Serious Problems with Atheism

[Whateverist]

Personally, and like Dawkins I speak for just one atheist, I have no use for the word "evil" and prefer the word  "prosocial" to "good".  Goodness and Evil as nouns are nonsense.  Acts which get singled out as 'good' tend to be ones which are good for the wider group.  As a community we naturally appreciate such acts.  But self serving acts which serve only the individual are not 'evil', they're just not socially relevant.  On the long view, even the pursuit of solitude or solitary pleasures can be seen as having some prosocial value if by nurturing the individual that individual is then able to go on to more fully participate in and contribute to the social good.  

But some acts actually subtract from the social good and I have no problem calling them "bad": hitting or even killing others in anger, robbing them, the destruction of property, and so on.  But "evil" is still a reach.  The closest I can come to attaching meaning to that would be anyone who inflicts pain and suffering on others for the pleasure they receive in doing so, like Charles Manson.  But then, he was obviously deranged so possibly all 'evil' is really an offshoot of pathology of one kind or another.  But "evil" as a thing in itself itself exists no where but fiction (e.g., in the bible).

That's at the core of the debate isn't it, why is "prosocial" better than "antisocial"? Why is human survival better than 

extinction?

Not 'better' in some absolute, abstract way. Prosocial behavior is just better evolutionarily as it carries a survival advantage. We weren't designed to cooperate we evolved that way. The way we feel about inflicting harm, bestowing support and our capacity for empathy are some of the ways that manifests in our experience.  What we experience is what it feels like to be a creature with the advantage of being able to live cooperatively in communities of our kind.

As the 2007 atheist suicide-murderer Pekka-Eric Auvinen from Finland said ‘The faster the human race is wiped out

 from this planet, the better … no one should be left alive. No mercy for the scum of earth.’ ‘I am the law, judge and 

executioner. There is no higher authority than me.’ 

Why are the random electron collisions in his brain forming his "logic" 

"bad" and the random electron collisions in your brain forming your "logic" "better"?

Who says they are? His behavior was obviously not pro-social, his 'tribe' did not benefit from his actions.

The question should be, how do we account for his aberrant behavior - with or with out a god. With a god, as has often been said, either it isn't all powerful or else it doesn't care and if it isn't either of those things, why call it god? Without a god we account for in the same way we do a baby with birth defects or cancer, as simple failures in the system. Shit happens in a godless world. In a world with a god, you have to ask yourself why god allows it. Or if you think it is all powerful then you might wonder why he designed it to happen. Mistakes make more sense in a godless world.

So my point is we innately know that there is Good and Evil in this Universe because we have a Conscience which is simply 

irreducible to random electron collisions in our skulls, and it requires the stubbornness and closed-mindedness of a Dawkins to

 deny the obvious.

There is nothing random about evolution except the occasional mutation, and then only those which improve the survival of the species win out. Of course evolution leads to more complexity and increasingly better adapted creatures.