Re: atheist babies (was Re: [asa] Behe's Math... was Arrogance)

I'm afraid people here are taking the claim that "all babies are born 100% atheists" as a more precise one than I intended. When I quoted this from an atheist, my point was that there is a sense in which Christians should agree with it - i.e., that all people are born without faith in the true God. In that sense they are a-theistic. Or to put it in the language of scripture, they are "without God in the world" (Eph.2:12). The doctrine of original sin does not say that the unregenerate do not believe in any "God"
or that they have all made a conscious choice to reject belief in the true God.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck
  To: philtill@aol.com
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Sunday, September 02, 2007 3:11 PM
  Subject: Re: atheist babies (was Re: [asa] Behe's Math... was Arrogance)

  Actually, even besides the whole theological question about predestination and such, the "all babies are born 100% atheists" statement seems far too strong.

  First, it confuses the belief of atheism with a "neutral" state. As Alister McGrath discusses in his recent "Dawkins' God," "Doubting," and "The Dawkins Delusion," atheism is a belief that requires some degree of faith. Like the decision to believe in God, the decision not to believe in God is a choice a person makes among competing alternatives based on less than complete or perfect evidence. Clearly, a newborn baby is not capable of exercising such a choice.

  Second, this statement seems to contradict what many contemporary atheists believe about religious experience. Contemporary atheists such as Dawkins tell us that people have in some ways been hard wired by evolution to be predisposed to religious belief. This observation, the notion of religion as a meme, allows them to suggest that the God of religious belief isn't "real," but rather is a false belief that at one time enhanced survival value but that does not correspond to reality. They of course suggest that this belief can and should be elided now that they have supposedly explained its provenance. But then, if this account of religion is even partly correct, it cannot follow that "all babies are born 100% atheists." It would be more accurate, under the hard-wired / meme view, to suggest that "all babies are born with varying degress of predisposition towards receptivity to religion memes."

  (Actually, here the contemporary discussion of religious experience tends to become incoherent, IMHO. On the one hand, religion is like a malicious virus, that takes advantage of its host without benefitting the host; on the other, it is rooted in social behaviour that conferred survival advantages and became hard-wired in the hominid biochemistry; on yet another hand (yes, three hands,) it is a "meme," a mysterious, unobservable, immaterial entity that was originally incorporated into a human memeplex -- another mysterious, unobservable, immaterial entity -- because of some survival value. It seems to me that this is more a set of ad-hoc explanations than a carefully thought out theory; and in any event, even this ad-hoc set of explanations generally contradicts the theory that babies are born atheists.)
   
  On 9/2/07, philtill@aol.com <philtill@aol.com> wrote:

"all babies are born 100% atheists."Maybe not depending on what you believe about their spirits rather than their minds (take John the Baptist in his mother's womb, for example). But certainly all babies are born 100%...

    1. illiterate
    2. ignorant
    3. helpless
    4. non-scientific
    5. irrational
    6. undiscerning
    7. demanding
    8. selfish

    So are these, like atheism, supposed to be positive qualities since we see them in babies?

    Phil

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Received on Sun Sep 2 15:57:05 2007