19 posts tagged “atheism”

I was surprised to see these points made by an atheist in a blog post elsewhere. 

1. Having an explanation does not make your position superior to that of those who may lack one.
2. Not being able to explain a phenomenon doesn't preclude you from legitimately assuming the reliability of that phenomenon
3. Assuming the reliability of a phenomenon without being able to 'account for' it does not mean that you implicitly accept the world view of people claiming that theirs is the only explanation of that phenomenon.
4. The failure of a person to explain a phenomenon doesn't invalidate their world view or render it inconsistent.
5. Acknowledging that you don't have an answer is better than making things up.

These points were made in attempt to refute presuppositionalism, a position for which I have no opinion. My question is does the author offer the same concessions to theistic belief that it has allowed for himself in these five points?  I don't think so.  For sake of discussion, I think it is fair to equate the concept of a lack of explanation to acceptance by faith.

1. Having an explanation does not make your position superior to that of those who hold their position by faith.
2. Accepting a phenomenon by faith doesn't preclude you from legitimately assuming the reliability of that phenomenon.
3. Having faith a phenomenon by faith without being able to 'account for' it does not mean that you implicitly accept the world view of people claiming that theirs is the only explanation of that phenomenon.
4. That a person accepts a phenomenon by faith doesn't invalidate their world view or render it inconsistent.
5. Acknowledging that you accept some things on faith is acceptable.

I believe having an explanation is the superior position, that not being able to offer an explanation forces one to take things for granted and/or to rely on something/one external to decide for us what is true, that the worldview of other people with an explanation may be less dependent on faith, that the inability to explain, while not necessarily invalidating one's worldview, certainly calls into question the reasons for holding said worldview, and that the more options held open the more likely one is to find truth.  I believe that both theists and atheists accept certain premises on faith and that acknowledging that they do so is better than dissembling, equivocating, and wrapping oneself in blankets of deliberate ambiguity.

I have no idea where I'm going with this.  Apparently I just needed to get something off my chest.  Anyway, overall you'll find a thought-worthy article although I think the author probably needs to revisit his five points in light of a broader application.  Presuppositionalism is something I need to understand eventually--probably sooner than later.

I'm back on Clifford's Principle again today--the one in which he asserts "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

Consider these propositions:

    P1 Theism is true.
    P2 Atheism is true.

The theist believes P1 and atheist believes P2.  The tendency is to demand the theist provide evidence while the atheist gets off the hook.  A negative cannot be proved, they argue.  Phooey, I say.  Neither should get off the hook.  If person believes P2 he should have evidence supporting that proposition.  To quote Carl Sagan, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  Lacking sufficient evidence, agnosticism is the only reasonable position and not only in religious matters.

I've never heard Clifford's Principle invoked against anything but religious belief.  I wonder why. 

Although I've become quite the skeptic or agnostic of late, it troubles me when ill-informed unbelievers, disbelievers, atheists, or whatever claim that it's reasonable to conclude there is no God because there is no scientific evidence of his existence.  Such claims beg the question.  Science deals with the natural world.  To demand scientific evidence of God assumes that God is not supernatural and therefore is not God at all.  Not only is this type of reasoning begging the question, it is also an example of the argument from ignorance because it assumes the existence of God to be false because it has not been proved to be true.

Victor Reppert has linked to a thought provoking article called "Is There Scientific Proof of God?" that is worth reading.  Here's a snippet:

...the only way science can empirically prove the existence of ‘God’ is if the Naturalist position is correct.  But if ‘God’ were empirically proven, He would necessarily be a part of Nature, and thus not Supernatural – nor God – at all.  To prove Him scientifically would be to disprove Him. In other words, if the Naturalist position is correct, science could never offer proof of Supernature because once science proves a thing, it proves that thing belongs to Nature.  If the Supernaturalist’s position is correct, no manner of science could ever offer proof of a supernatural God, because by definition God is 'not of Nature', the only realm where science is equipped to speak.  "...god isn't a scientific phenomenon, and hence cannot be evaluated using scientific methods."

A review of Christopher Hitchens' "careless and dishonest polemic" God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Tom Piatak .

Here's one paragraph:

Although Hitchens’ book is lively and well written, it is fatally marred by its many rhetorical evasions and falsehoods.  Throughout the book, whatever Hitchens dislikes is blamed on religion and whatever he likes is credited to something else.  A clergyman Hitchens admires, Martin Luther King, is dismissed as someone who was “in no real … sense … a Christian.” By contrast, Hitchens blames the atheistic dictatorships that killed more people in the 20th century than had been deliberately killed by the state in all the preceding centuries on religion, offering up the Jesuit missions of Paraguay which protected the Indians until their dissolution as the first successful instance of totalitarianism and claiming that “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.” What Hitchens ignores is that Christian Europe produced very few theocracies, because the Church, basing herself on its founder, has always taught that men should “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” The political legacy of Christianity is thus one of law and liberty, not one of unitary despotism and worship of the state.  In Hitchens’ strange mental universe, religion is to blame for slavery—a primordial human institution abolished in major part by religious men such as William Wilberforce—and the Rwandan genocide, where one Catholic ethnic group slaughtered a different Catholic ethnic group.  Hitchens also repeats the Communist inspired lie that Pius XII was “pro-Nazi,” citing as his sole authority the book by John Cornwell that has been so thoroughly discredited by serious historians that even its author no longer makes such a claim.

Complete Article

If God is dead, does that mean we cannot survive our own deaths? Recent best-selling books against religion agree that immortality is a myth we ought to outgrow. But there are a few thinkers with unimpeachable scientific credentials who have been waving their arms and shouting: not so fast. Even without God, they say, we have reason to hope for — or possibly fear — an afterlife.

Curiously, the doctrine of immortality is more a pagan legacy than a religious one...

Read more @ NYTimes

Jim Holt offers a thought provoking piece, however, I have to wonder what led him to distinguish paganism from religion.

Peter writes:

Pantheism is the belief that nature/the universe/the totality of everything is god. Within pantheism we can make a further distinction, between those who attribute nothing to the universe besides facts derived empirically, whom I shall call rational pantheists, and those who attribute certain additional, mystical, properties to it, whom I shall call irrational pantheists. Clearly there is no chance that irrational pantheism will collapse into atheism. However, irrational pantheism isn’t an especially attractive position; by accepting certain facts on faith alone it isn’t on any firmer ground than traditional religious belief. Rational pantheism has greater draw, within certain circles, since it tries to free itself from a foundation of blind faith while at the same time retaining some elements of traditional religious belief. However, I claim that rational pantheism is the same as atheism, meaning that the beliefs of atheists and rational pantheists have the same content, and that they differ only in terminology (emphasis added).

...snip...

The word “god” carries many connotations with it, it is used by many to designate the final arbiter of right and wrong, the creator of the universe, and usually a being who should be worshipped. By hanging onto this old word pantheists run the risk of unconsciously projecting some of these old connotations onto the universe. And even if the pantheists themselves don’t make that mistake many people who hear them will. Thus it seems wiser, to me, to simply call the universe “the universe” and leave “god” out of it. This is why I would describe the (rational) pantheist as a confused atheist; they believe the same things that the atheists do, but they discuss their thoughts using an archaic terminology that often encourages confusion, unnecessarily.

Read more @  On Philosophy

 
I read this article a few days ago but I didn't give it a lot of thought until I read the article on Richard Dawkins by Ruth Gledhill.  I commented in a previous post that after reading Gledhill's article I wondered if Dawkins' atheism was a matter of semantics rather than conviction.  In light of that, some of the points raised in Pantheism is Confused Atheism suddenly seem more poignant for me.

Hat tip: Stephen
Note: Moving the date forward because this is on my mind again recently.

A scathing commentary by Peter Berkowitz at WSJ.com's Opinion Journal has this conclusion:

http://www.opinionjournal.com

In making his case that reason must regard faith as an enemy to be wiped out, Mr. Hitchens declares Socrates's teaching that knowledge consists in knowing one's ignorance to be "the definition of an educated person." And yet Mr. Hitchens shows no awareness that his atheism, far from resulting from skeptical inquiry, is the rigidly dogmatic premise from which his inquiries proceed, and that it colors all his observations and determines his conclusions.

Mr. Hitchens is by far the most erudite and entertaining of the new new atheists. But his errors and his excesses are shared by the whole lot. And these errors and excesses have pernicious political consequences, amplifying invidious distinctions among fellow citizens and obscuring crucial differences among believers world wide.

Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today, the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great evil pathology, today's bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America's destruction.

Like philosophy, religion, rightly understood, has a beginning in wonder. The most wonderful of creatures are human beings themselves. Of all the Bible's sublime and sustaining teachings, none is more so than the teaching that explains that humanity is set apart because all human beings--woman as well as man the Bible emphasizes--are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).

That a teaching is sublime and sustaining does not make it true. But that, along with its service in laying the moral foundations in the Western world for the belief in the dignity of all men and women--a belief that our new new atheists take for granted and for which they provide no compelling alternative foundation--is reason enough to give the variety of religions a fair hearing. And it is reason enough to respect believers as decent human beings struggling to make sense of a mysterious world.

Along the same lines, check out The Idiot's Guide to New Atheism at Prosthesis.

The Barefoot Bum discusses propositions and hypotheses in the context of Metaphysical Natrualism. Stephen Law reviews Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing by Bede Rundle. The Christian Thinker, Brian Tapp, discusses Richard Dawkins' Ultimate 747 argument here, here, and begins his counterargument here. At Naturalistic Atheism, debater posts an Open Letter to Theists about Abusing Atheists. At Dance of the Mind, Laura reviews the documentary Sex and the Celts. George, at The Paleo Blog suggests Freedom Is The Answer--Not Just A Return To The Constitution.

Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing Sex And The Celts

Yesterday I posted the conclusion of an article by Michael Gerson entitled What Atheists Can't Answer.  Christopher Hitchens responded with a piece of his own. 

Here's his conclusion:

"In a world without God," he writes, "this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature -- imprinted by evolution but designed for disappointment." Again, he substitutes the wish for the thought. We very probably are, as he admits, not the designed objects of the Big Bang or of the process of natural selection. But this sober conclusion, objective as it is, is surely preferable to the delusion that we have been created diseased, by a capricious despot, and then abruptly commanded to be whole and well, on pain of terror and torture. That sick joke is one that we can cease to find impressive, that belongs in the infancy of our species, and gives a false picture of reality that we would do well to outgrow.

Complete Article at WasthingtonPost.com

Interesting piece found on Sam Harris's blog reaches this conclusion:

None of this amounts to proof of God’s existence. But it clarifies a point of agreement—which reveals an even deeper division. Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature—imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

This form of “liberation” is like liberating a plant from the soil or a whale from the ocean. In this kind of freedom, something dies.

What Atheists Cant Answer