Criticism of atheism | Wikipedia audio article
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Date: 2018-11-29

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Criticism of atheism

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"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
- Socrates



SUMMARY
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Criticism of atheism is criticism of the concepts, validity, or impact of atheism, including associated political and social implications. Criticisms include positions based on the history of science, findings in the natural sciences, theistic apologetic arguments, arguments pertaining to ethics and morality, the effects of atheism on the individual, or the assumptions that underpin atheism.
Various contemporary agnostics like Carl Sagan and theists such as Dinesh D'Souza have criticised atheism for being an unscientific position. Analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, argues that a failure of theistic arguments might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism; and points to the observation of an apparently "fine-tuned Universe" as more likely to be explained by theism than atheism. Oxford Professor of Mathematics John Lennox holds that atheism is an inferior world view to that of theism and attributes to C.S. Lewis the best formulation of merton's thesis that science sits more comfortably with theistic notions on the basis that Men became scientific in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th century "[b]ecause they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.' In other words, it was belief in God that was the motor that drove modern science". American geneticist Francis Collins also cites Lewis as persuasive in convincing him that theism is the more rational world view than atheism.
Other criticisms focus on perceived effects on morality and social cohesion. The Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, a deist, saw godlessness as weakening "the sacred bonds of society", writing: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him". The father of classical liberalism, John Locke, believed that the denial of God's existence would undermine the social order and lead to chaos. Edmund Burke, an 18th-century Irish philosopher and statesman praised by both his conservative and liberal peers for his "comprehensive intellect", saw religion as the basis of civil society and wrote that "man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long". Pope Pius XI wrote that Communist atheism was aimed at "upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of Christian civilization". In the 1990s, Pope John Paul II criticised a spreading "practical atheism" as clouding the "religious and moral sense of the human heart" and leading to societies which struggle to maintain harmony.The advocacy of atheism by some of the more violent exponents of the French Revolution, the subsequent militancy of Marxist–Leninist atheism and prominence of atheism in totalitarian states formed in the 20th century is often cited in critical assessments of the implications of atheism. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke railed against "atheistical fanaticism". The 1937 papal encyclical Divini Redemptoris denounced the atheism of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, which was later influential in the establishment of  state atheism across Eastern Europe and elsewhere, including Mao Zedong's China, Kim's North Korea and Pol Pot's Cambodia. Critics of atheism often associate the actions of 20th-century state atheism with broader atheism in their critiques. Various poets, novelists and lay theologians, among them G. K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, have also criticized atheism. For example, Chesterton holds that "[h]e who does not believe in God will believe in anything".