Overthinking Clearly

Many times, you can hear the so-called “first cause” argument and that it supposedly proves the existence of God.

The argument goes something like this:

1. The Universe had a Beginning
2. If the Universe had a beginning, it must have had (transcendental) cause that is outside of our reality – first cause
3. The Universe has a first cause that is outside our limits
4. This cause must be powerful
5. This cause is God

On the first glance, the argument it does look powerful.

TL;DR – That science and religion do not clash as they are not concerned with the same things is basically a mantra invented by religious people to have their religion not questioned.

On today’s date, 18 May 1872 (- 2 February 1970) Bertrand Arthur William Russell, was born. Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, writer, activist and Nobel laureate.

If you ever encountered an “atheist post” on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or some other social media platform, you might have had a passing thought what really motivated the author? Or maybe you even encountered a bit “sharper” post, which may be even offended you for a split second, right before you continued scrolling further down to funny cats and vacation photos which don’t question your beliefs.

Or as an extreme example, you might have even been seriously offended and choose to comment and resorted to ad hominem?

One of the things that has a great potential to irritate is the denial of basic and proven scientific truths. A lot of confusion can come from the fact that a theory in science is something very different from the regular understanding of the word “theory”. We touched upon this already.

As all atheists know, there are a lot of preconceived notions what atheism is and what atheism isn’t, what it means, what it doesn’t mean. There are jokes and stories about how theists (religious people) think that atheists eat babies, worship Satan or something similarly absurd. In reality, these stories are shown only to be a slight exaggeration.

You might have heard this clever wordplay about how the fact that there is no evidence for something does not mean that this does not exist. People proclaiming “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” want to say that just because humans have not found evidence for something, it is not excluded that this does not exist.