I don't know about you, but I think there is something wrong with atheism. I'm not going to say there is something wrong with every individual who is an atheist, but it is a fundamentallly flawed philosophy. For one, it is the reason people believe that their rights come from the state. If your rights do not come from God, they can only be granted by other men. That means, the men who have the most power, get to set the rules. That is the very foundation of statism.
This is an argument from consequences. You're saying, in effect,
"God has to exist, since if he doesn't, then rights can only be granted by other men. I don't want that to be the case. Therefore, God exists." I'm sure you see why that doesn't hold water.
In fact, as a practical matter, rights
are only taken or protected by force wielded by man. I'm not aware of any God
ever coming to the defense of anyone's rights -- at least not in any verifiable fashion. Instead, we routinely see humans denied their rights. That's been the case throughout history. Whether rights exist or not in any sense is moot if they're not backed up with force or the threat of force.
Also, it is impossible for there not to be a god. Something cannot come from nothing. Where did the matter, the energy, the laws come from if there was no original force that made the universe behave as it does? It doesn't matter whether you believe God did it through evolution or some other method, but you can't logically deny the existence of an original intelligent force. Otherwise, there would be no original force.
While you're correct that there needs to be some "first cause," the assumption that it must have been an intelligent God is unjustified. It's possible that the "uncreated creator" of the universe is simply the laws of physics, or maybe even some other perfectly natural phenomenon that humans lack the capacity to understand.
There's a book on this subject called
A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. I haven't yet read it but plan to as soon as I get a chance.
The truly logical position on this question is agnosticism. Humans simply don't know where everything came from, and we may never know. Everything may have been created by some kind of God -- perhaps a completely impersonal one who's nothing like the anthropomorphic God portrayed by the various religions. Or everything may have been created by a self-existent
but natural entity that "lives" outside our universe. We just don't know, and that's uncomfortable for many people to accept.
Religions are rooted in the ancient attempts of man to come to grips with things he didn't understand. Just as lots of people today are "sure" that a personal God exists, people were once
certain that witches were responsible for their crop failures and cattle dying, that people with epilepsy or Tourette's syndrome were possessed by demons, and so forth. But as science revealed more about how nature works, the role of religion grew smaller. Its only refuge now is in questions that science still hasn't answered, such as the origin of life and the universe itself -- though there are some plausible theories out there about these things.
. I don't think Santorum is going to be in trouble the exchange about foreign policy, but Paul can use things like this to combat the idea that his foreign policy is dangerous and radical. And he has to do that to get main stream support. It's obvious that Ron's trying to do this too (did you hear his intro statement LOL). I was kind of sad that the debate mostly avoided foreign policy except for that question.
