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Censorship Is Atheism’s Immune System

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The irony of intolerant atheists is remarkable. They proudly declare their open-mindedness, and in the same breath they work feverishly to extinguish by force any mention of God, any support to theism, in civic life. Are you puzzled by this? Don’t be. Censorship is in atheism’s marrow.

When we lack recourse to a creator, rights become mere assertions of power. Those who have power do what they want to do, and call it a “right.” Without transcendence there are no rights, because without transcendence there can be no objective moral truths — therefore no rights — at all.

Moreover, atheism cannot withstand reasoned examination. The assertion that everything came from nothing, without reason and without moral law, isn’t defensible in rational discourse, so silent assent is necessary to hold sway over culture. 

Despite claims to “rationalism,” atheism is at odds with any coherent use of reason. Some atheists are able to reason quite rigorously about some things, but the refusal to accept theism is a gaping intellectual lacuna. Reasoning itself depends on objective truth, a concept denied by atheist dogma. Reasoned discourse is anathema to atheism because a world without purpose is a world without reason.

One cannot honestly hold to atheism and claim, in that respect, to be acting with even rudimentary intelligence. Atheism, indeed, is self-refuting on many levels. One obvious way is that it presupposes the invalidity of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). PSR is an ancient metaphysical inference, articulated in modern times most assertively by Leibnitz, that postulates that every state of affairs in nature has a reason outside of itself sufficient to account for it. Things happen for reasons, without exception. Of course, we don’t know all the reasons, and will probably never know them all, but there are reasons for everything. 

Atheists deny the PSR in a fundamental way: they assert that the universe is self-existent, and has no reason outside of itself for its existence. Atheists believe that the universe “just is.” Hume summed it up by suggesting that the universe, not God, was the necessary existent.

The problem with denial of PSR, aside from all sorts of subtle but decisive metaphysical conundrums it invokes, is that it makes science impossible, if taken seriously. If the entire universe exists for no reason outside of itself, then obviously any part of it can exist for no reason. How did that species get here? Maybe it just “poofed” into existence, rather than evolved. Heck, the whole universe just poofed into existence, why not a species? The same inference can be applied to anything in nature — “it happened for no reason” has to be added to the traditional scientific hypotheses. Without PSR, science becomes impossible. Even ordinary life becomes impossible. If we truly believed that things could happen for no reason whatsoever, we couldn’t function.

And the retort “but we see real causes happening all the time, so we can draw inferences…” is nonsense. We rarely actually understand the reasons for things in our lives or in science with any detail, and the rational basis for inference is quite shaky anyway (Hume again).

The implicit atheist denial of PSR would be classified as a mental illness if it were not so culturally widespread. Atheism as a philosophical proposition is utterly untenable, and belief in atheism amounts to self-delusion or culpable ignorance.

There are, accordingly, to be no questions that might lead to a source for existence or to objective moral truth. All of atheism’s power depends on making it immune to questions. Censorship is thus a core manifestation of atheism.

Michael Egnor

Senior Fellow, Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence
Michael R. Egnor, MD, is a Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook, has served as the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery, and award-winning brain surgeon. He was named one of New York’s best doctors by the New York Magazine in 2005. He received his medical education at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed his residency at Jackson Memorial Hospital. His research on hydrocephalus has been published in journals including Journal of Neurosurgery, Pediatrics, and Cerebrospinal Fluid Research. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Hydrocephalus Association in the United States and has lectured extensively throughout the United States and Europe.

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