Is atheism self-contradictory ?

[Mister Agenda]

I see you're no exception to the rule that theists who come here wanting to know about atheism tell us what atheism is and what we must think. In fact, you're the second person with the 'question I stumbled upon concerning atheism' person we've had in the last week.  Not very refreshing, but I did not have much of an expectation. At any rate, welcome to the forum, I hope you like it here. 

I'm sorry I have to say this, but it seems to me that everybody has the right to insult and disregard any argument we make because they think they are too smart to answer. You are actually the second or third person to reply in this thread without directly neglecting the thread and attacking Muslim beliefs.

It's hard to be as kind and patient the 341st time someone marches onto our forum to tell us what we think, which accounts for a lot of people not having much patience for that sort of thing. But it's not your fault you're the 341st.

It does not follow from the fact that a god cannot be proven with logic, that the mind itself can't be trusted. You seem to have skipped some steps in making that claim. But the claims are not necessarily false in their conclusions, they are unsound. That is, if there is a God, none of the arguments presented thus far successfully establish that. There's no 'proof' given by a scholar or philosopher that both contains no logical fallacies and rests on sound premises that any reasonable person would assent to. 

If there is a God, who is by definition absolutely fair, he must make his creatures capable of knowing him and follow the right path. Therefore, I know my mind is reliable because God made it that way. Assuming no God exists, nothing tells me that my mind - as a product of long-term alterations of genome - is reliable enough to discover objective truths about life and the universe. Our minds can produce science, but science itself is merely cumulative experience and an endless trial-and-error process, and everything we know about the universe via scientific investigation can break down at any moment and become history. Producing science DOESN'T mean our brains are reliable, it only appears that way.

Our minds are provably unreliable in many ways. How do you reconcile that with them being a product of perfection?

You seem to be going the 'how do we know we're not brains in a jar or experiencing a vast hallucination' route. We don't. If you don't accept reality as an axiom, it isn't any more provable than God. And all you've presented to support your case is assertions, and assertions don't count as logic or evidence. You're just telling us what you believe. You can believe anything you want, it doesn't have anything to do with whether you're right, no matter how certain you are.

Also, I can't say for myself that I'm brilliant about anything. I can't claim that I have a good and natural voice unless someone else hears me singing and assures me of that. Humans cannot say about themselves that their minds possess any great ability without an "exterior consciousness" telling them that.

We can compare each other's observations, reasoning, and thoughts, so there you go.

You say therefore, but no argument preceded that conclusion. You're claiming not believing something is believing something, that's a strange claim to make. If you asked us what we think instead of telling us, you'd find that most of us just aren't sold on the deity you're trying to sell. There might be ghosts, but I don't believe in them. I'm not going to believe in literal ghosts (or Bigfoot, or alien abductions, or Amway) until I'm presented with sufficient evidence to convince me. Do you believe in things without sufficient evidence to convince you?

The initial variations in our genome are random within a certain range of possibilities, but which variations are conserved isn't random, evolution is (vastly oversimplifying here) a process of culling disadvantageous variations while conserving advantageous ones. I can reasonably infer that my brain has evolved to deal with the environment that actually exists, and while it may be imperfect, it does the job. And we've come up with science to help us with our blind spots (and there are many of them). 

I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm simply requesting for a reasonable explanation about our minds being presumably reliable.

Already given, and my explanation has the advantage of explaining why our brains are limited in their reliability.

This is, of course, not sufficient to summon any supernatural creator, but means that [u]If our minds aren't the work of a consciousness, THEN they are not reliable.

You keep skipping the middle part of an argument:

If our minds aren't the work of a consciousness,
(Middle Term)
Then they are not reliable.

You don't even bother to try to explain why they require an exterior consciousness creating them to be reliable (as reliable as ours are, anyway).

Or you could do it like this:

If our minds ARE the work of a perfect consciousness,
Then our minds are perfectly reliable.
Our minds are not perfectly reliable.
Therefore our minds are not the work of a perfect consciousness.

Snip

It clearly follows from the two premises that our minds ARE NOT reliable as we claim they are.

How reliable do we claim they are? I haven't heard anyone claim they're more reliable than they need to be for us to survive in the environment we find ourselves in.

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As a nit, not 'self-confessed'. The story of Aisha's underage marriage is from a hadith, and the Shia vigorously contest its authenticity.

I know enough about islam that the hadiths are claimed to be the authoritative word of mohammed. So either the person islamists worship was a child rapists, or a fantasy figure.

They're not all even supposed to be the word of Mohammed. Many are clearly third-person commentary on his life. The one about Aisha's age, for instance.

Or he could have been a real person who married Aisha when she was older. Shia put her as at least 19. But of course they had political reasons to make her older, just as the Sunni had political reasons to make her younger.