Atheistic Reductionism

Don’t look now —you might see the balloon of atheism imploding on its own sharp point of random chance.

Perhaps you’ve chosen to read this essay after scanning other articles on this website. Or, if you’re in a hotel, maybe you’ve decided what to order for breakfast, or what clothes you’ll wear today. You haven’t. You may feel like you’ve made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your “will” had no part in that decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year’s resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you’ll have no choice about whether you keep them. The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they’re finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion. -USA Today

What seems to have lost in the mad dash for atheism is that atheism is a reductionist system.

What does this mean? In atheism, all things must, eventually, be reduced to a single thing, the one unifying theory of the universe. Once you make God “the god of the gaps,” then everything supernatural goes into the gaps with God, to be squeezed into nothing.

There is no god in atheism to even take your freedom —instead, there is chance.

You don’t really enjoy eating, it’s just chance. You don’t fear death, it’s just chance. You don’t really believe in God, it’s just chance. You don’t really believe in science, it’s just chance.

Chance is the most capricious god you can imagine. There is no sacrifice, obedience, faith, or lifestyle that will satisfy the anger or elicit the love of random chance. Atheism’s god is more unpredictable than Allah, without the soul of Yahweh, and without the goal of Bhudda. Chance just is.

Is this really what you want to believe?