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The Village Atheist's Guide to Religious Debate Those crazy theists have offered a bewildering variety of reasons for thinking that God exists. Anselm argued that the very idea of God as a “greatest conceivable being” includes his existence so that he cannot be denied without pain of contradiction. Leibniz argued that the principle of sufficient reason points unmistakably to the existence of a necessary cause of the world. Medieval Islamic scholars, borrowing insights from Aristotle, argued that an infinite regress is logically impossible, as the idea of an actual infinite is replete with logical paradoxes. They thought that it could be demonstrated that the universe had an absolute beginning in time and that, if it did, then it had a cause that preceded and transcended it. Kant argued that the objectivity and normativity of morality may be taken seriously only if God is assumed as a sort of “posit,” and philosophers have argued variously that, in one way or another, morality requires the existence of God. Numerous philosophers have argued that various features of the world are best explained on the hypothesis that they have been designed. Most recently, the deliverances of physics suggest that the fundamental constants of the universe fall within a remarkably narrow range so as to have made life possible among the debris of the Big Bang. Theists have advanced an array of arguments designed to show that certain things that we know, or reasonably believe, to be true could not be true on the assumption of naturalism. Consciousness defies explanation or analysis in physicalist terms, they say, and is suggestive of non-physical substances. Purposive action is eliminated on naturalism, these philosophers suggest, because naturalism banishes all teleology from the world. And the very reasoning capacities that we naturalists must use to defend our view are not reasonably trusted as reliable on naturalism, some have urged. Others have argued that the phenomenon of religious experience provides the ground for an argument to God’s existence as the object and cause of that experience. Others have appealed to such experiences without argument, simply reporting that they find belief in God to be inescapable, and they go on to urge that such belief might well be warranted and count as knowledge of God actually does exist as the cause of that belief. This group has even offered the obviously absurd suggestion that perhaps God's existence may be known in some direct and basic way, without argument! Some critics of these arguments have had the patience and the wherewithal to follow such arguments in their detail and root out fallacies or unproved assumptions. Kant noted that Anselm’s argument works only if existence is a property, which it is not. Hume argued that Leibniz’s argument helps itself to principles that are questionable. Various critics of moral arguments have argued either that we can have ethics without God or that we should just give up on thinking that there really is a difference between right and wrong. But all of this is too much work, and Village Atheists have more important things to do, such as boycotting the Motel 6 for keeping Gideon’s Bibles on the nightstand or protesting Red Cross blood drives for their divisive name and emblem. Here is an easy, two-step plan for dispensing with any and all such theistic arguments without so much as having to put any gray matter in motion. The two steps correspond to two all-inclusive assertions. Assertion One: All Theistic Arguments Are Reducible to the “God-of-the-Gaps Appeal. This sweeping generalization dispenses with any need to take any theistic arguments with any seriousness whatsoever. Is there a new volume of essays purporting to advance compelling arguments for theism? You needn’t open it. You know in advance that each and every such argument is simply another variant on the god-of-the-gaps: whenever people cannot explain something naturalistically, they make an unwarranted leap to supernatural explanations. But we must take metaphysical naturalism as axiomatic. As Richard Lewontin has advised, “We cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” Oh, sure, some of these theists will say things like, “It isn’t simply that we do not yet know how X can have a naturalistic explanation. It is, rather, that we do know, by way of considerations C and argument A, that X cannot be given a naturalistic explanation. They seem to be suggesting that the arguments are not criticisms of the current state of the empirical sciences, but that there are entities whose natures essentially resist reduction to or analysis into the natural/physical. Such philosophers may be safely ignored by on the grounds that the distinction that they are attempting here eludes the average person, including the average Village Atheist. It is easily portrayed as so much sophistry. After all, we know by way of atheistic fiat that there is no god and reality consists of nothing more or less than material entities bearing physical relations. As Dr. Sagan explained, “The Cosmos is all that is, was, or ever will be”—a deliberate rewriting of one of the creeds of the theists. And so, we have but to observe that appeals to an alleged designer or first cause or ground of morality are one in essence with mythological explanations for everything from thunder to pestilence. We thus follow Colin McGinn who, upon confessing that physicalism is in a funk and that all reductionist programmes have failed, assured us that it is better to assert “hidden structure” than to “wallow in the supernatural.” With McGinn, we reaffirm our conviction that consciousness is a purely physical and natural phenomenon even though, in this, as with all other such topics, we walk by faith and not by sight. Assertion Two: Theistic Belief May Be Explained Away Psychologically Once we have swept away all theistic argument with our panaceaic first assertion, we may finish off our theist by asserting that the nearly universal belief in the supernatural may be explained away by appeal to human psychology. There is a deep desire to know the unknowable, and this is accompanied by certain emotional needs that are thought best satisfied if the universe is conceived as ultimately personal. In this assertion, we follow the lead of two of our great atheistic forbears, Hume and Freud. The point, of course, is to assert that the best explanation for the belief in question is one that need not appeal to the truth of that belief. Once again, our theist is likely to attempt sophistry. He may suggest that these features of human psychology are, in fact, anticipated on theism. He may even quote Augustine as saying “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee.” Or he may attempt to suggest that we beg the question here, as we can know that our psychological explanation is the best one only if we already know that there is no God. And then he might observe that Hume offered the same psychological account in order to undermine most of our common sense beliefs, from the belief that some events cause others, to the belief in the self as an enduring thing. What justifies using this strategy to eliminate the one kind of belief but not the others that we wish to retain? Here, we must hold our ground and, if need be, resort to an additional sort of psychological explanation: theistic belief is dysfunctional—-the product of brains incapable of comprehending the obvious fact that naturalism is true. Religious believers are, on average, of inferior intelligence. If asked to produce the evidence for this assertion, we have but to observe that they all have in common the absurd belief in a god, which is worthy only of hayseeds, coal miners and bagboys. muddle's blog | login to post comments
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