Tom and I have briefly crossed paths before. Following a discussion over at SoM’s site, I wrote a post based upon that discussion. I recently dissected another of SoM’s rants, and shared those thoughts with Tom. In response, Tom has written a new post, and that is the post I take a look at here. To quote:
What is the difference between an Agnostic and an Atheist? An Agnostic says, “I don’t know.” An Atheist says, “There is no God.” Since there is no way of proving there is no God, the Atheist is making a faith-based leap that far exceeds the faith required to be a Christian. Of course, since the illogic required to be an Atheist is obvious, many Atheists try to redefine the term. However, if one just doesn’t know whether God exists, it makes more sense to call ourselves Agnostic.
I dare say that here, we have an example of expecting atheists to prove a negative. ‘prove there is no god’. Prove there is one. God, be it in a Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Hindu, or any other form, has not revealed themselves to humanity in any way shape or form, save for in texts written thousands of years ago, and these texts often contradict both each other, and observable facts about the world and universe. These texts are often highly self-referential, which is to say, their proof of accuracy is because they say they’re accurate.
Let’s consider the basic question. Does God exist? If you are going to insist upon empirical evidence, no. However, an insistence upon empirical evidence is a silly requirement. The notion that we have the tools to study the Creator and do reproducible experiments upon Him is just absurd. Do we have the capacity to apprehend the Being that created the universe? Not likely. Yet you assume we can.
When dealing with observable facts, and evidence-driven conclusions, what conclusions should we reach? The idea of a supreme creator is entirely faith driven, not fact-driven, and Tom, you more or less admit that. People who address the world in observable terms aren’t going to acknowledge a being that has not been observed, and indeed, cannot be observed, and for which no evidence exists. Every process in the known universe could have formed naturally. It is a question of probability, but it is far from impossible. I refer to the excellent Creation Theory, and an experiment you can run there, involving dice.
The point I am making is, we do not need the existence of God to explain the evolution of the universe or our world. Our studies of the universe have demonstrated this. Any arguments about the supernatural and divine are impossible to verify. From a purely practical, logical point of view, they are therefore irrelevant.
The question of whether or not God exists is a philosophical problem, not a scientific one. That is one reason the Greek philosophers approached the existence of God from that perspective, and we have not progressed to the point where we can do much better.
For the most part, I broadly agree here. It is impossible to prove God’s existence from a logic-driven, observation-driven, scientific perspective.
What does our science do for us? Well, we can probably see that Creation is much more beautiful, ordered, and delicate than the ancients realized. Few of them would have perceived the ground that they stood upon was just part of a gigantic ball of air, water, earth, and molten rock that revolved around a nuclear inferno. We don’t have the capacity to directly perceive the vast emptiness of space. Still even the ancients somehow managed to grasp that the stars move with clockwork precision. And all without a guiding Intellect, a Creator, a First Cause? That defies logic.
All that we see and observe could, as mentioned earlier, form naturally, over time. The odds of that may be great, but they are not impossible, and all it would take is time. The universe is billions of years old, and the earth is billions of years old, so all these processes have had plenty of time. Not only that, but we can see from fossil records how chaotic this process is. Evolution isn’t linear; earth’s history is littered with extinct creatures that could not adapt.
As for a ‘first cause’, we simply don’t know, but just because we don’t have an answer at this moment, does not mean we’ll never find an answer. The absence of knowledge doesn’t automatically mean we apply any form of god to the equation. Even if we did, which god? Maybe none of the gods in earth’s history are responsible. Perhaps the universe exists as we know it, because of a vast alien intelligence. We can speculate endlessly, but in the end, assuming a divine involvement takes a lot more faith than following the evidence.
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Many atheists are agnostic atheists. I know, I am. I am agnostic on the God question. Since we don’t possess infinite knowledge, we can’t know for certain whether a god exists. Perhaps someday in the future a deity of some sort might reveal itself to us, but so far there’s no evidence a god exists. Is it possible a god exists? Sure. But, is it probable? No. When it comes to the extant human created religions such as Christianity and Islam, I’m an atheist. I have sufficiently investigated and studied these religions, and I can confidently say the Abrahamic God is a myth.
So, I’m an agnostic, as described above, but I live my day to day life as an atheist. When new information for a deity’s existence is presented to me I’ll consider it. Until then, I am a convinced atheist.
Well-said Bruce, as always.
Enjoyed your response. Full disclaimer: Tom’s my older brother and I love him and he loves me, but that is about all we agree on most of the time. Fuller disclosure: I’m a believer, a rather orthodox, although perhaps nonconventional, Catholic.
That said, although we may have different concepts of what “faith” is, I basically agree with you that much of a belief that there is an intelligence to reality that gives all life, and each our own lives, some kind of meaning and purpose must derive from something like faith. However, whether you want to call that necessarily unknowable and undefinable supreme intelligence “God”, or the laws of nature, or whatever, except for sociopaths and psychopaths, we all act with an intentionality toward certain moral and material and emotional goals “as if” our lives had meaning and purpose. After that, for me at least, it all gets more derivative than deterministic, more a matter of awe and wonder than dogma and formulaic canon law, more an embrace of complexity and ambiguity than comfortable simplicity and certainty.
I also don’t have any desire to evangelize anybody either to a given religion or to atheism (which, as you imply, is a religion of sorts). Truth speaks for itself and is either convincing or not based upon our human capacity to understand it when we see it.
Finally, I think that we all have what I have heard called “God shaped minds”. Those human vessels end up being filled with a mythology (I use that term broadly without regard to the truth or falsity of the mythological belief system) even if we pretend otherwise. A belief that we can overcome religious faith with reason simply makes religion out of reason, a religion that actually isn’t very rational. Faith is the nature of the human psyche, consciously and unconsciously, emotionally and rationally, whether we like it or not. I would argue that we humans just don’t possess the perfect cynicism required to perfect nonbelief anymore than a dog can do astrophysics.
If you don’t mind, despite my basic agreement with your argument, here are a few counter questions:
1. Have you ever considered that the “supernatural” may just be the “natural” that we either have not understood yet or simply may not have the capacity to ever understand?
2. Rather than a “first cause”, have you thought about the Thomist argument of a prime mover, a deus mechina, or in other words, the logical need for an unmoved mover that not only started the known and unknown universe, but is the underlying force at both macro and micro levels, continuously in real time (or perhaps outside of time – who knows)?
3. The guy many think was the greatest 20th Century philosopher, Karl Popper, posited that something is a “scientific” theory only if it is subject to “falsification” (for example, through mathematical, experimental or empirical disproof). If a given theory is not subject to such falsification (for example, a belief in God) whether the theory is true or false, then it may be a valid theory of another aesthetic realm, but it is not, according to Popper, a scientific theory. If Popper’s understanding of the scientific method is to be believed then, any claim of dogmatic scientific certainty is itself not scientific, and any claim of absolute scientific truth or a “law” of science is a process fallacy. We can have a certain faith in the utility of a given scientific theory only in so far as it continues to survive falsification throughout a number of scientific falsification methods over time, but since we don’t know what we don’t know, if it’s to be scientific, it’s always a theory. (See the “all swans are white” controversy). This is a basic and necessary limitation of science just as “wonder”, rather than dogma, describes a basic and necessary attribute of science. (I think also, it must be an attribute of religious faith as well, but that’s another discussion).
With that limitation in mind, have you considered that there may be other realms of knowledge where the scientific method simply has no purchase? Along that same vain, wouldn’t the concept of infinity or an uncaused cause or an unmoved mover altogether fall outside the ambit of science? In fact, because science has no infinite measuring stick to compare infinity to, wouldn’t it be unscientific to either assume causation goes on infinitely (for example, one atomic particle being made up of another, ad infinitum) or since science deals with categorization and causation, to think it possible to scientifically investigate a primal causation that is itself uncaused and therefore cannot be categorized? Put differently, doesn’t science break down as an epistemology when dealing with either infinite present material causation or a cause that it cannot theorize a cause for?
Something to think about anyway.
Greetings Tony. I look forward to our conversation.
Forgive me, I’m not sure if you’re replying to me or to Bruce here, or are you responding to Tom? I dare say that both Bruce and I would reject the idea that atheism is a religion, and I’m not aware as to where either of us suggest it is. I don’t wish to seem nitpicky on this point, but I feel it’s important to distinguish atheism from religion.
To address your counterpoints:
I’d be inclined to agree. Throughout history, we have misinterpreted natural phenomena as being supernatural or divine. Our ancestors worshipped the sun. We know now precisely what the sun is. Humanity has steadily increased its understanding of the universe, and pulled back the veil of the supposed supernatural, one step at a time, to discover there is nothing supernatural about it.
I’ll confess to not knowing much about Thomism, so I can’t comment about it.
Again, I won’t pretend to understand much of this, but I imagine whether or not you conclude any claim of absolute scientific fact to be in fact, unscientific, depends on how much you subscribe to Karl Popper’s philosophies. I’d argue we can state some things as a fact, but I guess that’s a different conversation.
As to everything else, I’ll freely admit that I don’t fully grasp it all. The finer points of philosophical arguments for the existence of God have never been a field I’ve been interested in, or understood. However, thank you for your thoughts, and I look forward to hearing more.
Forgive the confusion Ben. Because I originally read this on Tom’s blog where you appeared to be defending Bruce’s position, for the sake of an interesting discussion, I simply combined both your ideas where they appeared to agree, and where I mostly agree with you both. I guess I shouldn’t jump into an argument at the middle instead of the beginning.
With regard to atheism having religious qualities, I was referring to this, upon which we all seem to be in general agree, even though we may dispute the finer semantic points:
“What is the difference between an Agnostic and an Atheist? An Agnostic says, “I don’t know.” An Atheist says, “There is no God.” Since there is no way of proving there is no God, the Atheist is making a faith-based leap that far exceeds the faith required to be a Christian.“
Back to Bruce specifically, this above bothers me a bit:
“When it comes to the extant human created religions such as Christianity and Islam, I’m an atheist. I have sufficiently investigated and studied these religions, and I can confidently say the Abrahamic God is a myth.”
I think that since the disagreements that churned out of the Enlightenment (for example, between Freud and Jung), the religious fundamentalists on one side and the modernist rationalist fundamentalists on the other have been arguing past each other over a kind of scientific literalism about metaphorical truths. This argument attempts to make a science out of religion and a religion out of science, and in my humble opinion, ends up really being neither.
Science as an epistemology deals with “theories” that are no less ultimately literally incorrect than some facts that theological epistemologies have generated, but we don’t throw out science as an epistemology (a source of truth and knowledge) just because it constantly generates knowledge that is falsified. We adapt our theory and progress. It’s basically the nature of the beast. The basic ontological and cosmological metaphysical theories of religion can survive even where the scientific physics may prove primitively wrong.
It’s silly to say that there is no metaphorical truth or knowledge in the Bible, truths that the human animal not only uses, but is part of how the human mind works at a fundamental level.
I’ll shut up now and try to better follow the conversation. Again apologies for crashing into your discussion.
You’re welcome to stay and converse, even if we’ll possibly end up disagreeing across a range of topics. I’m sure we can start at the beginning, and work from there!
I’m fine with saying that there is “truth” or wisdom in the Bible. I’m fine with the deistic God. However, the moment someone says Jehovah is the one true God and the Bible is his Word, I’m going to expect evidence for these claims.
Sure Ben. I find the topic interesting. Unfortunately, it drives strong emotions on both sides, often to the boiling point.
Minds seem to come to the topic pretty closed, as if any of us mere mortals actually could possess perfect certainty of opinion either way. The Catholic Philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, coined a term for this kind of phenomenon of intellectual hubris. He called it “Emotivism”.
Are you saying we can’t look at the extant evidence and come to a rational conclusion? My mind is open, having been on both sides of the aisle. So far, when I interact with Christians, all they give me are tired, worn-out cliches and arguments. Maybe, that’s all there is, and what I lack is the requisite faith necessary to overcome what my logical, rational mind is telling me.
Bruce,
The older I get and the more I learn about myself, the way that I think and the way that all people think, the less that I tend to idolize the rational part of the human mind, including my own brain. Reason, as important as it is to our success as a species, is probably the least used part of our everyday cognition anyway, don’t you think? I mean, talk about “myths”! Just look around. Look at the mess that people make of themselves, their lives, their families. Look at the mess that the world is in. Do you really think that most of the people that you know, or the people in the world, even supposed atheists who claim to worship at the altar of pure reason, actually “act” rationally most of the time?
The idea that people and societies operate rationally, even when they truly “believe” that they are, must be the greatest of all time mass delusions, particularly in western civilization. A fervent, even evangelical faith in all sorts of rational, deterministic, mythological schemes (Communism, Fascism, Capitalism) have brought the world and most of the life in it to the point of apocalypse, and yet the atheist/agnostic claims to have a rational mind and to require “evidence” in order to believe in an impulse toward universally profound religious metaphorical truths that are as ancient as the human mind itself. The human being’s very nature is to have blind confidence in and therefore to impulsively rely upon in certain ingrained and innate “faiths” about the reality we operate in, only a fraction of which is probably actual reality.
On the other hand, as I said above, faith in reason, is counterintuitive to the epistemology of reason itself. Actual reason requires endless skepticism that always looks with doubt that a supposed “fact” that reason formulates is actually a “fact” at all, even though we may rely upon that fact to make important decisions. Think about ancient cultures that used reason and science to come up with highly sophisticated lunar and solar calendars in order to predict equinox and solstice events for planting and harvesting dates, even though their science was completely wrong about the actual astronomy and cosmology.
There’s a story about the Positivist Philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, where he asks a colleague why people used to think that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Wittgenstein’s colleague responded that it was probably because “it appeared that way”. At that point Wittgenstein queried his friend, “Well, how would it have appeared to if instead the Sun stayed relatively in the same place daily and the Earth spun on it’s axis?”
Just because we are using the “extant rational evidence” doesn’t mean our reality is actually correct. We may be looking at it all wrong and with the wrong part of our minds. That includes the way we “think” about a necessarily undefinable and infinite quality we label as “God”.
That’s where “wonder” and “awe” are required, both in reason and in religion. In that state of “wonder” and “awe” the question we should be asking ourselves is not how to prove the existence of profound meaning to existence, but how to experience it wherever we can find it. At least that’s my opinion, for what it’s worth.
When people make metaphysical claims, I know of no other way investigate them except through rationality and reason. I agree with your assessment of these tools, but from my perspective they are all I have. Yes, I can be emotional and irrational, but I try to understand my frailties and biases and how they affect my thinking. I have no doubt I’m irrational every day of my life at some point or the other.
I certainly have great capacity for awe and wonder. I’m not a dry, sterile rationalist. I love nature. Every night, feral cats, raccoons, possums, and skunks meander through our yard. During the day, countless birds eat at our feeders — squirrels too. I marvel at the symphony of life I see playing in my yard, We have thirteen grandchildren. They fill my heart ❤️ with joy. I could go on and on. None of my “feelings” require a deity. I don’t need a supposedly all-powerful God to appreciate and enjoy the world around me. The Bible says I do, but reality says I don’t.
Bruce
That’s so beautifully put Bruce. Thank you.
If we were actually fighting, as far as wordsmithing goes, I would feel like I had brought a knife to a gunfight. Metaphorically speaking, let me drop my gun, and let you aim right for my heart then, and because my heart is right where yours is, you can’t miss.
Because you obviously have an appreciation for love and beauty, but say you don’t need a logical metaphysical explanation for that appreciation or a theological explanation for why finding a kind of harmony with that appreciation gives meaning to your life , to all our lives, what is your “story” of that meaning?
Tony,
Life just “is.” Unlike many atheists and theists, questions about our origin don’t interest me. Not that I can’t engage in such discussions. I can, but I just don’t find them interesting. I suspect “why” has to do with the fact I’m sixty-six years old, sick, and dying. I choose to embrace life as it is. Science gives me a sufficient understanding of the universe. No, it can’t tell me (to my satisfaction) what happened before the Big Bang, but neither can theism (to my satisfaction). And I’m fine with that. ❤️
Bruce
Jeez Bruce! I am sorry to hear that, well, as sorry as I can be for someone who I just met on a blog. That is sad news buddy. Sure makes our discussion here seem rather trivial . . . or maybe it somehow makes it even more relevant. I’m not sure which. If it means anything, we are both the same age.
I want to come back to my earlier statement that I am not interested in converting anyone, not to my religion, not to my view of life or its meaning. However, I am happy to discuss my opinions, for what they are worth. And I don’t flatter myself that they are any more than just MY opinions.
I was curious so I looked at your website. You’ve led an interesting life. And given your experience, you appear unlikely to learn anything from me about Christian theology or apologetic, even if I were interested in making that sort of argument.
Besides, again, just my only somewhat slightly informed opinion, but the books on Christian apologetics seem paradoxical. Why is it so important for a theist to logically prove what, by definition, cannot be logically disproven, even if it is wrong? (I’ll refer you again to what Karl Popper said about the need for falsifiability in any rational epistemological theories).
It seems to me that the theists attempts to beat the atheists at their own game just makes them look ridiculous. I guess because we are all creatures of the Enlightenment, because we have witnessed and benefited from the breakthroughs in knowledge that the rationalist epistemologies like science and mathematics provide, we just cannot help ourselves. In the High Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, channeling Aristotle, made the best attempt that I have read at playing the logic game in his “proofs”, but even he never claimed to prove the existence of God (which I can’t imagine that he even thought was a problem). All Aquinas was saying, as I understand it, was that, assuming the existence of an Infinite God, that Being must have certain attributes, and then Aquinas give logical proofs about those attributes. Aquinas makes a very elegant argument, but I’m sure you know all that.
I have also read several books by prominent Atheists, and they all seem to be arguing only with a certain kind of fundamentalist Christian, one who takes all the profound metaphorical (and yes, “mythological” – it’s not a dirty word the way that I mean it) information in the Bible far too literally, as if everything in the Bible (or the sacred texts of any of the other major religions) has to be an historical “fact”, whatever that is, or else the whole thing has to be thrown out.
As you well know, the Bible is mostly stories, and Jesus taught using fictional stories, metaphors, that we call parables. Metaphorical learning (not reason), in my humble opinion, is how we basically imprint most of our conscious and unconscious knowledge and truth, particularly our moral knowledge. But as Joseph Cambell said, if we are too literal in dissecting metaphorical knowledge, we can miss the message by getting too wrapped up in the story itself. I’m no biblical scholar, but even I can come up with a dozen amazing and profound truths just in the Eden story that have nothing to do with whether or not it was an actual historical “fact”. But like I said, as creatures of the Enlightenment, we just can’t help ourselves.
As a result of this need combine reason with everything religious, people, especially young people, have abandoned organized religion in droves. (I think part of this may also have to do with how people in this age think that they have to have an opinion on literally everything, whether they know anything about it or not, and unlike Aquinas, they just can’t take some age old, but intractable mysteries on face value, as a given). What’s interesting, however, is how, as they flee the churches, people still feel a psychic pull, an innate need to identify as “spiritual” in some way, either as a nonpracticing Christian, or in some other cultish New Age mysticism or another.
Most of my best friends adamantly identify as atheists, and also as “bleeding heart” liberals (given all the symbology surrounding the “bleeding heart” of Jesus, isn’t that an anachronistic label for conservative Christians to dub them with?). And yet, most of these supposed atheists are also artists, great believers in beauty, in all forms of aesthetics, and these friends of mine seem to love more dearly and hate less stridently than the more (supposedly) religious folks whom I know. Don’t you find that an interesting paradox Bruce?
So yes Bruce, I agree, “Life just ‘is’. Regardless of the “why” or even the “how” we do it, if we “just live”, as best we can with grace and love (and inherent in that small word, I would include kindness, compassion, empathy, sacrifice, humility, etc.), then I think we are being the best kind of a religious person, even if we don’t really claim to believe in any religion, or to adhere to any particular religion’s miniscule conception of God. In my opinion, assuming an intelligent force underlies everything (and I do assume that as a matter of faith, not reason), that Being(?) would be to us mere mortals, ineffable, undefinable and unintelligible anyway. But we may grasp fragments and hints here and there, in ancient scriptures, in beauty, in suffering, in the sublime in nature and yes, in the elegance, and in the inherent limitations of science and reason.
One last thought in this long post and then I’ll leave you to do other things with your precious time. I often ask this question of religious people who use the prize of Heaven and the terrors of Hell mainly as a way to judge other people and also as a kind of schadenfreude to feel good about themselves: What if there is a God, and all God wants us to do (as Jesus said) is to love, but there actually is no nebulous Heaven and there is no horrors of Hell, would that religious person still do what that God wants? Would he/she do the right thing for its own sake, without regard to any reward, without any punishment, without a promise of any afterlife?
I’m yet to get a satisfactory answer to that question. It would appear that most people need their religious theory to be transactional. They require that bargain with the Infinite. Maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t know. But I don’t need that, and it just doesn’t bother me if anybody else doesn’t need that either.
I think it was also Wittgenstein who said that, whether there is an afterlife or just some form of oblivion, to each person death will be a kind of seamless nonevent. Either way, it is inevitable and therefore silly to fear. I can agree with that.