07.11.09
Certain?
Why Atheists Shouldn’t be Afraid to be Certain
Say It Loud, Say It Proud: There is No God
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
The question of divinity is incoherent, and therefore its negation, as in atheism, is also incoherent. Atheists, especially the New Atheists, routinely deduce properties of the universe from their ‘atheism’ which are probably false. The falseness of those beliefs (e.g. natural teleology) does not affirm theism, but it does caution against the whole dilemma.
The cosmological argument may be false, but so is its antithesis.
It is important to see that both sides are part of a Kantian antinomy.
And then atheists also routinely assert that the design argument is explained away via Darwinian natural selection. But this belief in natural selection is as irrational as any belief in divinity. Again, the failure of natural selection does not prove the design argument, not my point.
But, overall, the issue is one from which no satisfaction is possible, noone, in Kant’s phrase, has ever gained a single inch of ground on either side of the issue, which makes it dangerous since at some point people get so frustrated they begin to kill each other.
As to the left, why should it be atheist. Better to stand beyond t he whole question altogether. Fuerbach was a poor guide.
Atheism claims that God does not exist. It does not claim anything about the usefulness of religion, or even the usefulness of believing that God exists. You can be an atheist and believe that religion should be treasured for its social benefits. You can feel the same way about mere belief in God’s existence. There are such atheists. You can believe in God and hate religion with a passion. Some believers do. And of course the smartest believers are smarter than the dumbest atheists. Irrelevancies aside, is there a case for atheism?
Atheism emerges from a two-stage argument. The first establishes that belief in God is unjustified. The second establishes that denial of God is justified: though the first stage doesn’t prove there is no God, it proves enough to justify the assertion that He does not exist.
Belief in God is unjustified because there is no reason to believe in God. There are alleged proofs of God’s existence: the ontological and cosmological proofs. The ontological proof is too abstruse to merit discussion here; it has little currency among believers. The cosmological proof says that there must be a first cause, namely God. But there is no reason why a first cause should be Godlike, nor why it has to be assumed.
To be a cause is to explain an event, and to explain an event is to give an account of how it came about. But positing any sort of first cause explains nothing; it simply places an entity for which there is no explanation at the start of a causal chain. So the cosmological proof has no force.
The other reasons alleged for belief in God are faith, and the order of the Universe. Faith is not only not reason; it is also not a reason to believe in something. Faith that there is a God may feel different from faith that your team will win, but no feeling, whatever its intensity or quality, can make non-evidence into evidence. We know the most intense faith can be wrong about worldly matters – why should it be more reliable on much tougher issues?
The only remotely plausible ground for believing in God is also the most popular: that there is some sort of design in the Universe. This doesn’t prove that a God designed nature, but it doesn’t have to, because if nature has a designer, God is a pretty good guess.
Atheists respond by arguing that the biological order in nature is better explained by selective adaptation than by design. This seems right, but it doesn’t justify atheism. For one thing, for the last 300 years there have been theists – “deists” – who hold that God operates through the laws of nature; perhaps He designed through natural selection. For another, even a good case for the best explanation doesn’t eliminate all the runners-up. That we should prefer the best explanation is a methodological rule of thumb, not a mathematical certainty or an unshakable dictate of experience. Worse, philosophers of science have a hard time explaining exactly what makes an explanation “best”: the criterion inevitably involves slippery concepts like “elegance”, “systematic power” and “informativeness” which so far have eluded precise definition. Perhaps this is why Dawkins, for instance, espouses something less than atheism. Like the bus signs, he says “there is probably no God”, which doubts rather than denies God’s existence.
If we’re more cautious about our arguments, we can be less cautious in our conclusions. Before we argue about design in nature, we need to know what counts as evidence for design. Nature, we will find, offers us no such evidence. This not only refutes the argument from design; it gives us enough reason to profess atheism.
makarios said,
July 11, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Thanks for the effort. It seems as though you make some pretty long leaps of logic but what else is an atheist to do
nemo said,
July 11, 2009 at 4:18 pm
What is you point? Am I a theist or atheist?
James said,
July 11, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Actually, I think your link unwittingly provided support for John’s point that it is better to ditch the Holy Trinity(atheism, theism, and agnosticism).
Stephen P. Smith said,
July 12, 2009 at 11:42 am
I do not believe in said trinity, because I do not believe in the freedom-giver, nor do I disbelieve, nor am I agnostic on the freedom-giver.
nemo said,
July 12, 2009 at 12:37 pm
You misunderstand James: he referring to the passage ‘Nth God Name Sequence’ at history-and-evolution.com
nemo said,
July 12, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Smith’s Hegel link got deleted, sorry.
Darwiniana » Confused reactionaries said,
July 12, 2009 at 1:01 pm
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