The excerpts of Hans Kung's book which I posted last week began explicitly addressing its arguments to atheists.
Does God exist? Here we want to address expressly even the unbeliever. For even someone who does not think that God exists could at least agree with the hypothesis of which the inner meaning has become clear in the previous section and which nevertheless by no means settles the question of the existence or nonexistence of God. The hypothesis runs: If God exists, then a fundamental solution of the riddle of persistently uncertain reality is indicated, in the sense that a fundamental answer - obviously needing to be developed and interpreted - will have been found to the question of the source of reality.
Far from the claims of popular atheist blather, the materialistic, scientistic foundation of almost all modern atheism, undermines confidence in the reality of reality, "reality" being meaningless in human discourse if exactly the human experience of reality is not taken as its only definition. The exigencies of materialism require atheists in science and philosophy to undermine the status of our perception of reality and even the very conscious experience which is the only thing with which we can know that reality through. All of our talk and discourse and consideration of reality is dependent on the very entity, our conscious experience, which cannot be made compatible with materialism and retain its access to anything which has the transcendent quality of truth or accuracy, of it being a reflection of any external reality. That was what a good part of the hundreds of pages that preceded the arguments I excerpted reviewed and discussed.
Of course, as a political blogger, more so as an egalitarian democrat, what concerns me about that most is the undermining of the moral foundations of egalitarianism and democracy with the goal of producing the common good of all and the sustenance of life. Equality and democracy are founded in moral holdings that are non-negotiable and which must be taken as absolutely real and of binding consequence. I am convinced that science has been far from a uniform benefit in that regard and materialism is absolutely fatal to it.*
I am convinced that atheism will always, in the end, corrode and wash away those moral foundations and I am also convinced that most of atheism is not an intellectually motivated position, I think the passage from Kung in which he said that any atheist who would even listen to his arguments had to be "quite serious and not an intellectual pose, snobbish caprice or thoughtless superficiality." I added to that that my experience of discussion with many atheists online, everything from some of the more eminent of popular atheists, Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne, John Wilkins, to the dregs of the blog and, I'll admit, Youtube commenting atheists, leads me to believe that even the best of them hold their position on less than serious grounds. I gave a list of those atheists of the past I considered to be serious, though I think much of their writing, read again after decades of taking its quality for granted, is not infrequently slippery and deceptive. I would say that's especially true of Bertrand Russell. Oddly, I think the one I am left with the most respect for, and it is only because he gave full expression to the logically depraved results of his atheism is Nietzsche who I find totally loathsome in so many ways.**
Actually, most of the serious atheists I encounter are the ones who do not really care about atheism and seem to hold theirs quite loosely, though they generally aren't the ones willing to go into the ultimate consequences of holding their ideology. Several of my fellow egalitarian democrats who are also atheists who I know very well aren't interested in holding up their belief in equality and democracy against the ultimate consequences of materialism, scientism and atheism, which I can kind of respect even if I don't trust it as a trustworthy consequence of widespread atheism. I'm not sure that there really are atheists who are "quite serious," in the way that Hans Kung addressed himself to, certainly not in great number. I would contrast that to serious religious believers and even some who aren't so serious who are quite willing to deal with ultimate consequences and implications of what they believe, I think that is a consequence of believing that their actions and beliefs have actual and inescapable consequence in a way that atheism generally rejects. I think the very nature of belief in God that is common to the monotheistic religions lends itself to that kind of serious consideration in a way that atheism doesn't naturally hold. But first there is the choice to believe that reality is real and consequential. I think atheists, even the ones like the Churchlands and Dennetts are intellectual hypocrites whose descriptions of what their atheism requires them to say about our minds and consciousness are shown to be an empty pose by how they conduct their academic lives. The very expression with which their claims for atheism is made contradicts their stated conclusions. I can not pretend to have any respect for such an intellectual pose, it is totally corrupt, totally decadent, totally corrupting for an academic and general culture that tolerates it.
* My long study of natural selection and its inevitable product, eugenics, has led me to be extremely skeptical of the intellectual status of much of science and entirely skeptical of its compatiblity with egalitarian democracy, a stand which, I will point out, Charles Darwin endorsed when it was asserted by Ernst Haeckel. I am also extremely skeptical of the motives of those who invented and developed the ideas that comprise Darwinism.
** I've recently heard some of Nietzsche's music for the first time, which is technically competent but not very good.
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