Fifty years ago, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech at an antireligious rally, where he declared that the celebrated cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had confided to him that while in space, he had peered into the infinite distance before him, but could find no traces of God. Someone in the audience is alleged to have murmured then that if he had removed his helmet, the proud space traveler would have instantly secured a personal audience with the one whose creation he so carefully surveyed in hopes of finding.
This amusing story illustrates the doleful plight of the itinerant Atheist, who is perennially engaged in trying to disprove the existence of something he is certain does not exist; which begs the question: if God does not exist, why spend so much time and energy trying to disprove his existence?
Take Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist and atheist, for example.
In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, Dawkins was asked if he ever experienced a religious phase in his life. Of course, responded Dawkins -- I was a child, wasn't I?
Presumably Dawkins has moved on to matters that only grown ups consider worthy of serious consideration. To justify this inexplicable contempt for the religiously inclined, Dawkins goes so far as to casually wrench the Apostle Paul's admonition to "give up childish things" from its long established scriptural context. Dawkins would have us believe that the intent of the most prolific writer in the New Testament was to demonstrate that belief in God is either a passing fancy of those still in infancy -- like the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus -- or the imaginary wishes of well meaning adults who lack the basic reasoning skills to appreciate the absurdity of such a mindset; by far among the least disparaging of many an indignant remark Dawkins has typically leveled against his contrarians.
But this latent hostility against those who disagree with his conclusions only distracts from the obvious question which so few seem to be asking, which is why such a presumably brilliant man like Dawkins would uncritically accept the patently self-defeating logic inherent in the atheistic proposition in the first place; a proposition which collapses under the weight of its own logical inconsistencies.
