Do atheists know enough about the concept of God to reject it on rational grounds?
| September 5, 2010 | Posted by Steve Fuller under Atheism, Cosmology, Culture, Media, Mind, Philosophy, Physics, Religion, Science |
Sometimes I think atheists are simply having arguments with themselves – or, more precisely, with phantoms bred by their own ignorance. It’s easy to see why atheism does not make more headway, even in modern secular society: Once atheists begin to spell out the sort of deity they are rejecting, it becomes clear that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Julian Baggini, author of the Very Short Introduction of Atheism (perhaps the only one you need) and founding editor The Philosopher’s Magazine, is a very clever and amiable guy — under normal circumstances. But have a look at this piece, which appeared as the lead opinion piece in the most recent Saturday edition of The Independent, the liberal UK broadsheet paper. When an atheist pens a piece with the title, ‘If science has not actually killed God, it has rendered Him unrecognisable’, one wonders which screws have become loose.
Like others on this blog, I am always bemused by the ways in which atheists strive to say convincing things about a deity in whose existence they supposedly do not believe.
The occasion for Baggini’s piece is the publication of Stephen Hawking’s latest book, which apparently concludes that God was not necessary for the origin of the universe. (Since the book only comes out this week, no one has read it yet but there has been considerable media publicity surrounding this one point.) Baggini’s point is that physicists should not be taken as experts on God – even if, as in Hawking’s case, it’s not necessarily to God’s advantage – because physics is most likely atheistic anyway, and if not, then the sort of deity it allows is not one anyone believes in. Baggini appears to think that he’s doing both physics and theology a favour here. In truth, he is slighting both – not to mention the vast majority of religious believers whose idea of God is not tied to the ‘chap depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel’.
It’s clear that behind Baggini’s belligerent rhetoric is a plea for philosophy’s role in matters relating to the nature of God. This is fine, but it need not require driving a wedge between physics and theology, say, by dismissing appeals to the ‘mind of God’ as mere metaphor or (amazingly) singling out the Abrahamic God as the sort of deity that modern physics rules out of court. Both claims betray ignorance of various sorts.
In fact, I would suggest that perhaps the most fruitful way to understand the relationship between theology and physics is as accounts of reality’s ‘mind’ and ‘body’, respectively. This certainly allows much room for exploring possibilities, given the many positions philosophers have taken on the mind-body problem over the centuries.
36 Responses to Do atheists know enough about the concept of God to reject it on rational grounds?
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zeroseven:
CY @ 16:
Jurassicmac,
Actually you’ve answered the question I posed to 07. I asked him/her on what grounds he/she disagrees with me and KF on our definition of faith. I stated that on faith in my experiences with atheists, he/she would most likely answer that faith is belief in what is unreasonable. And here you are confirming just what I determined by reasonable faith, and contradicting that very evidence.
It can mean belief or trust in that which is unreasonable or untrustworthy, but does not have to mean that. Faith is basically an act of trust. You start your car and drive on roads, which you know can be very dangerous, and upon which people can be killed.
If you did not have faith in your own ability to safely drive your car and avoid the dangers, I dare say you wouldn’t drive. Nor would you take a bus or fly for that matter. You trust in your own ability as a driver or the abilities of others as drivers or pilots, because you have a reasonable belief that you or they are safe drivers or pilots. Do you have absolute proof of this? How could you?
So then based on a reasonable estimation of certain factors; how many times the pilot has crashed an airplane (hopefully none), or how many speeding tickets the bus driver has, you make the determination to get on the bus or the airplane. Heck, we don’t even go that far. We trust that because the pilot wears a uniform, he’s been hired by the airlines, and the airlines only hire experienced pilots with a safety record. It’s pretty much the same with bus drivers and yes, even yourself.
So I ask you; are we being reasonable or not when we get on an airplane or bus?
Now faith in the god Thor is unreasonable, but it is still faith. If I believe in Thor, like I believe in the bus driver, I trust that Thor exists, and perhaps that he may provide for my needs or keep me safe. I don’t have any evidence that he will. But this is not what makes my believing him faith. My act of trust is what makes it faith; whether it’s reasonable or not.
Now regarding:
Me: “There is as much reasonable evidence for the existence of God as there is for the fact that Obama is president.”
You: “That is quite a bold statement.”
It is a bold statement, but it is not an uncommon statement as if theists have not been making such statements, and now all of a sudden CY is breaking ranks. What do you think Christian apologists like William Lane Craig and N.T. Wright have been up to these last couple of decades? That you pay little attention to their arguments does not render their arguments null and void as if to make such statements is anathema to reason. Christians have been arguing the existence of God quite strongly for millennia. It shouldn’t surprise you that I would make as bold a statement as they.
Yes, every thought, which requires an element of trust requires faith. Faith is trust in the reasonableness of a proposition to the extent of action in light of that reasonableness. Therefore, if I believe that in order to accept something as true it must be empirically verified, I am acting on my trust that empirical verification is the means by which truth is known. That is faith. Therefore, to not believe in something, I am exercising the same trust in the exercise of empirically verifying a truth proposition as I would in confirming my belief in something that is reasonably valid.
Furthermore, the person who still believes in the god Thor is not necessarily exercising unreasonable faith. He/she may be accepting that faith or trust in Thor is reasonable despite evidence to the contrary. That is what in psychiatry is called a delusion. But people with delusions are not entirely unreasonable. Believe me, I’ve worked with them enough to know this.
Maybe this person does not possess the evidence to the contrary, or refuses to look at it for fear of angering Thor. For that person then, it is perfectly reasonable not to look at the evidence for not trusting Thor in order to avoid the perceived consequences. If you know anything about religious cults, this is how they are able to keep questions about the reasonable validity of the belief system from surfacing. They claim that God will strike you down if you don’t trust, or if you associate with certain people. So a person who refuses to look at contrary evidence may be acting very reasonably given their belief in the consequences.
But I’m pretty much done with this discussion, because I perceive it leading to a further discussion on first principles of reason, which we’ve exhausted nearly to the point of infinity, and yet to which we still face unending and unreasonable objection, which isn’t surprising.
Who was it on this board that said something like this: “to the principles we must go?”
“Every thought requires ‘faith’. Not believing in Santa requires ‘faith’. Not believing in the Flying spaghetti monster requires ‘faith.’ Not believing that my mailbox will turn into marshmallows if I sneeze requires ‘faith’.”
Even if the negation of these propositions were self-evident (which they are not), it would still require trust in the principles of right reason. Therefore, faith is still involved.
Folks:
In this thread, we are beginning to tread into the deep waters of worldview warrant on comparative difficulties across life option sets of first plausibles, i.e. what I have elsewhere called faith points. (The link is to the upgraded form of a course reader page for a course I gave some years back. Note the venue [and that this was a compulsory for graduation course], and then begin to think again on the notion that Christians are not interested in warrant for their beliefs and views.)
Sorry, it therefore looks like a bit of epistemology 101 and worldview analysis 101 are called for.
BTW, before going anywhere else, CY’s definition of faith as trust sufficient to act on it, is in fact in part a direct quote and in part a direct inference from the Bible:
Now, the second step is to understand what knowledge is, on 2500 years of discussion.
The best in-short description of most of what we accept as knowledge is:
That is, knowledge is a particular species of belief, based on our trust — that word again — in the basis for accepting it as true, a basis which must follow good and reasonable criteria.
Such reasonable criteria trace back to the first principles of right reason, and to the confidence we collectively have in our ability to correctly perceive the world as we experience it, internally — the transcendent, unified I that we all instinctively depend on — and the external world. If our inner world is untrustworthy, then confidence in our ability to accurately perceive and understand the external world collapses.
Similarly, if we have a set of claimed first plausibles — the core of a worldview — that boils down to mistrusting the general credibility of our mind, perception of the external world and experience, it is self-referentially incoherent and absurd.
Brains in vats worlds and the like can therefore be dismissed out of hand.
Next, we must recognise that here is a key error that skeptics often make, which founding father of the modern theory of evidence, Simon Greenleaf simply termed “the error of the skeptic” and which we have found it convenient to descriptively term, selective hyperskepticism.
The basic idea here is that one can always object to beliefs that one does not find attractive, but the issue is on what grounds do we disbelieve. If we find ourselves exerting a double-standard for warrant so that we have stacked the deck by demanding an unreasonable degree of warrant beyond what the nature of the case provides, we are in trouble. Mathematical claims require demonstrations relative to axioms, but recognising that in a post Godel world, axiomatic systems will be either incomplete or incoherent, and they can even be both. Mathematicians TRUST their axiomatic systems. In science, we have a lot of points where we must trust accuracy of perceptions, reports, the intelligibility of nature, the generality of natural law, the existence of reliable cause-effect patterns, etc etc. On history and in court, we have basic principles of evidence and sifting quality of claims, and the like. Selective hyperskepticism says “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” but by that means that what I don’t like, I will demand what by the nature of the case cannot be had. So, we see the double standard. We are in trouble.
Double-trouble, actually: for in order to disbelieve what we should — on reasonable warrant — believe, we have already had to swallow something else that we should not have.
Then, we can look at an abstract claim, A. This is accepted on a warranting basis B. But, why accept B? Thence, C, D . . .
So, we face either an infinite regress [absurd], or a circle, or else we have to find a set of first plausibles, F, that can stand up to reasonable scrutiny.
CY is correct above: the reality of the God of the Bible is actually stronger on the collective evidence across time — the epistemological history he points to — than the claim that Mr Obama is President of the USA.
For instance, Mr Obama is generally accepted to be president, but there are actually fairly serious questions as to whether his qualification on birth was adequately demonstrated. For, the short-form birth certificate his publicists have used is actually not a particularly reliable document: one can get it, it seems even if one were not in actuality born in HI. [We need to go back to the old, printing press produced, hand written birth certificate with witnesses, maybe jazzed up for C21 with inks that have dated coded microparticles in them. Just like, I have a lot more confidence in old fashioned paper ballots than any of the modernised voting systems.]
But, for most people, it is generally taken as acceptably warranted that Mr Obama is a natural born American.
By the standards for trusting documents used in this case for so serious a decision as the holder of the US Presidency, the New Testament is an extremely well authenticated C1 historical document [and even by much tougher, courtroom tested standards], one that has astonishing evidence of its accuracy, even on minor incidental details mentioned in passing that the writers such as Luke could not have realised were going to be specifically checked archaeologically etc.
In the case of 1 Cor 15:1 – 11, we have an AD 55 record of a standard creedal declaration taught to the Corinthians in AD 50, and tracing to the four leading men in the C1 church, in Jerusalem — where the key incidents described in it happened — in about 35 – 38 AD, i.e within 5 – 8 years of their public occurence. And of course the gospel and church based on those events started within walking distance of the physical evidence, and — highly significant, this — could not be stopped by hostile authorities, even by threats, beatings, imprisonment and judicial murder. Millions since have borne witness to life transforming encountering of God in the face of Jesus of Nazareth, the risen Christ, including the undersigned. And including some key figures in the history of our civilisation such as Pascal, Kelvin, Maxwell, Planck and Pasteur, just to name a few scientists.
It gets stronger.
1 Cor 15:1 – 11 points to fulfillment of prophecies of the scriptures, and in context Isa 53 is particularly in mind. This text, written prior to 700 BC — and we have two MSS from C2 or so BC thanks to the dead sea scrolls — specifically predicts a suffering servant messiah who would be despised and rejected, would work miracles of healing [and these have continued to happen in his name down to today, even for the undersigned, so I have enough back to sit up and type this, and the breath to do so as well], make his soul a sin offering and rise triumphant from ignoble death.
As in what happened to Jesus of Nazareth on the strength of 500+ eyewitnesses, none of whom could be broken to recant, not even in the face of whips [think cat of nine tails with bone or lead tied in the thongs -- an instrument of torture to crippling or death, not mere spanking], fire, stones and swords, or even crosses. (Paul was beheaded, Peter was crucified upside down, James was murdered in Jerusalem in the gap between two governors, John “only” suffered double exile: from his homeland then from his adoptive homeland in his old age — how he came to be on Patmos.)
There is of course a lot more, but let it suffice to say, I am far more confident of the grounds on which I accept that Jesus died for our sins, was buried, and rose the third day with 500+ witnesses, than I am of the right of Mr Obama to be sitting in the Oval Office.
(Ironically, if he would be willing to spend US$ 10, he could produce a long-form birth certificate that would remove all reasonable doubts. After several years and north of US$ 1mn in legal fees, he has not. Perhaps, the point is that — knowing the mainstream media are his best friends and allies, he figures to use the issue to help wedge off those who object as wackos, discrediting them on more central issues. I do know he is fully capable of that sort of deviousness, on track record. So, I freely confess to being a student in the Lucy Pevensie school of epistemology.)
Okay, I trust this allows us to clear the rubble enough to begin to lay a sound foundation.
GEM of TKI
PS: On identifying and correcting selective hyperskepticism
KF:
Oh no, you’re a birther!