Atheism's Last Stand: Anti-Rationalism and Asymmetrical Skepticism

Recently the minor Atheists roaming the internet have taken to increasing the power to their shields by morphing several new definitions of Atheism. This has been necessary due to the pressure placed upon them to provide evidence and logic to support their worldview and belief system. So the Atheist response has been increasingly in the direction of denying that they have anything which requires evidence and logic, and therefore they have no need to provide it. This is accomplished via the Atheist sliding and slippery definition tactic.

Atheism has always been knowledge-negative in the sense that it does not produce any knowledge; it merely denies that there can be any knowledge outside of a certain category or type which is favored by the Atheist and Philosophical Materialist. So it is knowledge-eliminativist or knowledge-negative.

Being knowledge-negative is the primary characteristic of the practice of Skepticism as well, and Atheism is a subset of Skepticism. Skepticism aspires to sitting alongside the stream of knowledge and taking pot shots at knowledge bits and pieces which come along the stream, knowledge quanta which the Skeptic doesn’t care for. But the Skeptic is careful not to actually engage the knowledge stream because that would involve intellectual activities for which he is ill prepared. So Skepticism is merely the assertion that “you cannot know that”, with the reason being, “with any certainty”. Taken to the Skeptical limit, nothing can be known with any certainty (we cannot prove with certainty that we are not all merely simulations in a huge computer program somewhere, and everything in our “reality” is a delusion, so that in fact, nothing exists, even ourselves). Thus, under escalating Skepticism any and all knowledge is deniable, depending upon the value assigned to “certainty”. The Skeptic just sits and chooses which knowledge he likes and which he wants to destroy. This is Asymmetrical Skepticism.

Nietzsche (the last and only honest Atheist) drove this point home: there are no self-evident, axiomatic truths because they cannot be proved. Ever the intellectual avant garde, he drove the point to its obvious necessary conclusion: rational discourse cannot exist. So he developed his philosophy of Anti-Rationalism, which turned out to be indiscernible from insanity.

The new Atheist drive toward denialism is merely an internally dishonest version of Nietzsche’s more honest admission. The attempt to rescue themselves from any burden to explain their beliefs has morphed from “there is no god”, to “we have no god theory”, to “we have no god beliefs”, to “we have no beliefs in god/s”, to “we have no beliefs”, depending of course on the particular Atheist involved, and whatever stage of the argument he needs to protect himself from.

The intent appears to be to become absolutely knowledge-neutral, having no intellectual position betrayed or exposed to the necessity of defending it using actual evidence or logic. Since achieving knowledge-neutrality is rather like balancing a bowling ball on the point of a needle, it fails rather badly under disciplined logical applications of entropy. And this is where the massive Atheist intellectual dishonesty results in massive absurdity.

Under the new definitions of Atheism, we are expected to accept, with no complaints involving their logical errors, that Atheists (a) have no beliefs which need justification, (b) yet are morally, logically, and intellectually superior, and (c) have a worldview which is based on evidence and logic.

This viewpoint is achieved through the tactic of Asymmetrical Skepticism, which allows the Atheist to refuse all undesired knowledge, regardless of its logic or even its material evidence, using the “certainty” requirement. For his own position however, the Skepticism evaporates and becomes an obtuse soup of credulous acceptance of ideas which are self-evidently absurd and totally without evidence or logic in their support. This is not a problem for the Atheist. The self-evident axioms are different for Atheists, who have developed their own set of "truths" in the vacuum left by the death of absolute First Principles. They presuppose that their innate and tautological personal correctness makes their every thought logical with no need for the standards of disciplined logic. The design of morality locally and under their own moral authority allows them to be completely moral at all times and in all situations, no matter what they do. They can and will decide what sort of evidence each party in a discussion is required to present (HINT: it’s not themselves). They can and will decide where “reality” stops, and it is not a rational conclusion, it is an ideological, Philosophical Materialist decision which requires no evidence to back it up.

And they are never, ever, skeptical of their own mental processes or conclusions.

Having adopted the Nietzschean Asymmetrical Skepticism, these Atheists have inadvertently (or maybe not) engaged reality from the Anti-Rational standpoint. And because Anti-Rationalism, when applied to logical assertions, is indiscernible from insanity, discussions with the anti-rational becomes rife with logical failures, failures which the anti-rational don’t care one whit about, because they don't apply under Anti-Rationalism. Logic and Anti-rationalism are like matter and anti-matter in that they cannot coexist non-destructively.

This is where honesty comes into play. Honesty has to be measured against a standard. The standard for honesty is consistency in a person’s behavior as measured against the person’s stated worldview standards. It presumes that a person has a set of First Principles which are consistent with reality, meaning that they are not internally contradictory, or otherwise illogical or irrational.

With Anti-Rationalists, there is no admitted position, certainly no consistent position, against which to measure the Anti-Rationalist’s behavior – except to observe, yes, that behavior is not rational, so it fits the Anti-Rationalist worldview.

But under traditional Rationalist understandings of honesty, irrational behavior in the pursuit of worldviews which are merely convenient is not honest; it is contrived out of logical fallacies which the protagonist cannot and will not defend. Persistent irrationality equates to intellectual dishonesty, when viewed under Rationalism.

Dishonesty also is apparent when there is a disparate application of rules, insisting on impossible rules for the opposition while allowing no rules for oneself. Requiring material proof for the existence of a non-material entity (the infamous Atheist Category Error) on the one hand, while accepting no requirements for providing evidence or logic for the Atheist position (by using the Orwellian tactic of changing the definition of the position as required to attempt to avoid responsibility) are blatant intellectual dishonesties and rational failures, at least when viewed under Rationalist principles. Under Anti-Rationalism, they must seem just fine.

Under Nietzsche’s Asymmetrical Skepticism, it was deemed rational to eliminate the foundations of rational thought and thus become an Anti-Rationalist. The obvious internal contradiction was acceptable, because there no longer existed any Principle of Non-Contradiction; that principle was lost to Asymmetrical Skepticism. Coherence was/is no longer a requirement for proper thinking, and is used only when convenient. Otherwise, Anti-Coherence prevails in Anti-Rationalism. In fact Anti-Coherence is a proper tactic in the ascent of those engaged in the Will To Power; Nietzsche’s disciple, Saul Alinsky, attested to that, half a century after Nietzsche’s death, a death only after a final decade of insanity and irrationality. Again, it turns out that Anti-Rationality when taken seriously is indiscernible from insanity.

And that is the intellectual state of the casual internet Atheist. He is caught declaring that his Anti-Rational assertions are, in fact, rational, and further he has no burden to show any logic or evidence in their support, nor need he admit to the internal contradiction as a failure. If the Anti-Rational Atheist actually believes that, then he behaving according to his worldview, and is irrational by definition. If he doesn’t believe that, then he is maximally dishonest and is using it as an excuse, an intellectual dodge. Either way, his arguments are failures when judged under Rationalist principles of disciplined logical analysis. Further, the Atheist’s objection – just more denialism, actually - to that failure is inconsequential, being only an artifact of his Anti-Rational affliction. In fact, the Atheist’s objection is absurd, a concept that is only meaningful under Rationalism.

The Atheist claim to be based on logic and evidence is false, and demonstrably so. Under the new Anti-Rationalist push to deny the need to even argue their position, they tacitly admit to the falsity of that position. They have, in essence, defaulted the high ground of rationality, logic and evidence to the Rationalists, who are not Atheists.