Saturday, December 18, 2010

Inexplicable! And That's No Lie!

Every fact of human experience is proof of theism and, therefore, a disproof of atheism and, thereby, also of agnosticism. This is the transcendental argument for the existence of God -- God exists because of the impossibility of the contrary.

The other day I was pondering the slogan that some people make about our former President, "Bush lied, people died."

But what is this human act called "lying"?

First, lying requires intentionality. A lie is to knowingly utter a statement contrary to the truth in order to deceive. In this regard, the slogan above is a claim that Bush intentionally said there were WMD in Iraq, while he knew there were none.   Thus, the slogan is an extraordinary claim since most of the world's leaders and intelligence agencies believed Iraq possessed WMD. Regardless of why the nearly worldwide agreement on intelligence data was faulty, without that moral dimension, speaking or believing a falsehood is not a lie -- it is merely an error.  Otherwise, students answering examinations incorrectly are the biggest group of liars in all of creation.

Moreover, lying is a sin!  Sin is the breaking of God's commands.  But for atheists, lying could not be considered a sin, since to them, there is no God. In that case lying becomes "good" or "bad" according to situational relativism.  Of course "good" or "bad" is not absolute to the atheist -- "good" or "bad" means "good" or "bad" in terms of consequences for oneself or the conventions of one's social group.

For many of the godless, lying is a means to an end.  But this brings us to the crux of the problem for atheists.

The laws of physics have the property that they have no memory of the past and no goal for the future.  They are "ignorant" of the past and "blind" to the future (to use the usual anthropomorphizing of an insensate material universe) . The atheist worldview of materialism embodied in the laws of physics states that the future depends only upon the state of reality now.  This implies two things:
  1.   There is absolutely no teleology in physical systems -- there is no goal-orientated direction.  
  2.   The future is compelled by laws of physics channeled via irrational quantum chance.
This means that if man is purely a material system, as atheism claims, there can be no "means to an end."  And to the atheist, since man is quantum mechanically predetermined -- and his acts ultimately produced by irrational randomness -- even describing lying as a "means to an end" is inexplicable. 

It is further inexplicable that man as an absolute physically determined system can utter a false description of reality in order to deceive and attempt to alter, influence or otherwise elicit a desired response from other humans to achieve a self-centered goal.   Man's mental states, being no more than mere results of "random" quantum mechanical fluctuations, can then have no causal efficacy -- they cannot cause electrons to swerve from their paths. Mental states are to the physical brain as a person's shadow is to the body.  As a result "mental" states cannot alter physical brain states, just as the body's shadow cannot produce body motions.

"Lying" as an immoral act rests upon the presuppositions of mental causation, logical laws, human free agency, intentionality, and moral laws, none of which would exist in a purely physical reality.

The very act of lying is impossible and inexplicable in a Godless reality. So then, the human act of lying is proof of God. On the other hand, the atheist believes in things -- such as lying -- that his fundamental presuppositions deny.  Such are the contradictions of atheism and its self-refuting pretensions.