The struggle to definitively prove or disprove the existence of atheists has puzzled philosophers for centuries. Some have proposed the cosmological argument — “many cosmologists seem to be atheists” — while others have fallen back on the argument from design — “without atheists, who would believers have to argue against?”
But the Catholic Encyclopedia seems unconvinced by these arguments:
The most trenchant form which atheism could take would be the positive and dogmatic denial existence of any spiritual and extra-mundane First Cause. This is sometimes known as dogmatic, or positive theoretic, atheism; though it may be doubted whether such a system has ever been, or could ever possibly be seriously maintained. Certainly Bacon and Dr. Arnold voice the common judgment of thinking men when they express a doubt as to the existence of an atheist belonging to such a school. Still, there are certain advanced phases of materialistic philosophy that, perhaps, should rightly be included under this head. Materialism, which professes to find in matter its own cause and explanation, may go farther, and positively exclude the existence of any spiritual cause. That such a dogmatic assertion is both unreasonable and illogical needs no demonstration, for it is an inference not warranted by the facts nor justified by the laws of thought.
You have to admire the confidence — the fact that “dogmatic atheism” is “both unreasonable and illogical needs no demonstration,” and let’s leave it at that. It’s a little bit different from the tack they take in another entry:
Formal dogmatic Atheism is self-refuting, and has never de facto won the reasoned assent of any considerable number of men.
The Encyclopedia does not dirty its hands by explaining the nature of this self-refutation, any more than it explained the previously-noted unreasonability and illogic. I like it! It’s kind of like arguing on the internet.
And since the day is nearly done (at least here), let’s take a break to enjoy this slight divergence from topic, Creationism vs. Norse Mythology…
(work safe page, although other pages on that site may not be)
No one truly believes in God, at least not in the good old US of A. Have you ever heard of an American family that’s about to lose a loved one–or has just lost a loved one–child, adult, senior citizen, that is overjoyed? Singing happy songs, rejoicing, throwing a party of thanksgiving? That would be the expected and appropriate response, would it not, if they were dead (pardon the word choice) certain that the loved one was in fact with the angels? I mean, if they have traded this vale of tears for eternal joy, why all the despair?
Wow, it is like arguing on the internet, because if you read the context, you find that the quotes in the post are all out of context. For instance, from the post you don’t get any indication that ‘positive and dogmatic atheism’ is being used as a technical phrase for the purposes of the article, and that it is explicitly contrasted with (1) atheism based on a materialist view of the world and (2) atheism based on lack of evidence for theism and (3) atheism based on our inability to know whether there is a God or not. So apparently we are to dismiss claims that an atheism based on neither evidence, nor a recognition of the limits of the human mind, nor on anything strictly required by a materialist approach to the world, is unreasonable!
But I get it — the post is really a joke, showing what would happen if atheists actually argued like the people at Uncommon Descent, showing how absurdly foolish they would look; and so it serves as a valuable lesson in not taking quotes out of context like the IDers do, and in not trying to build, as many IDers do, insinuations on the basis of a phrase here and a silence there. A great joke, with a great lesson in how to argue rationally — but a bit subtle, I think. You should be careful; people might misunderstand you.
The deus ex machina still can’t pass the Turing test, the costumes and masks are lame, the plot is silly and the dialogs and monologues, however poetic or pretty or clever, are ultimately dissatisfying as evidence of anything beyond this world. Pour the tea from Russell’s teapot into a cup I can measure the contents of, or take your cream crackered, skint arse argument off to Hyde Park.
I don’t believe that “God/gods” exist/s because there is no robust evidence to indicate that it/they does/do. I see no reason whatsoever to have ‘faith’ in something just because a large number of people think I ought to. Even if I could see a reason for it, I would still be unable to honestly become ‘faithful’ in something that is so unreasonable, etc.
It would suit me just fine to drop the label: atheist. However, as the society I live in has opted to make it an issue that touches many areas I am interested in, such as science and art, and to do so, often enough, in a disturbing way that smacks of authoritarianism and indicates a desire on the part of a fair number of religionists in my country to control whatever they can get their hooks in, I feel that there is an ethical compulsion for me to explicitly state my position clearly and unambiguously.
The main trouble with atheism may not be the stance itself, but the misguided (IMHO) opinion that “exist” is the straightforward, simplistic category most of us want to think it is. Click on my link for some eye-opening critique of what you are used to thinking about the existence of “the material universe.” Then you might be inspired to be less casual about throwing around opinions such as whether “God exists.”
BTW, advanced philosophical concepts of “God” are not very related to concepts like fairies etc., aside from whether “existence” is a simply coherent “trait” (is it even a predicate we can grasp at all, other than as a generalization from experience?) God and fairies etc. are logical apples and oranges at best. Critters like fairies, ghosts, etc, are alleged non-ultimate entities with peculiar composition or mode of being, but are still denizens of the universe the absence or character of which has no comprehensible logical consequences – they have no “logical function” in the scheme of things. OTOH, “God”, by definition, is supposed to be a first cause that our universe existentially depends on (presuming that argument is correct), whatever it is that *would* exist of its own accord, etc. God would at least be a potential proper explanation of why laws are the way they are, but fairies wouldn’t be (unless you were just a smartass defining your nominal category as being like “God” anyway …)
To me, maybe there is a God or other sort of ultimate reality (google for alaya vinyana) that conditions which worlds really exist, or maybe there are the multitudes of worlds imagined by some and we just lucked out. I think the idea of *this* particular “possible world” just happening to be the one that should exist, and furthermore to just have conveniently life-friendly features but not in order to have same, is the most crocked and tacky concept imaginable. It’s like saying, the number 23 (or almost as bad, numbers 21-26 like a limited landscape) just happen to be reified as actual brass numerals despite no obvious logical way to relate some numbers to a mystic idea like “real material existence” and not others. The modal realists are at least right on that count, even though I don’t agree with them anyway because of the foundational and non-mathematical nature of consciousness as epistemic ground (as we experience it, not as alleged “computation” which Penrose and Hameroff have well critiqued IMHO.)
A good Bayesian rationalist never assigns a probability of 0 or 1 to any belief, but many beliefs are of sufficiently low probability that they warrant rejection. We can’t disprove the existence of God, but the probability of this concept being true is in the same neighborhood as fairies, UFOs, and the gods of religions that Catholics reject.
We must also remember that the null hypothesis is privileged. A good rationalist asks — is there a God? — and looks for evidence. Religious people start with the conclusion and work backwards. In the mind of a believer, the evidence is a string of rationalizations (We can’t see God because he is invisible. He appears to answer some prayers and not others because he works in mysterious ways) and non sequiturs (X recovered from cancer…God saved him. That car narrowly missed me…God intervened. I won $100 in the lottery…God chose me).
For several weeks after you buy a new car you may see many people driving the same car. Did lots of other people buy the same car at the same time as you? No, you just weren’t looking for that car before. Now that you have that car, it is a SALIENT part of your perception. Similarly, if you’re looking for evidence of God, and you want that evidence to exist, you’ll find ambiguous, interpretable evidence everywhere you look.
God appears to be an ineffective concept or conjecture in our understanding of the world. This does not disprove the existence of God, for science is not about proving things. Science is about observing the world and a theory is regarded as operative (tentatively true) if the preponderance of data supports it. So far there is a virtual nullity of data which supports the conjecture that the world emerged by the supernatural activity of a vast or infinite conscious being, nor is there any data to support the activities of this being in the world.
A moment’s reflection also makes the God conjecture difficult to support. If God acts upon the world, even if only as the designer or prime mover of it, then this means that God must change the energy states of systems, or their momenta. This is even the case if that supernatural entity is a spiritual force commonly called a soul meant to “explain” our consciousness. If this supernatural entity is able to change the physical state of a system it can do so in two possible ways. It can do so in a way which preverse these physical quantities, eg conservation of energy, momentum, baryon number or … . This might sound reasonable, but if this is the case then the God operates according to symmetry principle that conserve these quantities a’la Noether’s theorem. In this case this supernatural entity is “programmed,” or unable to deviate from some set of rules that are indistiguishable from natural principles. Poof, God evaporates into naturalism. Assume on the other hand God can violate these principles, say as some Schopenhauer-esque “will” that is able to exert its power in any way its volition permits. This would mean that there should exist systems or observable processes which utterly defy any logico-emperical understanding. This is what Intelligent Design advances. So far after several centuries of science no clear incidence of this has occurred.
Without going into great depth here I do think that there are behaviorial programs in our brains which predispose us to believe in Gods or supernatural entities. Religions, which are culturally created forms of nature mythic systems of thought our Pleistocene ancestors lived by, offer a meaning to the “life the universe and everything.” They psychologically anchor the believer in some sort of neuro-psychological basin of attraction which offers a purpose or meaning to life. In the last several centuries science has dismantled much of the intellectual foundation for religion, and I think given time the demolition will be complete. Religious people become very testy or even angry by any suggestion that the whole basis upon which they have hung the meaning of their lives upon is a fairy tale.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Responding to Matt (the real one):
And neither do most others. You are setting up a straw man.
Again with the straw man. No one ever indicated that they would reject fairies or alien abductions without having thought about it. I don’t think it takes a tremendous leap of intellectual industriousness to intelligently and thoughtfully reason that the existence of fairies and alien abductions is improbable.
There are (and have been throughout history) “whole mountains of eyewitness evidence” in support of many ridiculous claims, and I don’t think it takes a scholar in the field of psychology (or history or science for that matter) to suppose that this is not very compelling in the absence of corroborating (hard) evidence, especially when in this particular case the very idea of what is claimed makes very little sense (on many levels) when thought about critically.
Brandon, your stance would be more compelling if you could find a way to actually reveal to us what the technical definition of “formal dogmatic atheism” is supposed to be, and cite the relevant passage in the Catholic Encyclopedia, so that we may more easily see why such a stance is self-refuting. Thanks!
Bill M.D.
You make an excellent point. I have often thought along the same lines.
I think that the main reason why people “believe” in god, is that in their heart of hearts, they are rational and they know the odds. They know that in the end everything will turn to dust, and the existance of the entire human species will eventually be lost to time.
People sometimes need to believe that all our efforts are not in vain. God is just another manifestation of hope, a belief that no matter how bad things get, the universe is random and chaotic enough that one’s fortune will change at the drop of a hat.
There is nothing particularly mysterious about this, but when push comes to shove and we are faced with the starkness of our reality, and realize that we just have to keep moving, or give up. However, if we keep moving we know things will always change one way or another.
If people need something to believe in, I would say believe in your fellow man. As hard as this may seem at times, you have to believe not everyone is like the a**hole journalists on CNN, MSNBC and FOX.
All American Rejects Move Along remake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMMceEx72sE
Neil B,
I can accept the possibility of the existence of “a first cause,” although I’m not convinced that the existence of such “a first cause” is a logical necessity. So, suppose such “a first cause” existed. How do we know such “a first cause” is the same as the “God” as described by various religions? Yes, such “a first cause” is responsible for the existence of the universe, but religions describe various other aspects of the “God” as well. How do we know that the “first cause” also share those aspects of “God”? Why do the advanced philosophical concept of God and the concept of God taught in organized religions have to be identical? It is the God(s) in organized religions that many of us have a problem with, not with “Spinoza’s God” as Einstein described.
So, we have to ask, “Please Tell Me What “God” Means?”
To Bill MD:
1) We had a party when my grandmother died, most everyone there were theists.
2) A belief in God does not supersede human emotion. It’s ok to be sad for one’s self even though something is happening to another we care about that is ultimately positive.
3) Should the inverse be true as well? Is it safe to say that people in the US of A don’t actually disbelieve in a God because they get emotional, sad, and mourn when a loved one dies. I mean afterall, it’s just nature and natural selection right?
I think that our propensity to believe in gods, along with ghosts, spirits, and the like might stem from our evolutionary past. One of the remarkable faculties we have is telling stories. This is after all one of the primary purposes of language. I suspect that in our evolution of language a big selective pressure for it was the ability to communicate information about our local environments. Most stories involve people, and our stories about things in the world we related to often have anthropic projections. So in communicating information about the world, such as certain seasons when game is migrating, our Pleistocene ancestors conjoured up stores based on anthropic projections which could be easily told and retold down generations. These are of course spirits, totems and other apparitions which are common to indigenous people. Religions are just highly complex constructions from these basic mythic behaviors.
Another characteristic which I think betrays this is the great popularity of ghost stories. I no more believe in ghosts than I do Santa Claus. Yet the movie “The Sixth Sense” I found compelling when I first watched it. I have long had some fondness for vampire stories, and in high school one of my favorite rock bands was Blue Oyster Cult. I don’t have any belief in these things, but I suspect that indulging in these fantasies stimulates certain neural pathways which may be associated with our propensity to believe in magical or supernatural entities.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Further. Silly Catholics.
After considerable reflection, I have decided that I am a string atheist: I affirmatively believe that there are no gods. And I believe that I have a firm rational basis for that belief.
Obviously, I can’t specifically refute all possible imagined deities, because there is literally no single common factor they share. (For example, pantheists identify God with the universe, so their God is neither invisible, imperceptible, nor immune to interference by humans.)
But I can say that the world I live in lacks an active, interventionist deity. It would be a very different world if there was that sort of intervention regularly. Quite possibly a nicer one; it would be nice to have some good wrathful smiting of the evil by a perfect judge rather than relying on limited and corruptable human authorities.
This is backed up by, e.g. studies of the efficacy of intercessory prayer.
The alternative is a non-interventionist deity who, perhaps having created it in the first place, does not meddle in the unfolding of the universe. There is no observable effect that such a deity will have, so obviously I can’t disprove its existence.
But I can also go happily along with my life assuming such a deity doesn’t exist and I will never be wrong.
I don’t have to have 100% certainty to believe something. Once you get past solipsism, certainty is hard to come by; I have to settle for theories that have worked in the past and are likely to work again. I do not know first-hand that being hit by a car hurts, and even if I did, that doesn’t prove that it will hurt next time. But it’s the best idea going, so I accept it and move on to other debates.
Likewise, I can’t prove that no gods exist, just that the universe acts as if no gods exist, so applying Occam’s razor, I might as well assume that no gods exist.
“I believe no gods exist” in the same sense that “I believe sticking my tongue in that light bulb socket would hurt.” It’s not 100% certainty, but I’m not going to waste my time testing it.
God is the proper name of the deity worshiped in the Abrahamic faiths. Proper names are capitalized whether or not the object named exists.
Perhaps, the real argument made by the Catholic Encyclopedia, when you try to parse it, is that “dogmatic” atheists are inconsistent.
Actually, I think most people would probably agree with that, whatever it means.
Sean doesn’t believe in the tooth fairy???!!!
No wonder he is so immoral.
Aided by circumspect nudges from Einstein, atheism was moving along pretty strongly with bien pensants until the concept of the anthropic principle was proposed by Brandon Carter in 1973. As this bit of circular reasoning percolated through the scientific establishment it was increasingly recognized to afford, with its realization of the universe’s myriad evident “fine tunings” promoting life, a new and seemingly insidious argument for deism. It of course deserves strong co-billing along with many other fortuitious discoveries since then, both physical and philosophical, for the growing embrace of the multiverse vision among specialists, a grand sweep of inflationary reasoning which obviates the speciality of the quirky laws, constants and initial conditions underpinniing our paltry universe. Strangely, however, the AP is still kinda like Rodney Dangerfield; it can’t get no respect in many scientific circles, not even as a superseded bogeyman which pointed us in the right direction, as Euclid and Newton did. Now, however, a cosmologist as distinguished as Alex Vilenkin, in his recent, magisterial Many Worlds in One , can grant a modicum of possibility, at least in a poetical sense, to a Creator obsessed with mathematics who is good at formulating the perfect equations for universes:
“Earlier cosmological models suggested a Creator meticulously designing and fine-tuning the universe. Every detail of particle physics, eash constant of nature, and all the primordial ripples had to be set just right. One can imagine the volumes and volumes of specifications the Creator handed down to his assistants to complete the job! The new [inflationary] worldview evokes a different image of the Creator. After some thought he comes up with a set of equations for the fundamental theory of nature. This initiates the process of runaway creation. No further instructrions are needed.”
Presumably, after this, like a good father, he leaves us on our own.
See also 😉
7. Sean, in this case it is because there is a vast theoretical and philosophical background to the claim. You are quoting from the catholic encyclopaedia, the intellectual cast of the catholic church has been arguing over what “God” means for ever, and the answers they have come up with are fantastically sophisticated. So if you tell a Jesuit you don’t believe in God it’s perfectly reasonable to hear back the question: “Which one?”
The most logic-laden part of the doctrine comes when the same church advises you to pray in front of a piece of a dead saint (bone, dessicated blood, etc, all aestetically framed in gold and accompanied by gruesome martyrdom story) and the dead saint himself will thus channel your prayer so that you can influence the omniscient and omnipotent God more effectively.
PaulF wrote:
Are you really sure of this? It seems like an awfully bold statement.
To digress a bit, what’s with all the religion/politics posts lately? I really enjoy reading about the science but religion, eh, not so much. (and yes I can ignore those posts, just wondering if I’m the only one here)