“The universe has no cause, and science involves the search for them” . . . and other Liberal chat-up lines

(...from the “materialist” people who brought you the scientific concept of “potential life”)

Most people are familiar with the scenario of a man attempting to impress a woman to whom he is attracted with tall tales of imagined achievements and talents. The above statement, and our discussion of science and cosmology elsewhere on this site, highlights how anti-theists act like this as a matter of course, and collectively, trying to impress listeners with their “scientific” credentials in spite of the above glaring contradiction in their theory, which they nevertheless assert (but never demonstrate) to be true.

Here is a good example from the Secularist press's “science” department. In its “Bad Science” section (one has to feel safe with a title like that), The Guardian tells us that, when examining the health effects on the mother, of having an abortion, the “correct” control group is women who have not had children (3/11/07). Let us think about that one. What are we examining here? Cause and effect. A cause is a change, so we are looking for a verb or verbal noun as our independent variable. We have that in the word, “abortion”. At this point, we should bear in mind the requirement that a control group should be as identical to the experimental group as possible, barring the variable that we want to manipulate. So, if we want to examine the health effects of aborting one's unborn child, what simpler control group is there than women who do not abort their unborn child? Everything is identical, barring the manipulation of the variable. (It goes without saying that the experiment we are discussing here is not just highly unethical, it is evil.) The Guardian suggests an alternative “correct” control group on the implicit assumption that the conception of a human life is an insignificant scientific event! The trick we would like to highlight here is the false assertion that the doctor under discussion did not give the “correct” control group, and engaged in “fallacious science”. This is a false statement. It is Liberalism masquerading as knowledge.

The following few paragraphs comprise quotations from two early twentieth-century British philosophers on the subject of the Catholic foundations of the scientific revolution. Our intention is not to appeal to them as authority, but to give the reader an idea of the length of time for which we have been labouring under the delusion that science is atheistic:

“[T]he greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement [is] the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive power of research: - that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted on the European mind?

“When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.... By this I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words”¹.

“[I]f today it seems to some readers paradoxical, that is only because the facts have been obscured by a smoke-screen of propagandist literature, beginning with the 'illuminist' movement of the eighteenth century and prolonged by the 'conflict between religion and science' in the nineteenth, whose purpose was to attack Christian theology in the supposed interests of a 'scientific view of the world' which in fact is based upon it and could not for a moment survive its destruction. Take away Christian theology, and the scientist has no longer any motive for doing what inductive thought gives him permission to do. If he goes on doing it at all, that is only because he is blindly following the conventions of the professional society to which he belongs”².

The pressing question for our time is therefore this: can an atheist be a scientist (i.e. can one trust him enough to learn from him)? Our suggested answer is as follows. The atheist scientist should be treated with the same intellectual respect that he (possibly) “deigns” to grant St. Thomas Aquinas: he may be a brilliant thinker, but his metaphysics is incorrect. The following quotation may also help us with the specific problem of how to deal with the intelligent atheist (more tactfully than the wording implies):

“There was an old opinion (still commonly currrent) that the lunatic is a person suffering from a defect in his power of reasoning.... The kind of mentally disordered person generally meant in this statement was the paranoiac, whose main symptom is that he holds some absurd belief.... In other words, he suffers from delusions.... If we actually meet a paranoiac and discuss with him his belief...we do not find a loss of reasoning power. On the contrary, he reasons most persistently about the very subject of his delusions, and the quality of his reasoning is determined by his intellectual development.... His defect is that the opinions he holds are very badly wrong, and that his reasoning is used to support these wrong opinions and not to criticize them”³.

As with their attempt to claim science for themselves, so, as also mentioned elsewhere, anti-theists habitually make the leap from talking about their art, to claiming that art is theirs. Law is no stranger to this process either, as exemplified by this typically ignorant propaganda piece submitted to, and published by, the Daily Telegraph (8/1/08). (Of course, who cares about honesty and accuracy as long as you get the girl?)

As it happens, a blasphemy law is fundamental to our criminal justice system in that it defends the Christian root of the concept of love of neighbour that underpins that system (as well as showing a proper sense of honour, regardless of the fact that defamatory words may never hurt a person in the manner of sticks and stones). Although Secularists and their fellow travellers love to merely assert that their morality is equal to Christianity (at the same time as despising the latter), they rarely attempt to demonstrate how that is the case, and the facts indicate otherwise. Amongst other things, abandoning objective love of neighbour has so far led to the Abortion Act and the Mental Capacity Act and has no doubt encouraged free debate on the subject of legalising infanticide or withholding medical care from old people. Secularists say they would never murder a healthy adult, but that is perhaps to confuse a predictable objective morality with the artificial ceasefire created by a Mexican stand-off.

Returning to The Guardian, this time to the “legal” department, we find another example of deceptive reporting (8/10/07), in which Nicaragua's abortion law is blamed for deaths resulting from ectopic pregnancies; except that, if you manage to read as far as paragraph seventeen, you find the following contradictory admission: “To terminate an ectopic pregnancy is legal, it turns out”, a fact only to be expected among readers aware of the principle of double effect. (The Director of Amnesty International UK nevertheless wrote to express support for this article.)

Et cetera, et cetera (Is this really the best they've got?)

The Daily Secularist Telegraph, in a feature reassuringly entitled, “View from the Lab”, (Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin propagandising...), illustrates evolutionists' habit of arguing from a bad analogy that backfires on them (26/2/08). Today's example is an attempt to analogise belief in creation with a theory that the Earth is supported in space by an infinite chain of turtles; but an infinite chain of material causes is exactly the proposition atheists come up with to “refute” the argument for the existence of God as the First Cause. Incidentally, is it going too far to suggest that any normal person who had a hernia would go for a surgeon who understands that he is a man and not a fish? After all, what patient wants to risk a crazy doctor sticking him in an aquarium while he is under anaesthetic?

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