Atheism - Arguments
I am an atheist.
I believe that no God or gods exist.
It would be wonderful if some of the gods described in human mythology
and theology existed.
It would be appalling if some others existed
(e.g. the Old Testament god, or the Muslim god).
Sadly in some cases (and thankfully in others),
there is no evidence for any of them.
They are all just stories, inventions of our imagination.
The problem with Pascal's Wager.
It applies to all gods.
You have to believe in Allah and Baal and Ganesh too,
in case they punish you.
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The existence of God
- David Hume
(and here)
-
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
- In Section X, "Of Miracles",
Hume provides the classic rule
for a follower of reason
to judge all stories of miracles:
The idea that the person reporting the story is mistaken
must be more fantastic than the idea of the miracle.
- As Hume puts it,
"no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle,
unless the testimony be of such a kind,
that its falsehood would be more miraculous,
than the fact, which it endeavours to establish"
- When considering a fantastic story -
such as a miraculous cure,
an alleged Apparition of Mary,
the Virgin Birth,
Christ's alleged miracles,
the Resurrection,
or stories of miracles in other religions
- we should apply this rule,
and ask
is the possibility that the person reporting the story is mistaken
more fantastic than the story itself.
-
Clearly the answer in these cases is no.
So no rational person can believe in any of these stories.
- Hume's rule clearly makes sense.
And yet applying it would make the whole world deists at most.
Religion
only survives because people
simply ignore Hume's argument.
In particular, David Hume provides an answer to the
"Lord, Liar, or Lunatic"
argument
(or "trilemma")
centuries before the much lesser mind of
C.S. Lewis.
C.S. Lewis argues that Jesus must either be a liar, a lunatic, or be telling the truth.
He claims the first two are impossible, so concludes that Jesus must be telling the truth.
David Hume long ago answered Lewis' argument:
- First of all, these are not
the only 3 options.
A simple alternative option is "Misquoted".
- But even if we accept for the sake of argument that these are
the only 3 options,
by the Hume argument
it is clear that "Liar" and "Lunatic", however implausible,
however virtually impossible,
are less, not more, implausible than the supernatural explanation of "Lord".
However unlikely it is that people at the time
were deceived about Jesus being divine,
working miracles, rising from the dead, and so on;
however unlikely it is that they would be willing to die for false beliefs;
and however unlikely it is that false beliefs could spread so rapidly
across the world,
it is still more, not less, fantastic to believe that he
was divine, and a god and a supernatural world exists.
That is Hume's law, and it shows us that there is no religion on earth that
has sufficient evidence to follow it.
- Pascal's Wager
(and here)
- You should believe in God because if you're wrong, you lose nothing.
Whereas if the atheist is wrong, he loses the chance of salvation.
- Problems with Pascal's Wager:
- Pascal's Wager
only works if you half-believe in God and an afterlife already.
You have to believe, for example, that it is a priori likely
that a God would reward belief and punish disbelief.
What if God punished belief, though?
Knowing nothing about God, that is just as likely as the alternative.
To believe that it is a priori more likely
that a God would reward belief
is to already believe in something.
-
Another problem is that of picking which God to worship.
Pascal's Wager is often promoted by Christians.
But non-Christian gods might exist,
and punish Christians for not believing in them.
Why don't the Christians apply Pascal's Wager to Zeus, Thor, Osiris,
Krishna and Allah?
Aren't they being inconsistent?
-
In summary, Pascal's Wager
has nothing to say to unbelievers.
It only works if you believe already.
David Quinn is on the right in Ireland,
and like many other people I read on the right, I agree with much of what
he says on politics,
but disagree with his (traditional Christian) ideas on religion.
With the atheist
Richard Dawkins
it is the opposite -
I agree with him on religion
but disagree with his (traditional left-wing) politics.
So it is interesting to hear a
debate between David Quinn and Richard Dawkins,
on
RTE Radio One,
The Tubridy Show,
9 Oct 2006,
especially given that religious people
think he destroyed Dawkins.
I think Quinn is largely wrong,
but Dawkins doesn't do a good job of asking him hard questions.
- "God" made matter:
- Quinn claims that science
"doesn't explain .. how matter came into being in the first place.
That, in scientific terms, is a question that cannot be answered and can only be answered,
if it can be answered fully at all, by philosophers and theologians.
But it certainly cannot be answered by science
and the question of whether God exists or not cannot be answered fully by science either".
These are simply assertions for which there is no evidence.
(1) We do not know the limits of future science.
(2) Many concepts of God have already been disproved by science
over the last 300 years.
People keep inventing new, more slippery ones.
(3) Theology has never answered any questions ever. It is a non-subject.
(4) Quinn's answer, that something called "God" made matter, is no explanation at all,
for it fails to explain what made God.
If the answer is "Nothing made God",
then why not use that answer for matter?
-
As a comment says:
"matter is immediate and undeniable; God is not at all evident and is easily deniable.
It is far more reasonable to say that man created God than that God created matter."
- Free will:
- Quinn claims that:
"an atheist believes we are controlled completely by our genes and make no free actions at all".
He is confused.
Most cognitive scientists
(e.g. Minsky)
cannot see how
free will
can exist
in the pure, technical sense,
if our brains are physical machines
(i.e. all effects must have a chain of physical causes),
but no one disputes that
it feels like we have free will
- that
what we have is indistinguishable in practice from free will.
What everybody means colloquially by "free will" exists,
even if technically it may not.
-
Or does Quinn claim that it does - that our brain really operates independent
of causality?
Instead of answering the question -
of showing how physical effects in the brain can occur with no physical cause
(i.e. neurons firing for no physical reason) -
Quinn just says it feels like we have free will, therefore we do.
- There are two different definitions of "free will" in this debate.
Dawkins addresses the first, that we can rebel against our DNA.
He denies what Quinn attributes to him:
"I certainly don't believe a word of that.
I do not believe we are controlled wholly by our genes."
Like Darwin himself, Dawkins urges humans to rebel against evolution.
Evolution made us, but that doesn't mean we have to respect it.
We're in charge now, not blind and cruel nature.
The very conclusion of Dawkins' most famous book,
The Selfish Gene
(1976), runs like this:
|
"We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and,
if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination.
...
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines,
but we have the power to turn against our own creators.
We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."
|
If Quinn is not aware of this, he is not very well read.
-
Dawkins, though, here does not address the second definition of "free will"
- as to whether free will technically exists
(if our rebellion against DNA is simply a product of material causes too,
if we include the entire previous history of the universe).
Dawkins doesn't ask Quinn the hard question above:
Does he believe in uncaused effects in the brain?
Do neurons sometimes fire for no physical reason?
Do all animals have these uncaused effects in their minds?
Does all life?
Would alien life have uncaused effects?
When did uncaused effects start in history?
Did Homo habilis
have this "free will"?
Did the Australopiths?
When did it start?
Did one day a mother not have it and her child have it?
Could science in theory observe such uncaused effects in the brain today,
and thereby prove dualism
true?
- The cosmological argument:
- Killings for atheism:
- Finally, Quinn argues that the democide of the
communists
should be attributed to atheism,
and it is unfair to go on about killings for religion
while not also talking about killings for atheism.
But wouldn't it be fairer to say that
Stalin and Mao killed for the belief system of communism,
rather than for atheism?
- It is not unfair to talk about
killings for Christianity,
since Quinn is a Catholic,
and the Catholic church claims a line of continuity with
the blood-soaked medieval Catholic church,
and other violent killers like
Moses
(who is glorified even today by Quinn's church).
Whereas atheists like Dawkins and I
claim no continuity with
the deranged, evidence-free cult of communism.
-
Where was God's church in the Middle Ages, Quinn should ask himself.
And how could God support a rapist and butcher of innocents like Moses,
Quinn should also ask himself.
There is a
similar debate
between
an atheist whose opinions on religion I share,
but whose politics is sometimes ill thought-out
(though not at all as bad as Dawkins),
Sam Harris,
and
a theist whose ideas on politics I respect,
but whose ideas on religion I don't,
Dennis Prager.
-
As I say, Harris' politics aren't at all as bad as Dawkins.
I can't imagine Dawkins saying to Prager:
"I strongly suspect that you and I have similar views of the risks posed to civilization
by the spread of Islam. We probably draw some of the same lessons
from the failures of multiculturalism in Western Europe"
-
Harris has one great rebuttal to Prager,
as Prager presents tired old "arguments" for belief,
which is that the Islamists say the same thing:
"A further irony, of course, is that the civilizational threat that worries us both
- Islamic fascism
- is purely the product of religious faith,
held for precisely the reasons (or pseudo-reasons) you defend.
...
Let me assure you that "sophisticated" Muslims resort to the same rationalizations
that Francis Collins does to prop up their belief in mighty Allah.
Indeed, your "awesome beauty of nature" is one of the chief rationales for faith found in the Koran.
How many more people will have to die because of this Iron Age response to the beauty of nature?"
-
I agree with a lot of what he says
on politics,
but sometimes on religion
Dennis Prager talks rubbish.
More Dawkins on RTE:
- Another rather unenlightening debate
on "The Late Late Show", Dec 2006.
The UCD Philosopher
Gerard Casey
was deeply unimpressive.
Couldn't he have thought of at least one interesting thing to say?
- A much more enlightening, friendly interview
on "The Panel", Dec 2006.
The comedian
Ed Byrne
actually makes some sharp points,
much better than Gerard Casey.
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