot make a circle with four corners. Fair enough, and I agree wholeheartedly. But, why stop there? Read my “God’s Limitations.” Excerpt:
Since no capacity to ever do wrong exists in God, He is bounded by His nature to always do right — automatically.
Thus, no free-will, thus no choice, then automatic nature, like instinct. Thus, this whole argumentation of God being “perfectly moral” and having “free-will” and being independently “omnipotent” seems to fall flat on its face.
In another related, but seperate posts, I demonstrate how a God that is immortal and infinite must by necessity of His nature have a very monotonously boring life! Excerpt:
God cannot but live. God cannot but be moral. God cannot but be perfect. Thus, all of those things (at least), have absolutely no alternatives. And in the face of no alternatives, one cannot engage in choice. Thus, God has no choice in the matter and therefore cannot value His own actions nor can He value His own existence. This also means that God is limited in the things He can do.
The point is that a God who follows the principles of logic must–ironically enough–by the necessity of His own logical nature, NOT exist! Thus, to claim that God is rational and logical is to claim that God does not exist! Thus, it is clear that at the most fundamental level, reason does not permit the existence of God, but only faith does, and hence, reason and faith are diametrically opposed at all levels.
However, in my “First Principles of Atheism” I argued that the best way to prove the non-existence of God is to have the believer admit–like the Pope did–that any concept of God must be intelligible and open to rational and logical scrutiny. If this condition is not met, then I will have equal legitimacy in claiming Batman (or Superman) as my deity as you have in claiming Jesus or the Spaghetti Monster as your deity. If God is not required to be intelligent or rational or logical, then anything and everything can be considered “God”; one does not even have to worry about consistency, let alone truth!
Anyway, I used this opportunity not only to argue against the modern trend of mixing faith with reason but also to highlight the uniqueness of my own approach to atheism based on reason not on faith.
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