I’m an old-style creationist. I believe that, around 27 billion years ago, God literally snapped His fingers and created the universe.
My belief in creationism comes from Aristotle. In his "Metaphysics," the Philosopher introduced the concept of an "unmoved mover": everything in motion was set into motion by something else.
If A is in motion, there must be a B that set A in motion, and so on. This series must culminate in an X -- an unmoved mover, a primary cause, the origin of all motion in the universe. Aristotle called this X "God," describing Him as perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and engaged in perfect contemplation: self-contemplation.
The "unmoved mover" has since been associated with the Judeo-Christian God by St. Thomas Aquinas.
This is the God who caused the universe, created life, and gives humans a purpose.
The God who offers atheists something to disbelieve in.
But what do atheists believe in if they claim not to believe in anything?
The logical opposite: the universe is eternal, life was created from non-life, and our existence is pure chance.
At one time, the scientific consensus supported an eternal universe, eliminating the need for a creator.
Atheists everywhere rejoiced, with Nietzsche even claiming that time itself was in 'eternal recurrence'. With no beginning or end to time, God was written out of history.
That was until Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest, proved the scientific consensus wrong. His Big Bang Theory was a massive score for religion.
If the universe had a beginning, there could have been a moment of creation. Additionally, this theory validated St. Augustine’s 4th-century insight that time and matter have a common origin.
The Big Bang doesn't necessarily imply a creator, however, a creator would address a significant issue: without a cause, the Big Bang would violate the laws of conservation of mass and energy.
But the "eternal universe" debacle wasn't the first instance of atheist cosmology being subjected to ridicule.
The idea of a flat Earth is a fundamentally atheistic proposition, originating from the works of Epicurus, a fourth century B.C. atheist who aimed to discredit the pagan worship of the Sun and Moon as physical deities, arguing that these celestial bodies were just atmospheric phenomena.
To align with gravity, Epicurus proposed that atoms would continuously fall into an endless void until encountering resistance.
A spherical Earth would cause matter to slip off its edges.
Conversely, a flat Earth would provide the necessary resistance to retain matter on its surface while the Earth itself continued to fall into the void, thus "explaining" cosmological movements.
Epicurean cosmology held time and space were eternal and everything was material, leaving no room for metaphysics.
In Epicurean ethics, or 'egoistic hedonism,' the purpose of life is experiencing pleasure.
The prospect of an afterlife’s reckoning undermines this purpose, necessitating a materialistic universe devoid of metaphysical morality sources. An entire pseudoscientific framework, designed backward to support his assumption of atheism.
For Epicureans, free will was a byproduct of chance within an infinite, randomly moving universe. This belief in randomness still underpins much of contemporary atheistic thought, despite scientific skepticism.
Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, for instance, relies on "random" mutations arising over time. Atheists wrongfully appropriate that idea to support the belief that we are just clumps of cells, evolved from endless permutations of stardust.
Our thoughts, emotions, and consciousness are reduced to chemical reactions and electrical impulses. Just white noise and enzymes.
Then there's the question of life's origin.
Evolution explains how one species evolves from another but doesn't explain the actual origin of life.
Regressing from one species to its ancestor inevitably leads to the absurd conclusion that life must have originated from inanimate matter. Without a creator, atheists must take a leap of faith and believe that eventually, a rock gave birth to a cell.
Despite their belief system's shortcomings, some atheists claim intellectual superiority, citing studies that suggest religiosity "correlates inversely with intelligence" or that atheists are "brighter than Christians" and "smarter than believers."
While this research may be biased, atheists might indeed have slightly above-average IQs, which is the same as saying that atheism mainly appeals to slightly above-average midwits.
An underwhelming argument for intellectual superiority, based on a few random people ticking boxes in a pathetic IQ test form and then handing it over to a bunch of bored undergraduates to tabulate.
True brilliance, as the esteemed atheist Bertrand Russell once described, is "the noonday brightness of human genius," far beyond IQ scores. It is embodied by Dostoevsky’s "Brothers Karamazov," Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, and Mendel’s principles of genetics.
It’s found in Antonio Vivaldi’s "Four Seasons," the differential calculus of Leibniz and Newton, and Descartes’ analytical geometry. In the encyclopaedic poetry of Dante. In Magellan circumnavigating the globe and Faraday discovering electromagnetism.
All those brilliant minds were not just nominally religious, conforming to the social norms of their times; but true believers who achieved great things not despite their faith, but because of it.
They believed not only in God but also in a higher purpose for their minds and souls.
They did not surrender to hedonism as a means of escaping a brutish, materialistic world where our only purpose is to react to the stimuli of a hostile environment until we eventually vanish, becoming just as inconsequential as the stardust we are made of.
Cauf Skiviers writes about philosophy, economics, politics, and things that lie between the inconceivable and the undesirable. His reports also appear at: https://cauf.substack.com. Read more of Cauf Skiviers' reports here.