Atheism Is Religion For Flat-Earthers

by Cauf Skiviers, Cultural Inappropriation, ©2024

(Apr. 14, 2024) — Note: article first published at Newsmax, exceptionally adapted and expanded below.

I’m a Creationist. Like, an old-style Creationist. None of that new-age ‘Intelligent Design’ for me. I truly believe that, at some point, likely around 27 billion years ago, God literally clicked His fingers and created the universe. To me, the Big Bang was God clicking His fingers.

My fundamental belief in Creationism isn’t based on Genesis, though, but on Aristotle, the father of Western monotheism. In his 322 BC Metaphysics, the Philosopher proposed the concept of an ‘unmoved mover’: everything in motion was set in motion by something else; if A is in motion, there must be a B that set A in motion, and so forth. This series must halt at an X — an unmoved mover, a primary cause, the creator of all motion in the universe. Aristotle named this X ‘God,’ describing Him as perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and engaged in the perfect contemplation: self-contemplation.

The ‘unmoved mover’ has since been identified with the Judeo-Christian God by thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas and Maimonides. This is the God that caused the universe, created life, and provides humans with purpose. The God who offers atheists something to disbelieve in.

But what do atheists believe in if they claim not to believe in God? The logical opposite: the universe is eternal, life was created from non-life, and our existence is pure chance.

Once upon a time, the scientific consensus affirmed an eternal universe, negating the need for a creator. Atheists everywhere rejoiced, with Nietzsche going as far as 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 might have been a moment of creation. Not only that, but this theory validated St. Augustine’s 4th-century AD insight that time and matter shared a common origin.

The Big Bang Theory doesn’t necessarily imply a creator. However, a hypothetical creator would solve a significant problem: if nothing caused it, 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 4th-century BC atheist who aimed to discredit the pagan worship of the Sun and Moon as physical deities (hence the term ‘celestial bodies’), arguing that both were just atmospheric phenomena, essentially suggesting they were the result of ‘climate change’ — in modern lingo.

To be consistent with gravity, Epicurus proposed that atoms would continuously fall into an endless void until encountering resistance. A spherical Earth would cause matter to simply 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, a continuum without end or beginning, similar to Nietzsche’s ‘eternal recurrence.’ In such a universe, everything is material, leaving no room for metaphysics. Epicurus’ moral assertion that no gods existed led to both an infinite universe and a flat Earth.

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.

While Epicureans didn’t deny free will, they believed it to be a product of chance within an infinite, randomly moving universe. This belief in randomness still underpins much of contemporary atheistic thought, despite scientific skepticism.

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