A gentleman who occasionally writes letters to the local paper to criticize Christianity and extol atheism took the occasion in one recent epistle to trot out the tired old shibboleth that Christianity is a mere superstition. This is certainly an amusing claim coming from an atheist. The definition of a superstition is any belief unreasonably upheld by faith in magic, chance or dogma. Consider some of what an atheist must believe in order to believe atheism is true:
They have to believe firstly that something (the universe) can come from nothing. Then, in order to avoid the conclusion that the cosmos is purposefully designed for life, they have to believe, in the complete absence of evidence, the only other possibility: that there are a near infinite number of universes of which ours is just one.
Believing as they do in a naturalistic origin of life they have to also believe that the equivalent of a library full of information (the DNA molecule) was somehow assembled by random chance and then, despite the enormous improbability of it, DNA just by accident developed the highly complex process of self-replication. They have to believe, without any evidence, that human consciousness - the awareness of one's surroundings and the ability to reason, abstract, and experience sensations - somehow arose by chance from chemical reactions occurring in the brain.
They often also believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that atheism is superior to theism in terms of offering a reason to hope that justice will prevail, a meaning for human and individual existence, a ground for moral obligation, and a basis for thinking that human beings have dignity and should be accorded human rights. On atheism there's no absolutely no reason whatsoever to think that there's any real justice, any ultimate meaning to life, any ground for moral obligation or moral judgment, or any reason to think humans have dignity, worth or inherent rights. Yet many atheists believe in all of these things.
So who's being superstitious?
*Superstitious by Stevie Wonder
RLC
