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.
From Spaceman Spiff on Jun 26th, 2008 at 9:40 pm: “Do I understand you to mean that it’s impossible for delusions or even misunderstandings to exist if evolution is true?”
That is not at all what I meant. Perhaps my post was not clear. Allow me to try again.
If we (us humans) are hard-wired (“programed”) by evolution to have false beliefs, as asserted by Lawrence Crowell, then why should we trust our own reason? We can never really know whether what we think to be true is the result of a rational argument or is just one of those pre-programmed beliefs. We could have beliefs that are true AND/OR beliefs that are delusions, but we could not reliably distinguish between them.
As an example of the problem that we have here, I point to post #71. There is no empirical data on which Lawrence Crowell bases his argument in that post. But according to his own admission, evolution has caused him to have false beliefs. So why should I believe his argument. For that matter, why should he believe it?
This problem really comes into play when Sean Carroll asserts that the universe should “make sense” to him. But what value is that if he is hard-wired to have false beliefs?
The bottom line is that Lawrence B. Crowell’s assertion is self-defeating. If it is true, then it cannot be believed.
If you’re going to argue that it is unclear to say one does not believe in God because God itself is ambiguous, then I’m going to have to point out that the ambiguity first creates a problem with the theists. So, however the theists define their God, I say that’s a good starting point for the atheists to say “bull.” I’m no theologian, but I believe the general idea of God is some sort of omniscient, supreme being who created the universe and has some level of control over happenings in the universe (in the Christian faith, I believe that control ends at the free will of humans). So, as an atheist, I say I’m pretty sure that no such being exists. I think God has a few “features” to give meaning to the idea of believing/not believing. The tooth fairy takes your teeth away and leaves money; God created everything and listens to people and smites the wicked (or whatever). I believe it highly unlikely that a small winged creature came in the night to take my teeth as a child, and that a far more likely explanation is that my parents did so. I also believe it highly unlikely that any sort of supreme being(s) created all the life around me, and that a far more likely explanation is that they evolved, beginning in a soup of organic molecules that formed when the Earth was all young and hot and had lightning everywhere turning simple molecules into complex ones.
Someone above said something along the lines of “the best arguments for theism are brute force and/or popularity.” This reminds me of a poster I saw on one of these fundie nutter sites (I browse them occasionally when I’m feeling particularly in need of a good laugh). It had a picture of a kid with a gun on it (presumably Godlessness makes you kill people… but no one has ever killed anyone else because of God) and says something along the lines of “evolution demotes you from a special being in God’s image to just an animal. believe in God so you can feel special,” but not in so many words. I can’t find it, and if someone knows what I’m talking about and could provide a link, that would be awesome. I just always thought that poster was really telling: people need religion to feel that they have a special place in the world. Really, though, I think it’s much more awesome to think that beings such as ourselves could have had such humble beginnings.
Also, reading this post, I was reminded of a particular school-bus ride when I was in middle school (in conservative, whitey-white Protestant Indiana), overhearing some kids talking about atheism. I believe they got this “information” from their pastors or ministers or whatever, and they were discussing how atheists are evil Satan-worshippers. I, at the worldly age of 12, thought this was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. An atheist, by definition (just look at the etymology!) does not believe in God. WHY would such a person believe in, much less WORSHIP, God’s evil counterpart? Anyway, I just thought I’d share, to make everyone feel better about humanity. 😉
Apologies for posting so many times in a row, but when there are 70+ comments to read, I keep coming up with things to say before I get to the bottom
I beg to differ. First of all, I would say that, at least for me, atheism is not so much an active belief in the non-existence of as a lack of believe in the existence of a god. It may just seem like semantics, but there is an important difference. I don’t believe in God the same way I don’t believe in Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster. I don’t believe in any of those things, but I don’t sit around with people reveling in that disbelief. Also, I disagree with the idea that non are willing to admit they might be wrong. Agreed, there are some atheists that wouldn’t admit that possibility, and a whole heck of a lot of theists who wouldn’t, but personally (and I think I speak for the majority of atheists when I say this), if any real, solid believable evidence for the existence of God, I would definitely consider changing my mind (same goes for Big Foot, Loch Ness, etc). I think what I think because it seems to me to be the most likely possibility.
Because it’s Friday afternoon, and only the real die-hards are still reading this thread anyway, here’s a treat for you. It’s about my favorite song ever, and it illustrates why I refer to myself as a ‘spiritual atheist,’ without intending to imply that I believe in anything supernatural.
Enjoy, and have a good weekend.
The notion that atheism is impossible depends upon a fairly specific view of human cognition that derives originally from Plato and Aristotle and imagines what happens in consciousness as a top-down process as if our awareness and understanding of specific things and events depended upon high-level metaphysical commitments. Folks who buy into this idea are likely to think that people necessarily have something like a world view with a ruling principle in order to have any meaningful thoughts at all or make any sense of their own actions.
JCF on Jun 26th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Lawrence Crowell –
But these things you mention in your last paragraph — quantum wave functions, infinitesimal strings — aren’t they as “real” as anything else, if they somehow work?
—————–
I will betray one aspect of how I think about physics. The most real aspect of reality is information. In a particle experiment what is the most real is when a photo-multiplier tube goes “click” to register a voltage that is amplified and stored in some register or media. A statistical assembly of such data is used to reconstruct a scattering cross section or some channel process. This is compared to what we expect.
Think of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. We play the music or listen to it and our minds fixated upon the brilliant counterpoint of his second movement, or the uplifting of his choral fantasy Ode to Joy in the final movement. Yet we have to ask what is going on? You have people who are drawing coarse hair across strings, which in turn produces sounds which are transduce in an esquisitely designed resonance cavity made of wood. Other people are blowing air through their puckered lips into nozzle shaped pieces of metal that connect to these metal tubes all coiled up. Other people are banging membranes on cavities, blowing are through other pieces that create resonant acoustical sounds in tubes, and some are thrusting air through their larynx to create sounds in their throats. And so what does all of this sound do? It combines in a way that amounts to lots of acoustical pressure. Now suppose we set up detectors that pick this up. Some analysis is done, the first is maybe a fast fourier transform. What we find is that is not just white noise. There is signal in this system. From there lots of further work can be done. Some recent developments have shown that sequences of triads obey rules similar to those found in orbifolds. So is music in some ways a recherche of string theory?
If we were to send Bach, Beethoven or Debussey into the universe on EM fields and it were picked up by ETs they might perform this sort of analysis. They would deduce something about this information stream. Yet would they be able to capture the passion of Beethoven? For that matter, do we today understand fully the meaning sense of Bach’s Cantata 169 when he performed it in early 18th century Leipzig? Where is the essense of this music? Did Beethoven’s brain really exhibit patterns of orbifold compactification of D2-branes? And if so, where is the passion of Beethoven?
Physics is similar to this. We detect various elementary events and compare them to our models. We compose our systems of music, which we call mathematics, that are model systems of internal consistency. I will not for now get into the Platonic issue on these structures, such as Tegmark’s ideas, but for the time I will assume that these things are model construction of the human mind — until further data comes forth. We then compare our models to what it is that nature is telling us. These mathematical systems are developed for one reason: The beauty of it all, and with physics we employ them, facilitate their development or directly contribtue for one reason — nature must be beautiful. Nature is beautiful, but in the end it is dispassionate. The passion is something from us.
All of these things we consider as so real outside of data are in the end our passionate desires, which best be codified logically to have some prospect for science. What science really requires as real is data, and whether that comforms to our model constructions is up to nature. Nature is the final arbitar, and if we are wrong then so be it. In our motivation for beauty, just as with our Pleistocene ancestors we are guided by this anthropic brain which quests for beauty and tries to define that as truth — an eternal struggle, we continue onward.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Bravo!
To LC re post #82,
I second that “bravo”…a thoughtful read.
Extending what you say, each mind reads and especially interprets the information stored in the cosmic structure differently, because the way the universe is observed from each frame of reference is different.
Yet what occurs in time space at each frame of reference is also by definition…”real”. People contemporary with Mozart saw his music in a social context different than that of the 21st century. Some people today regard classical music as “disturbing noise” and others regard the contemporary music of the 21st century as equally disturbing “noise”. On a more elementary level, dogs, cats, fish and trees “read” the universe differently than we but their perspective on the universe also has an important place.
Modern cosmological models, as much as describing the universe, define the universe in such a way that everyone who studies and conceptually comprehends them can understand his or her place in the universe more fully, and (collectively with others) develop a workable and quite advanced technology from what has been emperically derived.
We need to remember (as you implied) that observation and consciousness are crucial to the very existance of the universe. Whether we relate the massive body of information and complexity we observe “correctly” is important if we wish to produce a viable technology…but clicks must be heard, recorded and related, if what we call the “Universe” is to exist. Consciousness and particulate existence are entangled concepts. We can’t “have one without the other”.
Lawrence, Sam,
It seems to me the issue is that while bottom up process is unitary, the top down order derived from it isn’t absolute in the sense that one frame can be derived from it. It is this assumption that this bottom up connectivity ultimately implies some absolute frame that is the basis of all Platonic assumptions, from monotheism to, as Lawrence says, Tegmark’s argument(s).
It amounts to confusing zero with one. Unitary doesn’t imply a universal unit.
Therefore, if we take away all cogent observers (but not necessarily data-recording devices), the universe does not vanish? Or does it?
“W. V. O. Quine has been one of the most ruthless of recent appliers of this principle [Ockham’s razor.] I recall an exchange in print (a fest-schrift, around 1980) where someone quoted Shakespeare’s “There are more things on heaven and earth, than are dreamed of in your philosophy” at Quine. Quine responded something like, “Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.” ”
– David Lyndes
Need anyone really say any more?
Dogmatic religionists do, and how, and they yap so incessently that they hardly ever give themselves a chance to listen, or if they ever manage a moment’s worth, bother to contemplate any argument they judge doesn’t conicide with their preconceptions.
In short, ladies and gentlemen, they don’t come from a place of reason and logic. They come from a place of authoritarian righteousness.
Oops, omitted word correction:
“Need anyone really need say any more?”
Pardon.
Wow, so sorry – The FIRST one was correct after all…guess it’s time for that new pair of glasses.
…and that’s an analog of how scientifically minded individuals work to correct their ‘beliefs”.
The universe obviously existed before H. sapiens walked onto the stage. At least we are able to deduce a long history, geologically and evolutionarily on Earth, astrophysically with the age of stars and cosmologically with redshift and Hubble distance. So in some sense the universe existed, but it may not have had conscious entities to confer some existential modality to the universe or assign it an ontology. With ET conjectures there must have been some time when on the Hubble frame the first ET came about, so maybe before hand the universe existed in a blind state or unaware of its existence. Whether this is necessary for a universe to exist is uncertain, and I have some negative opinions on anthropic principles. I think AP can only be admitted in physics and cosmology only when we are completely forced into it. This may happen in the future, where it could be the end of physics as a foundational science.
The universe will undoubtedly exist after H. sapiens is gone as well. Our species exists on very precarious terms. The biggest problem is that we are tearing down the planetary life support system. Global warming is an obvious problem, but to my mind equally disturbing are the disappearance of pollenating insects, ocean die-off and coral reef bleeching, tropical deforestation which has doubled in its rate in the last 20 years and so forth. Another disturbing trend is that we tend to place mentally disordered people in positions of great power. We have a President who learned foreign policy by playing the MB game Risk and took particular delight and glee at ordering executions as governor of Texas. This nation has been lead by a pantheon of schitzotypal personality disordered types for nearly 8 years. It appears likely that the world has not seen the last of this, and if not in the US then maybe in Russia or China or elsewhere. So to make an honest conclusion I think it likely the human species will not exist terribly much longer. Yet I think the universe will continue.
The final state of the universe is something we can talk about, though we can’t observe it. The AdS/CFT dualism and observed “eternal inflation” suggests that the final state of the universe is the AdS conformal infinity as an empty Minkowski spacetime. As the universe expands to become more deSitter-like eventually the cosmological horizon will likely emit a very weak radiation and the cosmological horizon will recede away “to infinity.”
The role of consciousness in the universe is strange. Before we ever get a handle on that we need to tackle the issue of “Why classical physics?” We might think of the universe as a grand path integral and the observable universe as some einselected state from all possible spacetime configurations. Einselection is an approach to understanding the role of classical physics according to how wave functions are reduced or so called collapsed offered by W. Zurek. In this process obviously classical gravity or general relativity emerged as well as large decoherent structures such as stars, planets and the like. I think that this einselection has some type of extremization to it where a cosmology is einselected so as to permit the maximum possible level of complexity in local regions. This might then tie cosmology to this bio-planet and the existence of ourselves.
The universe has a curious property where the most elementary of quanta or particles are indistinguishable, with some quantum statistics to go along with that. Larger decoherent structures are more distinquishable. We can fiind great differences between planets or between different species of life. The different “frames” of consciousness or POV may be tied to this.
It might also be the case that consciousness is in some ways analogous to a gauge potential. In physics there are two types of these. The first is with internal symmetries which give rise to gauge fields such as electromagnetism or QCD. Here the gauge potentials are not at all observable, and really don’t exist. The other is external symmetries which we call relativity. Here the equivalent of a gauge is a coordinate frame. This is in some sense observable, though it really is a sort of mathematical construction more than a physical one. Then of course comes supersymmetry which unifies these two types of gauge fields. If consciousness is some analogue of this then in some sense we might say that consciousness does not really exist. Of course this might raise all types of objections. Maybe mind exists in some platonic sense.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Non cogito ergo non sum?
The modus tolens of cogito ergo sum would be
not-(I am) —> not-(I think) = non sum ergo non cogito.
To state non cogito ergo non sum implies a necessary and sufficient condition. I am not sure this obtains. Of course the statement “I am” implies some recognition of beingness. This is a bit different from saying it does not exist therefore it does not think. Of course I think that anything which is capable of awareness or thought is a physical system, but I don’t know that.
It is interesting to note that “I am” is the identification God tells to Moses. If you are familiar with the Gospels, Jesus in Matthew identifies himself as “I am,” in the temple, where upon the priests and crowd chase after him and he disappears. Descartes in making this little syllogism came close to committing a blasphemy that could have gotten his ass in a major sling. Consider that mid 17th century Europe was coming out of a serious funk over the reformation and counter reformation.
Lawrence B. Crowell
In fairness I think it should be pointed out that the Catholic Encyclopedia dates from 1917 (hence the ubiquity of the masculine pronoun and other anachronisms). But bad arguments (or in this case, absence of argument) were still bad arguments in 1917.
Lawrence,
It would seem consciousness is some form of bottom up emergent phenomena, in the sense that it is apparent in lower order fauna and there really is no clear line between biological reactive functions and conscious perception. Even much of human activity could be argued is primarily reactive while still being conscious. The intellect, on the other hand, is a modeling of reality, a top down ordering of perception. The Platonic Ideal is the top down order as absolute, of which all other form is corrupt copy. Since the unitary state is formless, there is no absolute form and the projection of one simply serves to stifle further evolution, creating a constrictive and brittle model that only serves to hinder further upward process, until it breaks down and a new form begins to take shape. “Punctuated Equilibrium,” as Stephen Jay Gould called it. So the intellect would be the construct, while consciousness is an emergent reality.
“Another disturbing trend is that we tend to place mentally disordered people in positions of great power.”
A trend, come to think of it, that recedes to the beginning of recorded history, and not merely in the case of political power. One thinks immediately of Caligula, perhaps one or two popes. Unfortunately, the weapons at their disposal continue increasing exponentially in efficacy, as the terrors of the Old Testament continue to fade.
Yet, inasmuch as time and causality move in both directions, as Sean points out, did some compulsion to create the catastrophe, say, of the Iraq war produce the backwards causation for the Scalia decision declaring Florida for Dubya?
Re cogito, remember Popeye’s great self-affirmation, I yam what I yam, which may have influenced Descartes’ immemorial syllogistic aphorism.
Hi, Sean,
You say,
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!
I’m not sure what ‘stance’ this is referring to; but the “cite the relevant passage” part is absurd. Do you think niche encyclopedias define every technical term they use, given that they can assume that certain things are known by their intended audience? Since the Catholic Encyclopedia is a niche encyclopedia, it would require looking at the context in which it was written, namely, in the context of what would have been generally recognized by educated Catholics of the sort had in view by the encyclopedists in 1917; in the context of the article, the natural approach would also be to look at Bacon and Arnold, to whom the article explicitly refers on this point.
This is pretty basic stuff, not rocket science, as you well know: don’t quote out of context, look for the broader context of the text itself, don’t build arguments out of mere verbal similarities, don’t read into silences without investigation, in short, hold yourself at least to elementary rational standards. And the post, as I said, is a pretty decent parody of what atheist reasoning would become if all atheists argued like intelligent design theorists, since these are precisely the uncritical moves for which IDers are often rightly criticized.
By the way, I should mention, for those who don’t have the time to devote to critical analysis of an article largely removed from their primary interests, that in context one can draw some fairly probable conclusions about what ‘formal positive dogmatic atheism’ in the article would have to be, despite there being no explicit definition; it would be a view of the world that took the nonexistence of God not as a derived conclusion but as a first principle, i.e., as an axiom (cf. the “blank Atheistic denial” of the Existence of God article). You can see this simply by looking at what it is contrasted with, namely, negative atheism, every case of which involves the nonexistence of God being derived from (1) assessment of the evidence of the natural world; (2) assessment of the limits of the human mind; (3) more fundamental principles, e.g., those of materialism. All three of these are cases where the existence of God turns out to be excluded on the basis of something more fundamental; the opposing position is then plausibly seen as atheism taken as a fundamental principle in its own right. This is confirmed not only by the “blank” comment in the EG article, but also by the comment in the Atheism article that certain advanced phases of materialistic philosophy approach the category of postive dogmatic atheism when they “have left the sphere of exact scientific observation for speculation”. That is, positive atheists are atheists as a matter of metaphysical commitment (speculation, which is used to be a term commonly applied to areas of human thought where you recognize truths not by collating evidence but by simply seeing that they are true).
There are ambiguities due to poor writing; but I take it that we are not here considering an argument about how best to write encyclopedia articles. However, the basic idea is easy enough to see; it just requires the application of basic reading skills. That’s what makes the post such a great satire of certain ID methods for criticizing their critics: it’s exactly the sort of thing they do, trading on ambiguities, lapses in good writing habits, verbal similarities, obscurity of context, etc., in order to put forward a superficially plausible criticism that doesn’t stand up to basic critical examination.
The grand meaning of all possible parts, is in the context of their whole.-Aiya-Oba (Poet/Philosopher).
Do atheists exist? Are we meant to address more general existential questions first, such as “do beliefs exist?”? Several posters pointed out the futility of addressing such arguments. However, they also describe weights that their sense of reason requires them to ascribe to the relative rationality of various beliefs, including that of “disbelief in God or gods”, “lack of belief in God or gods”, “disbelief and/or lack of belief in the Loch Ness Monster” as well as an implicit “belief in the existence of things which are generally believed to exist by all people”.
Naturally, all of this begs the question. Can we use reason to increase our knowledge in this, or in any matter? While this might seem a most treacherous notion to posit amongst scientists, the absolute nature of the question (or any absolute question, such as “does paper exist”) does in fact inspire this logical fallacy noted in the first sentence of this paragraph.
I make these comments, for the most part, in ignorance of the history of epistemology, so I apologize if I have made any basic mistakes with regard to that subject. And while I have been, more or less, resolute in my own beliefs with regard to the matter, it seems that the conflation of personal and rational beliefs is particularly poignant in this topic, as it is quite likely that our own beliefs that rationality is the ultimate path to “knowledge” is what drove many of us into pursuing careers as scientists in the first place.