Wednesday, May 05, 2010

The Best Case for Atheism

Jack McCoy Could Win This Case

I usually make my Atheist posts in response to some other post made by a religious person. In the case of this post, I am responding to someone who is absolutely sure he’s proven the existence of God and the truth of his particular religion. Please forgive me for not linking to said person: I’m sure you know just the sort of bloke I’m talking about.

So, what I’d like to do in my own brief way is lay out the best case for Atheism. That is, why should someone conclude that Atheism is more probably rational and right than (any) theism? Here are the reasons why:

(1) It’s not clear that a being such as God (in the modern Judeo-Christian sense of an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful supreme being) could be at all. If the concept of God is logically inconsistent, then the God of that concept cannot be real.

(1.1) Omnipotence, for example, may not be logically possible.

(1.2) Omniscience, too, is a difficult concept and cannot simply be granted by us as a real attribute.

(2) The lack of a successful proof for God. If we cannot even make something like the ontological argument work, then maybe it’s time to reason that we cannot prove God because there is no God.

(3) We are justified in believing that many things do not exist: Santa Claus, Superman, unicorns, and so on. What makes God an exception here?

(3.1) If there were a God, there would be a steady influx of direct, unambiguous evidence to reinforce the view that there is a God. Yet, there is no direct evidence and nothing that cannot be reasonably attributed to natural causes.

(4) Widespread human and non-human animal suffering contradicts the concept of God.

(4.1) The innocent and the assholes are equally available to misfortune.

(4.2) What did the animals do to deserve death and their bloody struggle for survival?

(5) Generally in biology and cosmology, naturalism provides the better explanations of phenomena over all theistic explanations.

(6) Probability favors physical causes over intelligent causes for generation of features/phenomena and for the appearance of order.

In sum, the real problem with God is --

It cannot really be explained, it cannot be proved, it fits nicely into a human strength for creating imaginary characters, it is deeply undermined by the problem of indiscriminate evil, it is not the best explanation for anything, and it’s the most improbable cause of observed reality.

The best case for Atheism, then, is...God.

Note: Special credit and thanks to the "Atheism" article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, from which much of the material in this post is based.

28 comments:

  1. Larry´s Gospel.
    Should I say Amen?
    No, I do not want. I want the trial, so we need a Grand Jury of free people.
    But wait a minute.
    Is there free people out there? No, there is only people with the "illusion" of freedom, they act according to the fisical laws have determined them.
    Have we a law against the case be presented?
    Larry will propose the law of scientific knoledge, but according with this law, we are not going to be never 100% sure, so we are not going to be able to made a veredict.
    Larry, may be you have a case of God for the atheism, but then you do not have nor the law neither the jury to make it.
    Case dismissed.

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  2. Blas,

    I notice you don't address any of the assertions or the reasons behind them.

    Only point number 5 deals at all with science. The other points focus more on logic.

    I don't see why you would want to frame my post in religious terms (e.g., "Larry's Gospel"). Aren't you a fan of religion?

    Your oblique reference to free will or the lack of it, is tangential to what I am talking about here.

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  3. Excellent, succinct argument for atheism. I like it!

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  4. Just like the bible is the best argument against Christianity. Nice post by the way.

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  5. As all the cool kids say, "You killed it, dude." Great post.

    Kriss

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  6. Anonymous3:05 PM

    This is the most confused garble I've ever seen...The concept of an omniscient and omnipresent being is not logically incomprehensible when applying that to God or a God figure. In fact if we are applying those conditions to a God figure, anything less is incomprehensible and logically inconsistent.

    What is a "successful proof"? A proof that "you" accept? Why is your acceptance or nonacceptance of certain proofs more valid than mine or any theists? Once again your premise fails.

    If this is the best case for atheism, theism has no worries.

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  7. Anonymous is very confused and obviously did not get the post.

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  8. Anonymous,

    "The concept of an omniscient and omnipresent being is not logically incomprehensible when applying that to God or a God figure."

    I did not use the word "incomprehensible."

    "What is a 'successful proof'? A proof that 'you' accept? Why is your acceptance or nonacceptance of certain proofs more valid than mine or any theists? Once again your premise fails."

    No, it's not merely about my acceptance. Please provide me an example of one successful proof for God.

    "If this is the best case for atheism, theism has no worries."

    It's hard to read tone in online comments, but you "sound" worried.

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  9. By the way, those intersted in theistic explanations might like the recent posts at the excellent Philosophical Disquisitions blog:

    http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2010/05/successful-theistic-explanations-part-1.html

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  10. We have a winner!! That is simply outstanding. Nicely put, to the point, and very concise.

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  11. Gustavolk,

    This former Mountaineer thanks you.

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  12. Nicely done, friend. It's nice to see another New Englander who favors logic and reason above superstition and mythology. ^___^

    My mother is a Christian and I tried to explain to her why I favor logic and reason, instead of religion. Her rebuttal was that "logic is unstable and is only opinion."

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  13. Anonymous1:53 PM

    Larry, I enjoyed your sensible analysis.

    There's plenty of evidence that human cultures tend to develop tales about super-human forces and the characters that personify them, like gods and fairies, and the literate cultures put these tales into writing. There's no good reason to believe that any of these literary characters are real.

    And, as aitmanga said here, 'the bible is the best argument against Christianity.' If you study the bible, you see that it's not something a serious and upstanding person would go along with, even if it were true.

    Tripp
    Georgia, USA

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  14. Looked like many unsupported assertions and questions that would lead to discussion. But I don't think I'd consider any of these arguments.

    Whether we have a logical understanding of omnipotence or omniscisnce or not hardly tells us how to evaluate the existence of God. It's not God who is supposed to fit the labels or concepts but it is the concepts that are supposed to help us understand God, and when they don't, we change them. That's the way knowledge may progress.

    The lack of an irrefutable proof of God is nothing short of dubious litmus test and I see no rational reason at all to agree to it. If the ontological argument hasn't worked, maybe we shouldn't fret with a multitude of other more senseable reasons. The incredible value of people, the beauty of the world, our moral sense seem amongst other considerations to fit a theistic understanding better than a materialistic one.

    So God is compared to stories of persons that we know are fictional that we tell to entertain ourselves. Argument? Seems to me to be begging the question to begin with.

    Your judgement of the evidence is your own subjective assesement. And that's the only way it can be. Again, there is no argument here. Unsupported assertion? Yes.

    Widespread human suffering very well could just indicate that the truth about the world is that it isn't the way a perfect God originally intended it. Well, that certainly would fit some claims about the world and it's relationship to God, like Judaism and Christianity.

    And since the world isn't what God intended, of course you'd think a good God would do something about it. Again, that is what the Jewish and Christian stories are about, about God's rescue plan. That leads us to your next point. the innocent and evil both suffer misfortune. And that is because we are in the context for redemption, where broken people have opportunity to counter what it is that leads to their brokenness, to depend upon each other, help each other, love each other, sacrifice for each other, sympathize with each other and suffer with each other.

    What did the animals do to deserve all this? I don't know. Ask the animals and you will mainly get several grunts and yaps and other unintelligible responses. Whether or not categories of ultimate deserving apply to animals is questionable. this is a question, not even an assertion, let alone an argument.

    Naturalistic explanations tell us nothing about what is moral, human value, the meaning of our existence and so on. They can provide some explanation, for example seeing each other as valuable is definitely a survival bonus for the species, but that doesn't tell us whether the value is real or illusion that only serves the purpose of survival.

    As for the idea that order is best explained by natural causes, that completely depends upon what kind of order we are talking about and it is argued that some types of order are better explained teleologically, and this comes at both the level of life and the structure of the universe itself. So again, you offer no argument but an unsupported assertion.

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  15. Rob R.

    I appreciate the comment. May I direct you to the "Atheism" article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, from which much of the material in this post is based? Much of the support you are looking for can be found there. My purpose in the original post is just to lay out the case, not to defend it in gory detail.

    However, let me make some observations about your comment. You say "Whether we have a logical understanding of omnipotence or omniscisnce or not hardly tells us how to evaluate the existence of God."

    I think I get your idea that the existence of God is a separate issue from whether or not we understand God. However, in this separation, I fail to see the grounds upon which one would then claim (1) God (or gods) exists and (2) God has properties such as omniscience and omnipotence.

    Do you believe that logical impossibilities can exist in the real world? For example, do you think there can be such a thing as a four-sided triangle?

    May I ask you what, in a nutshell, is the best case for God being real?

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  16. I don't believe that the illogical is possible and I don't believe it describes anything that can exist. And illogical descriptions as a matter of fact just don't describe anything.

    I think the best Case for God is the presence that God makes known to us. But that is a subjective matter that involves interpretation of experience and it is not universal or we can lose that sense and mistrust it.

    I think from a more communicatable argument for God's existence regards a variety of existential considerations that surround our humanity. We have a profound sense of our significance, our worth, morality, and it is isn't that atheists or materialists can't explain these things but their explanation isn't very good.

    Our very personhood I think is the best evidence of transcendence, the greatness and godlike status that can't be forumalated and may be subjectively known but takes a truely dead soul to deny. It's not as if I can write a sentence and do it justice but only to refer to it. In our art, our extreme technological advancement, our developing awareness, our passions, consciousnous itself, they all scream godhood, and yet with our violence, lusts, our havoc on the environment and all sorts of depraved evils, we know that something is very wrong. Two extremes just do not fit this picture. Surely we aren't really gods with our infinitudes. But we aren't mere globs of chemicals sloshing around. The narrative that does our complex picture the greatest justice is the one that says that God made us kind of like himself, and yet what happened afterword was not fully his intention.

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  17. post 1 of 2


    Much of the support you are looking for can be found there. My purpose in the original post is just to lay out the case, not to defend it in gory detail.

    Fair enough. I've read some literature from atheists and I may or may not get around to reading this. Some of it is already old hat for me though.

    I think I get your idea that the existence of God is a separate issue from whether or not we understand God.

    Perhaps I gave the wrong impression. It's not that the properties of God aren't important in evaluating his existence. It's that our understanding of those properties are a work in progress.

    I just found it ill thought out to just claim that omnipotence and omniscience were illogical and cite that as proof against God's existence when those two properties are still very much a matter of ongoing investigation and scholarship. I have a classic understanding of those two concepts and yet I also believe some very unorthodox things about them as well and I think we sometimes try to cram God in to ideas that weren't fully thought out and are still in that process. Do I think that God knows everything for example? I do, but I think our understanding of the content of "everything" has been mistaken. The usual logical conundrum about this for example is that God's knowledge of everything would conflict with our free will since we could not choose other than what is perfectly foreknown. But if we are really REALLY serious about the reality of multiple options, then we better include that in the content of everything that there is to know. If we are serious about the freedom of some of our future actions, then we ought to abandon that there is always a specific choice that we will choose in those cases prior to our actual doing so. And if there is no truth about what we will choose (and instead, truths about what we might and might not choose, which in an authentically indeterministic world would entail a substantial amount of knowledge), we certainly wouldn't expect God to know these truths that in fact contradict reality.


    More directly to your question though, I consider what God is like to be more basic than whether God exists. But my point is that when our understanding of what God is like has problems, we can always improve our understanding and we have thousands of years of doing just that behind us. Your examples of omnipotence and omniscience are part of that history of development and they have seen development.

    Our understanding of God is not God after all. One of these is something that has to be shaped an will have imperfections.

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  18. Rob R.,

    You say: "I think the best Case for God is the presence that God makes known to us."

    This is not an argument. It's too vague (presence? what does THAT mean?) and it assumes that God made the presence known when we're trying to figure out if there's a God in the first place.

    I have similar issues with your "variety of existential considerations that surround our humanity." You're using vague polysyllables as a shield: Just because they're relatively big words doesn't mean they say anything significant.

    You seem to think it a good thing to hide behind facile mysticism, as when you declare rather arrogantly that "Our very personhood I think is the best evidence of transcendence, the greatness and godlike status that can't be forumalated and may be subjectively known but takes a truely dead soul to deny."

    Here, your most powerful argument is against anyone who would dare to question the idea of human "transcendence." Those of us who question and who want to learn are damned by you as dead souls and deniers. This little rhetorical trick of yours is simple bullying, and it fails to bring any real argumentative substance. If you want to provide some substance, why not lay out the philosophical and scientific grounds for the concept of "transcendence"?

    I'm also not impressed by how you end: "But we aren't mere globs of chemicals sloshing around. The narrative that does our complex picture the greatest justice is the one that says that God made us kind of like himself, and yet what happened afterword was not fully his intention."

    I am always amazed that people seem to take some sort of personal offense to being "mere globs of chemicals." You appear very certain that we are "more" than this, but why are you so sure and what does it really matter?

    It seems to me you just don't like the conclusion that people are one of many special life forms on a small planet in a certain galaxy in a particular universe. We're not the gods we've imagined. We're not the tools we use. We're not the art we create. We're not the knowledge and dreams we pass along. We're neither "mere" nor "more."

    But you're trying to make a case for God, and it essentially seems to be "there must be a God because people feel like they are important/significant beyond themselves." In other words, I feel like I have a pre-given purpose, therefore some intending agent assigned a purpose to me.

    If this is your argument -- and if not, please refine it so I can have it correctly formulated -- I don't find it convincing.

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  19. when you ask for one's support for their ideas, they may have personal reasons that aren't that communicatable, that whether you offer a sound arguement or not, you won't shake their belief because they have this reason and in a sense, for them it is the best. I mentioned the experience of the presence of God in this light and it wasn't offered so much as an argument and I thought I indicated as much.

    But I went on to offer something that I think communicates better by refference to our near universal experiences as humans.

    I had no intention of being esoteric. "existential considerations" is a great term that I explained, it covers a wide variety. If you have a serious alternative, I might be happy to use it. But quibbling about too many sylables, well I don't understand why anyone thinks this is a good idea.

    As for my "bullying" for daring to insist upon the greatness of humanity, for insisting that the language of the divine is needed for it, seems to me that bullying is more about treating people as if they didn't matter. it's not as if I thought atheists don't experience deeply significant meaningful lives or have a sense of morality. But I don't think they have the ability to articulate it as those who can speak of something that transcends the physical.

    I don't know why you find it odd for people to take offense at being mere globs of chemicals unless you find it odd to take offense at anything since we are mere globs of chemicals. The idea that we are "MERE" and nothing more is the essences of denying humanity and if that again is bullying, then what the heck does it matter that one glob of chemicals causes another glob of chemicals to have a chemical reaction that couldn't be avoided and is just the way it is. chemistry knows nothing of oughtness and significance, thus it knows nothing of human worth and dignity. you need "more than" not just "mere".

    As for my argument, I'll tell you that what I hope I'm spelling out in these relatively short posts is in my opinion done more justice in N.T. Wright's "Simply Christian" where in the first part of the book, he discusses four parts of our human experience and describes how they excellently fit the interpretation of echoes of a voice, that they point beyond themselves to the divine. These four aspects are our cry for justice, our near universal spirituality, the value and nature of community, and the value of beauty.

    Basically, instead of drawing up a deductive argument from a set of premises and ending in a conclusion, instead we look at the shape and nature of human existence and we note that the narrative of Judeo-Christianity fits well.

    It's not simply that I think that there is a god because people feel that they are significant and important. It's that I take it as basic and unarguable that we are indeed significant, that we have individual worth and that our relationships are of uncalculable worth, that there is a way that things ought to be even if the world is often very much at odds with that and atheistic materialism does nothing or what it does isn't very good and arguably is as odds with them and the picture given in scripture goes a very far way to explain these things.

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  20. Let's talk about where we agree. Look at your final paragraph

    (1) we {people] are indeed significant
    (2) we have individual worth
    (3) our relationships are of incalculable worth

    I agree with you here and there's nothing her that's inconsistent with atheism (or theism).

    What's more, we can still be "mere gobs of chemicals," as you say, and still have #1-3 be true also. Our specialness as human beings and individuals is not dependent on the existence of a god or on our having been created by a deity.

    I am sorry, but I am having a hard time parsing what you say and mean in the second half of that final paragraph.

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  21. These considerations are not necessarily at odds strictly with athiesm. But they are explained better in a theistic world.

    A man who went to high school with my sister years ago was an atheist. He abandoned that, not so much for intellectual difficulties, not because he was argued into it with great theistic proofs but rather because he found his atheism inept in the face of the experience of holding his new born child.

    Even though this wasn't a strictly rational analytic process and wasn't the result of articulated line of reasoning for this man, I think it's precisely this kind of experience that points the way towards some very fruitful analysis.

    I think though that a point is easy to illustrate from the opposite kind of experience. In the death of a loved one, particularly a child, while this may often fuel anti-theistic ideas (though which is exacerbated by what I insist is a wrong view of God's sovereignty, usually along the lines of determinism) the great pain that one feels at the loss indicates that this loss should not have happened, that this is a terrible wrong against the existence of the living and the dead. The typical atheist answer, that these feelings are their because such sentiments aid survival and the spread of our genes falls very short of doing justice to this experience which better fits the narrative of creation, that we weren't intended for death and this is part of a profound brokenness in our existence (which fortunately in our narrative is part reality that is to be fixed when the world is redeemed).

    There is no hard logical reason why one explanation is better than the other, but it just seems to me that one answer is far superior to the other and fits the emotion. I'm going to take that as an epistemic bonus for the Judeo-Christian view over an atheistic one.

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  22. Rob,

    "There is no hard logical reason why one explanation is better than the other, but it just seems to me that one answer is far superior to the other and fits the emotion."

    No there is a logical reason why one explanation is better than another. Look at the theological gymnastics you just had to go through in your previous paragraph! You have your "right" theology and others have "a wrong view of God's sovereignty, usually along the lines of determinism." Your only way of determining the "better" explanation is the one that seems more positive and comforting TO YOU.

    I don't doubt that some theistic explanations can be very beautiful and emotionally satisfying. I don't doubt that a reasoning process is involved. That's not the point.

    By the way, I find your proposed explanation to the death of a child absolutely horrific. The narrative of creation? Profound brokenness in our existence?

    Do you actually believe that this kind of stuff makes sense of the death of a loved one?

    To me, it looks like a profound determination to protect oneself from reality. It makes me sad to see a person grasping at tales to confront a real difficulty.

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  23. post 2 of 2



    We are broken, we have rebelled from God, thus God put us in a context for redemption. God opened himself to suffering, he suffers because of us, with us and for us. This is a theme powerful throughout the Old Testament which is one reason why incarnational theology makes sense, why Jesus embodies God's presence in the world which was most intensely fulfilled in Jesus death on the cross.

    You suggest the horrific nature of such losses undermines what I'm suggesting, but the worse it is, the more intense it is, the more hollow and inept null views such as atheism and mechanistic explanations such as materialism seem.

    You suggest that I'm not dealing with reality. On the contrary, I try to give this reality, this powerful sense that the world, this undeniable and unrelenting and undeniable subjectivity full force to lead me to the best understanding of reality that I can have. You seem to think that we need to deal with cold hard reality and then deal with the fact of such tragedies, but I recognize that these tragedies are an essential part of our reality and should inform us of that as well. And it isn't mere suffering which leads my thoughts that the way the world ought not be, but of course the world is not a monolithic thing and as I mentioned with reference to the link above to Arthur Sido's web site on his experience of the birth of his child, it is also the greatness of our humanity, for him as demonstrated by the wonder of the birth of his child, of the experience of something so wonderful in a vulnerable package that there must be something beyond mere object and mechanism in the world to explain the way that it is.

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  24. post 1 of 2



    No there is a logical reason why one explanation is better than another.

    Okay, yes, lets hear the rule of logic that I have transgressed. I know that my conclusions are not deductively necessary. But that is no rule of logic that says that everything must be the result of logic. And if that were true, we could know nothing about the world. Since Hume and well before, we know that reason in and of itself tells us nothing of the world without the logically unprovable assumption (and scientifically untestable one to boot!) that the world adheres to rules of logic. We must bring some things to the table to work with.

    Look at the theological gymnastics you just had to go through in your previous paragraph!

    It is true that what I say ultimately cannot be arrived at without a subjective appeal. And what you offer here cannot be anything more than a subjective judgment. At least, that is the way of it as far as I can tell as you didn't interact with my explanation except to say that I appeal to a horrific situation and marvel that I should do that at all.

    But the access to this issue ought to be subjective if our picture is true of a God who wants us to connect with him not because of force of reason but relationally, faithfully and in worship.

    Do you actually believe that this kind of stuff makes sense of the death of a loved one?

    I developed these thoughts in part by thinking upon the experiences of those who have gone through such a hell. With regard to faith, people who have had such tragic experiences may respond in three ways. Some lose their faith, some cannot bear to think that such a thing happened unless it was specifically willed by God, and some cannot believe that God would have willed such a thing to happen. But of the last two groups, these people actually come closer to God in their experiences. Nicholas Wolterstorff is a Christian philosopher who lost his son and wrote about his experience in "Lament for a Son" and wrote that after a time, he found it difficult to balance a realization that he wouldn't trade the closeness with God that he gained through the loss of his son for anything and yet the idea that God had specifically willed for his son to die was thoroughly repugnant to him. I believe that I have a picture that balances this, that such experiences bring us to the most intense realization that the world is not right. What comforted Wolterstorff was not that he could explain god's reason for allowing evil in the world but that God suffered with him. But I think that such a realization ought to play a role in our efforts to deal with our attempt to understand why there'd be evil in a world created by a god who is still sovereign.

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  25. Rob,

    "We are broken."

    I disagree with this negative and anthro-centric statement. We are not broken, the world is not out of joint. We don't need a hero or superhero.

    It seems to me that religious thinking loves to wallow in this sense of degradation, like we're all just Byronic characters.

    And you have the temerity to call atheism "hollow" or "null"? On what basis? Every argument you make in favor of your theism explicitly describes humanity as isolated, fractured, and out of sorts.

    And why is this? Just for the kicks of pathos? That's great that Wolterstorff found comfort, but surely you see it was comfort in a rationalized illusion.

    Rob, honestly: it seems to me that you are not understanding atheism but are rather presenting it as a cartoon opponent to your theistic beliefs. I am not saying this to annoy you or to score some rhetorical points. I am saying this because you seem like someone who strives for intellectual honesty. I read your comments and think that you want to have things communicated fully and fairly.

    I don't think you are giving the full and fair treatment to atheism. (And yes, I do think I give--or sincerely try--full and fair treatment to theism.)

    So, may I ask you to do me a favor? I would like you to ask me one simple question about atheism that I can answer in a direct and straightforward way.

    I am totally sincere. Please allow me to express what I think atheism really is on one small point. I would like to start small, as it were, because things can get complicated enough soon enough.

    What do you say? One question?

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  27. Rob, building straw men to knock down is not a useful or productive endeavour. I can't see the problem for a believer in losing someone close. Hey, they're all going to be waiting on the other side and what's 10 or 20 or 50 years in the great scheme of things? It might be different if this child hasn't had a chance to accept the jesus character into their lives because, as you will know from your bible, if you don't consciously and sincerely accept the jesus character as your saviour, then nothing and no one will stop you from going to hell.

    Which brings me to the ultimate immorality of christianity. A person could lead a perfect life in all respects but still be damned because they don't accept the jesus character as their saviour. Equally they could be the most evil mass murderer, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, but if they sincerely accept the jesus character as their saviour before they die, they get a free pass into paradise. You could be shown to your room in your heavenly father's mansion and find your next door neighbour is an ex fascist dictator who managed to get saved just before the cyanide took effect. That's what I call biblical morality.

    Same kind of morality that sends the holy tribe into an opposing village to kill every man woman and child, every beast of the field except for the untouched women who they can do as they will with. You can't knock those fringe benefits.

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  28. Sorry for my digression, I only came by to say that omnipotence and omniscience are logically mutually exclusive. You can't know everything that can happen and has happened and be able to do anything about it and if you can do something about it then you should have known before hand that you would change things and, well, you see where we're going here.

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Feel free to comment if you have something substantial and substantiated to say.