5 Questions Every Intelligent Atheist Must Answer

I heard about a website asking the important question "Why Won't God Heal Amputees?" and ignored it. It seemed like just another Christian-bashing site. But recently my curiosity got the better of me and I watched the Youtube video asking the ten questions every intelligent Christian must supposedly be able to answer. The questions seem pretty legitimate. They were, however, not being asked, but rather told to Christians, along with the message that "You are an idiot if you don't answer these the way we do." Over and over again the narrator says things like "If you use your brain..." or "If you apply the skills you learned in your college degree..." you will agree with him, and of course, if you don't, you're unintelligent, delusional, etc. After being insulted over and over again, I decided, for the sake of my blood pressure, that instead of attempting to answer a lot of loaded questions, I would just ask some of my own, because I'm tired of obnoxiously self-assured post-Enlightenment nonsense being shoved down the throats of sincere believers.

So to any educated atheists out there (because so many of you read my blog...), here are a few questions which, if we go by the above rhetorical framework, you must answer in order to retain your status as an intelligent human being:

1) How does scientific proof comment on historical exceptions?
If you cannot answer this question, then you cannot claim scientific laws to have any bearing whatsoever on anything with the title "miracle," "act of God," or even "strange coincidence," since each is simply a claim to be something that, given the ordinary working of the world, is out of those ordinary workings. Thus, if a man claims to have flown, and you say, "men don't fly," you haven't really done anything to disprove his claim to fly - just to point out the obvious reason why his claim is remarkable.

2) How do you judge the significance of an event, an object, or really anything at all?
If you cannot answer this question, then it's hard to interrogate any other points of view, isn't it? Do frequency, size, relevance to my arbitrary goals, relevance to my continued survival, or really to any relation to anything create a framework in which we can judge the significance of a thing with any weight at all? If so, how does it do that? And if not, why do we care? Why is there such an idea as "significance" at all?

3) Can critical thinking tell us anything about morality?
If you use your college degree and attempt to show how there is any normative reasoning, you will eventually make your way to an unfounded assumption of some sort. What a strange problem! If you attempt to tell me any moral thing (such as "it is horrendous for a loving God to let children starve," or "there is such a thing as a guilty or innocent person," or "God kills people who don't deserve it"), and then try to back it up, you will often find yourself sounding like a Christian pop-theology book, talking about things you "just feel inside." Morality is fiction when founded on deduction. Always. Is it a useful fiction? Maybe - but it's not morality. It's just your opinion, and you certainly can't condemn anyone by it - not Christians, Hitler, or Joseph Kony.

4) Is everything that is true within the grasp of the habit-based processes of your mind?
If so, how do you know? If not, how do you know whether those potential things are relevant to you?

5) How on earth do you know that God doesn't heal amputees, appear to people, answer prayers, care about the poor, and use symbol to communicate?
You don't. "I've never seen it happen" is an argument from absence. Metaphysical incuriosity is the foundation of most atheists' lack of faith (or search), and their tools for investigation completely miss the point - a point that is not mushy and esoteric, but concrete and not often understood - that pragmatic materialism is metaphysics, and requires defense.

If we answer all the aforementioned questions with the assumption that modern scientific thought is adequate for understanding the most basic questions of life, we arrive at an irrational humanism at best or a total agonistic breakdown of human interaction at worst. If we answer them, however, with the clear alternative that scientific doesn't have anything to say about these questions, then we have to look elsewhere. So does God heal amputees now? Did He ever claim to or not to? Do the Christian tradition's ideas on suffering, on God, and on miracles support it? I would suggest that no only does God heal amputees, but He raises the dead, and that if you take the time to seek out whatever God there actually is, you will come to the conclusion that to subject Him to this sort of interrogation is a violation of who He is - and that the version of God being knocked down over and over again by arrogant, sophomoric web junkies has very little in common with the one True God preached by Christians - or even the ineffable one we encounter through our reason.

I'm strongly tempted to assert that a lack (or at least misallocation) or their intelligence leads them to make bold pronouncements on the state of the world with no introspection, philosophical backing, or indeed investigation into the accuracy of the theology they set up as Christian belief. The reason I enjoy Slavoj Zizek is that he is an atheist who has taken the time to think about Christian theology long enough to see how it works and what it's for. He has meaningful dialogue with the Christian (and Jewish, and Muslim, and agnostic) geniuses of our day about public morality, justice, and the human psyche.

The tell-tale sign of fundamentalism is the claim that one's opponents are irrational. It is the result of an inability to question one's own viewpoint.