Christ is the Way of True Common Sense: A Critique of Atheism is the Way of Common Sense by Madalyn O’Hair (This is the second part dealing with contradictions and fatal flaw)

Part II: Contradictions
Second I will point out the flaws of her assumptions that life can exist without God and how this is ultimately a philosophy of despair.

Responding to O’Hair is quite challenging since her basic premise is a belief she fully accepts as truth yet offers no substantial support or defense. She takes by faith and believes in her heart that there is no God, though she has a few arguments, they either lack depth or merely trite observations made of other religions.

Another presupposition that she asserts is that man is naturally good. She believes faith in man’s natural abilities is the key or hope for progress to be made both in society and in man’s evolution. Two points for concern is that in believing the natural goodness of humanity is that she does not address evil and she does not adequately define what is good. O’Hair asserts that there exists something that is good or right or reasonable or just but she does not define these terms and assume everyone believes the same good, evil, justice, and reason. Man is left to himself to decide what is reasonable or just based either on personal experience or the consensus of a few people.
Even in this article, O’Hair appeals to the ethics of Immanuel Kant in his categorical imperative. Each person is left up to himself to create universal laws in which he alone will abide. Yet in the same breath O’Hair says that these ideals are so high that she breaks it all the time. O’Hair tries to promote relativism yet asserts there is a higher standard.

Each assertion O’Hair makes is contradicted by another assertion. I will lay out some of them in the following paragraphs:

1. O’Hair believes man is an animal but is also able to make choices based on ethics, justice, and fairness. If one observes nature, one sees survival of the fittest and that means the stronger animals overpowering the weaker ones. One observes the instinctual nature of animals to kill or be killed. Yet man is able to reason, he is able to care for creation and protect its resources. If man truly is an animal, he should be judged like all the other animals, but if man is different, if he is a little bit higher than the animals, as a caretaker and a steward, then man must be judged for who he actually is. She cannot have it both ways.

2. O’Hair contradicts herself by rejecting one ethic for another on the basis of her belief that there is no God. She rejects the idea of God and everything associated with this God, and yet fully accepts Kant’s conclusion without much of a question or a doubt. O’Hair rejects the ethic of the “religionists” because it does not fit her model because they look forward to heaven instead of the here and now, yet she is unwilling to look at what Christians have done throughout history and what Atheists have done throughout history. She is rather arbitrary in what she believes is ethical and one’s motivations for ethics. This relativism contradicts her earlier statement that she desires to know truth and be guided by what is true. She desires truth, but is unwilling to look at all her own empirical data. She cannot have it both ways.

3. O’Hair is quick to say she desires to know the truth and for truth to be her guide and motivator in doing things. But O’Hair quickly dismisses all religions as false, “pie in the sky,” ignorant, an assault on common sense, nonsensical, and useless. She is quick to dismiss God by taking a few strawman examples but is unwilling to examine the whole of any one religion. She not only dismisses them, but groups all religions together and dismisses the religion she has created, in essence a strawman. She wants to be taken seriously, but when confronted with the seriousness of other thoughts she dismisses them rather flippantly. She cannot have it both ways.

It is clear from the small sample from her writing that O’Hair, although very sincere in her belief, clings to the idea that what she believes should be the universal ideal. This relativistic view of reality is both incomplete and dangerous. It is incomplete because as she says, life should be one to seek knowledge and keep on a quest. She doesn’t know what the ultimate reality is, but one’s life should be to seek it. It is dangerous because she “admits” she doesn’t have all knowledge, yet she makes claims as if she did, placing herself (or man) in the position of some godlike entity.

As stated earlier this philosophy is a philosophy of despair. O’Hair’s philosophy is to set one’s ideals so high that one cannot attain it. Because of the relative nature of this philosophy, every man becomes his own God and acts both as lawgiver and judge. No matter how good the intentions, it has no basis for any “ultimate reality” that can support or identify what is good or bad. There is no understanding of ethics except that each person decides for himself some universal ideal. It is also a belief in a materialistic world that leaves man to live for a period of time, to build something and then to die.

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