http://orthodoxnet.com/blog/2012/09/atheisms-fatal-flaws/ A Voice Crying in the Wilderness Sat, 27 Apr 2013 23:10:20 -0700 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 http://orthodoxnet.com/blog/2012/09/atheisms-fatal-flaws/#comment-1588 Billy Bean Sun, 23 Sep 2012 01:45:09 +0000 http://orthodoxnet.com/blog/?p=1099#comment-1588 I am grateful that postmodernity has exposed the hubris of so-called “progressive” modernity. As N.T. Wright has said, postmodernism has eloquently proclaimed the doctrine of the Fall to the modernists, who presumptuously assumed that it was all “onward and upward” for the human race since the Enlightenment. But the postmodernists themselves are in need of the proclamation of the Gospel. Their “hermeneutic of suspicion” has gone to seed, producing a general paranoia and an ironically dogmatic agnosticism that leaves us defenseless against the epistemological acid of solipsism. I see little “progress” from an age in which people were sure there is no God, to an age in which they are no longer sure of anything at all. Absent a radical rethinking of the entire secularization project, I see only the inevitable intellectual collapse of the West.

]]> http://orthodoxnet.com/blog/2012/09/atheisms-fatal-flaws/#comment-1569 Peter Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:55:56 +0000 http://orthodoxnet.com/blog/?p=1099#comment-1569 It think it is not always productive to generalize about materialists, atheists, and atheism. It is probably less helpful to caricature them. While these are not coherent worldviews (IMO), those that generally hold them might see this characterization as a simplistic straw man.
A materialist/atheist might deny randomness, accident, and “unlikely results of a blind process of haphazard collisions”, and would likely point to some robust theories of self-organization in the material order. They will likely use different definitions for randomness and accident than a theist.
Further complicating matters are questions arising from quantum mechanics where causality and probability seem engaged in a bizarre dance of paradoxy.
Monistic materialists and theists both make truth claims regarding the material order. The material Christ made the most scandalous claim of all in claiming that He is the Truth.
The post-modern flavor of atheism is skeptical about, or outright rejects, the claims of both materialists and theists. It sees classic ontology, epistemology, and language as oppressive and abusive. At risk of caricature myself, it has created two or three generations of perpetually aggrieved, Oprah-ized occupiers – women and ‘men without chests’. (cf. C.S. Lewis)
This is what we’re up against.

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