A Tongue-in-Cheek Rendering of the Atheist.

ALTERNATIVE TITLE:  The Way The World Really Works

OR:

ALTERNATIVE TITLE:  What We Can Know For Sure

OR:

ALTERNATIVE TITLE:  It Was Bound to Happen, Sooner or Later

OR

ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Why Christians Should Be Treated For Mental Illness

(For this entry, I will present one formulation of the atheistic worldview, myself taking on the aspect and bearing of an atheist.  I’ve known many atheists, and like them quite well as people.  I hope no one is offended by my gentle lampooning.)

In the beginning….no….actually…skip that.

To start with….no….that won’t work either.

There was an explosion after the point of expansion.  Don’t ask me where this explosion happened.  Don’t ask me where the materials that were detonated come from.  No one can know that, and anyone who asks the question can only be pointing to the existence of god/s which we have no proof for.

There was logic in the void though, and natural law.  We know that, because without there being natural law and logic, there would have been no explosion, and subsequently, no universe.  Just don’t ask me where those things came from.

After the explosion, for billions of years, the universe played cosmic lottery, and then, the biggest long-shot ever came up, and life began on earth.  This life was probably the result of a series of enormous accidents.  The first of these was the Milky Way’s position in the universe.  The next was the forming of our solar system, with a sun of just the exact type we now see in our sky.  The next was the earth being just far enough away from the sun to keep the core of the earth warm, but far enough away so that an atmosphere could form without burning the earth to charcoal, or incinerating itself.  The next was that there were proteins formed on the earth, long chains of  chemicals strung together.  Somehow, there was a lightning storm one day, and, as it eventually would, the lightning struck one of these proteins, they fused, and life was created from chemicals.   All of these things were BOUND to happen sooner or later…the universe was billions of years old, and given that number of chances, it would’ve happened eventually, and it finally did.  There are thousands of these accidents that all had to happen at the same time, and the wonder of the universe is the math of near infinite probablility-even the universe can get it right if you give it lots of space, some matter (still don’t know where it came from), natural law (again, don’t ask where it came from, it’s always been), and billions of years with the computer rolling.  Vegas wouldn’t give you odds on that sort of thing.

But our luck was even greater than that.  Not only did these first single celled organisms spawn from a freak accident of "nature," but they also then spontaneously mutated (again, it was inevitable that it happen sooner or later) and created multicellular organisms, with these cells learning to do separate jobs to collaborate for the good of the system.  These communities also continued to evolve, and after millions of years, one of these beings suddenly became cognizant of itself.  This being was a human.  It was the process of long years of coming from the animals.  It was bound to happen sooner or later that some being was able to see it all.  When the humans came on the scene, after a while, they started to recognize the natural laws, and they recognized how they were able to have any coherent thoughts at all.  These humans started getting into communities, and agreed, even though they were just one step removed from other primates, that they ought to live in community.  Nature dictated that people should act a certain way, and that system of nature dictating how we should act is how we have things like the prohibition against murder and incest in most of our societies.  It was bound to happen.  The natural way of things became clear to them, and they started to study it.  They realized that logic and natural law had always been, and that they were what was guiding the system all along.  Information conveyed by an impersonal universe, picked up on a fluke chance by a being that was the product of hundreds of accidents.

But then the humans had a problem.  They couldn’t decide how they were supposed to act.  If they were truly animals, then behaving like animals is only natural.  But they couldn’t behave like animals and still be social in large communities.  So they recognized that for everyone’s common good, there were conventions, like truth, law and morality, which had to be created.  There had to be a system to distinguish what was good and what was bad.  So people made one up.  Everyone agreed it was for the best.  They agreed on the decisions of the group, and they all went about their way, the standards established.

The people decided they were good.  They were (probably) the only animal able to reason, and so they went about their way,  being industrious and creative, and they too, evolved, both socially and physically.  After a while, they started inventing things to make their life easier.  They took advantage of all of the accidents, and their knowledge of "nature" and they became masters of their domain.  They built huge cities, and freed themselves of the work of animals.  The studied "science," the natural order of things, the rules and principles that keep the universe together.  As they learned, they pass down a legacy.

And that legacy comes to us.  We receive knowledge of the universe and the world and nature and logic from the hands of human beings, the first beings in our own tiny little corner of an accidental universe to recognize that it existed.  But somehow, this life is meaningful, because to claim it was meaningless is something we’re not prepared to do.  Somehow, we’re not "just" animals.  We have a sense of duty, and oughtness to do certain things and believe certain things.  It must be part of what the people all those years ago agreed on.  We are the masters of our own domain.  We are gods.  And if we have enough time, materials and manpower, we can get an answer to any question we ask.  Until that time, those questions about the accidents will have to wait.  But we’ll get there.  For now, we can only believe what we’ve proved and what we think we’ve proved.  We reserve the right to change our minds when and if we discover we made a mistake.  You’ll be hearing from us.  Just go on believing in your "created," "meaningful" universe, even though you don’t have any the belief it couldn’t have all been an accident.  Delude yourselves with the idea that human beings have no underlying, intrinsic meeting.  We’ll go on proving that we’re all animals, and set the example ourselves.

Power to the scientists, the gatekeepers of our society, and the calculators of the longshot odds!