Beware Watered-Down "New Atheism"
Contrary to what many people think, the intellectuals known as the New Atheists pull their punches in their case against theism. Indeed, because they promote a philosophically watered-down version of atheism, they are way too easy on religious believers. While engaged in a worthwhile cause, they go about it in a weak and self-subverting way. How so? By giving undeserved credit to their religious opponents. They could pull the rug right out from under them, but they don’t do it. Too bad.
Here’s a typical example: in an interview with the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Ron Reagan said this about his lack of belief in God: “You show me evidence, I’ll reconsider, but in the absence of evidence I do not believe.” You can find similar statements from the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Matt Dillahunty,* Aron Ra,** and many others, all of whom I respect. Dawkins, a biologist, for example, writes, in The God Delusion, “The existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other” and “I don't know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.” A scientific hypothesis is subject to confirmation through evidence. Daniel Dennett, a formally trained philosopher, writes in Breaking the Spell, “The spell that I say must be broken is the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.”
So what’s wrong with this? What’s wrong is that Reagan, et al. implicitly concede that the theists in principle have a potential case for the validity of their belief. While the theists haven’t yet produced credible evidence for their position, the New Atheists do not rule out that the theists could conceivably do so someday, maybe tomorrow.
In fact the theists will never be able do so.
Look at the seeming proposition God exists. It seems to say something meaningful, but in fact it translates into this: a bundle of contradictions exists in a supernatural realm -- that is, exists in a manner that is unlike anything in the natural world and in a sense that no human being could possibly understand.
Here’s a typical example: in an interview with the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Ron Reagan said this about his lack of belief in God: “You show me evidence, I’ll reconsider, but in the absence of evidence I do not believe.” You can find similar statements from the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Matt Dillahunty,* Aron Ra,** and many others, all of whom I respect. Dawkins, a biologist, for example, writes, in The God Delusion, “The existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other” and “I don't know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.” A scientific hypothesis is subject to confirmation through evidence. Daniel Dennett, a formally trained philosopher, writes in Breaking the Spell, “The spell that I say must be broken is the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.”
So what’s wrong with this? What’s wrong is that Reagan, et al. implicitly concede that the theists in principle have a potential case for the validity of their belief. While the theists haven’t yet produced credible evidence for their position, the New Atheists do not rule out that the theists could conceivably do so someday, maybe tomorrow.
In fact the theists will never be able do so.
Look at the seeming proposition God exists. It seems to say something meaningful, but in fact it translates into this: a bundle of contradictions exists in a supernatural realm -- that is, exists in a manner that is unlike anything in the natural world and in a sense that no human being could possibly understand.
Any theologian worth his salt would tell you that, despite the grammatical resemblance, the sentences God exists and Dogs exist are in no way comparable. Indeed, major theologians, including Aquinas and Maimonides, have insisted that human beings should not ascribe attributes to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The most they would say is that God's attributes are unlike any attributes possessed by human beings.
The words God exists, then, actually assert precisely nothing. The sentence therefore does not qualify as a claim. It is nonsense and so, strictly speaking, is neither true nor false. It is noise. And since it asserts nothing, one properly would not demand evidence. If I told you that Treblig exists, would you ask for evidence? Evidence for what? If you don’t know what Treblig is, how could you possibly know what would count as evidence. The same goes for God.
Why do I say that God translates to “a bundle of contradictions?” Atheists have often shown that the word God purports to signify a nonmaterial entity (itself a contradiction) with a set of attributes that conflict with each other. For example, an omniscient God would know the future perfectly. But that would mean the future is unchangeable -- even by God -- else he could not have really known it. So God can’t be both omniscient and omnipotent. Yet, logically, omnipotence entails omniscience. So omnipotence both requires and precludes omniscience.
Or an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God would not allow bad things to happen to good people, but since such things do happen, God either perpetrates, allows, or is unable to prevent them. God therefore cannot be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. But is he even omnipotent, pure and simple? God’s existence is said to be necessary, so could an omnipotent God, A. C. Grayling asks, commit suicide? And so on.
As for the second part of my translation, why do I say God would have to exist like nothing else exists? Because being supernatural, God would have to dwell (at least part of the time, certainly before God created the universe) outside or beyond the natural world. Synonyms for the natural world include universe, being, reality, and existence. God, then, would have to exist outside existence. How could that be? How could anything beyond reality be real? God would have to be both real and unreal, which violates the Law of Contradiction and makes a mockery of our concepts, indeed, of reason itself.
Theologians and other apologists respond that these questions show that God is beyond our ability to understand. That’s why we must accept the assurances of the special people (prophets, etc.) who report their revelations. But why should these allegedly special ancient people be believed even when their statements defy logic? They need not be suspected of lying to be disbelieved. They might have been dreaming or fooled by someone else.
Regardless, the idea of the supernatural attacks reason and logic. It reduces the human mind to a delusion. That ought to terminate the discussion, which presupposes the validity of reason. We need not debate the existence of God because the theist can’t get over the first hurdle: saying exactly what he’s talking about. There is something that logically precedes the burden of proof: the burden of coherence. (See Antony Flew on this point.) The New Atheists consistently miss this point. (The burden of plausibility falls between the two other burdens.)
Again, an absurdity masquerading as a meaningful proposition need not be -- and strictly speaking cannot be -- refuted. One should not demand evidence or proof. Those concepts are derived from the natural world; that is, they presuppose existence as we know it. They cannot be yanked out of that context and applied to nonexistence. There can be no proof of nonexistence. Simply put, anything said to be outside existence simply does not exist. Let us take the believers at their word. (If anyone wants to make a case for a fully natural God, good luck to them.)
All of this indicates that the most prominent atheists of the day are offering a rather shallow and self-subverting case for their position. And they have no excuse for that because they often acknowledge that the Abrahamic God has conflicting attributes, which ought to rule God out as a real thing. Yet they also strike what they apparently suppose is an edgy radical skeptic’s pose: “You show me evidence, I’ll reconsider, but in the absence of evidence I do not believe.” They then rest on this square because they fear being pegged as dogmatists if they go any further and say that they know for sure that God does not exist. Since they accuse religious believers of dogmatism, that’s the last thing they want to be accused of. But why one would ask for evidence of a contradiction, I don't know.
(Aside: A a truly radical skeptical atheist would not ask for evidence because that would presuppose the efficacy of reason and hence the possibility of knowledge. If you doubt the efficacy of reason, how can you assess evidence? Rather, he would ask -- incoherently, mind you -- “Can human beings know anything at all?” Asking for evidence for a specific proposition may be called skepticism -- the better term is evidentialism -- in the ordinary narrow sense. But the request for evidence is merely a recognition of the uncontroversial fact that we are fallible, which is not an argument for hardcore skepticism, whose adherents, again incoherently, doubt everything claimed in general or in a particular domain. Everyday you hear people ask, “How do you know that?” It’s hardly edgy to do so. It’s just common sense.)
As noted, while the New Atheists unabashedly say they do not believe in God, they refuse to say that they believe that no God exists. While they are willing to say, correctly, that the supernatural is not needed to explain the natural world, they are unwilling to say that the supernatural cannot explain the natural world and would undercut the very possibility of explanation. (An all-powerful God would negate the Law of Identity, for example, because he could make anything be or do anything.) Almost without exception, I have not seen a skeptical (or evidentialist) atheist make this point in a debate, in a podcast, in a video lecture, or in writing. (The exceptions include the keeper of the TMM YouTube channel, whose name I do not know, and perhaps the philosopher A.C. Grayling.) Ironically, the only time I’ve seen the point made in a YouTube debate was when Dinesh D’Souza, a theist, raised it against noted atheist Matt Dillahunty. When Dillahunty asked for evidence of an afterlife, D’Souza said that of course there could be no evidence for the supernatural -- yet he chooses to believe in an afterlife anyway. D’Souza at least understands that the concept evidence cannot be ripped out of its natural-world context and applied to the supernatural. Why don’t the New Atheists see that?
In staking out this position, the New Atheists offer a false analogy. (For an example, see Matt Dillahunty’s false gumball analogy.) As supposed skeptics, they hold positions on many empirical provisionally. They don’t believe the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot exists but wouldn’t say with certainty that neither exists -- only that it's probable that neither one exists. Who can say with certainty that tomorrow good evidence won’t emerge that one of them exists? Therefore, they say, the reasonable person would have to think it is possible (however improbable after so many failed tries) that someday good evidence might emerge that God exists. (More on this below.) Of course, believers think they already have a growing array of good evidence; so the New Atheists are stuck quibbling over whether the evidence for God is as good as the believers say it is. What a waste of time and energy!
Here's the problem: epistemologically one cannot slide from the natural to the supernatural as if they were similar. If evidence of the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot were to be discovered, it would merely reveal a hitherto unseen part of the same natural world in which we find gila monsters and gorillas. Human beings have discovered many things that were once unknown. No problem there. The problem is with the supernatural, for the reasons already described. That we reasonably hold positions on some empirical matters about the natural world provisionally does not license us to hold a position, pro or con, about the supernatural provisionally. To think that it does is to commit a grave epistemological error that paves the way toward the very irrationalism that the skeptics seek to avoid. After all, the concept evidence presupposes objective reality (existence), identity, consciousness, and reason, and without those things, provable knowledge would be impossible. Thus the rules for discussing the natural world must be different from those for “discussing” the supernatural. Again, theism doesn’t suffer merely from a lack of strong evidence; it suffers from a lack of coherence and logic.
By analogy, imagine people who called themselves unabashed a-square-circlists. They don’t believe square circles exist. Why not? Because, they reply, “in the absence of evidence I do not believe.” Since their position rests on skepticism, they refuse to say, “I believe there are no square circles.” As good skeptics, they say, “You show me evidence, I’ll reconsider.”
You can see the problem. One need not -- indeed does not -- hold out the possibility of evidence for the existence of square circles no more than one would hold out the possibility of evidence that A can also be not-A. The skeptic’s position would be irrational because the word combination square circle is utterly and literally absurd. Even Walt Disney could not draw a square circle. The phrase communicates nothing and therefore cannot be the subject of a meaningful conversation. One properly says in response to the pseudo-claim that square circles exist not, “How do you know?” but rather, “What are you talking about?” One is not a dogmatist for thinking with absolute certainty that square circles do not exist. Evidence and reason depend on the laws of logic, not vice versa. "Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits..." Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote. "What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think." Certainty about the nonexistence of God is thus not faith-based, despite what the theists and the New Atheists would have us believe. It’s not empirical science that destroys theism. It’s logic.
I should note for the record that at least one among the group of New atheists I’m referring to would be unimpressed with my argument because he takes the laws of logic (and hence reason) to be provisional and defeasible assumptions that, although practical up until now, cannot be confidently assumed to be absolute. Presumably he thinks that, however unlikely, we cannot rule out that someday we’ll discover a cat that is simultaneously not a cat. And no doubt creature/non-creature will both be and not be on what is both a mat and a not-mat.
For a fuller exposition of this matter, I recommend George H. Smith’s classic, Atheism: The Case Against God (Prometheus; originally published by Nash in 1974). In that masterwork, the philosopher Smith shows that supernaturalism is not even a potential candidate for explaining the world that for now ought to be set aside because, per Occam’s Razor, it is more complicated than its opposing explanation, naturalism. Smith writes that it is “wrong, or at least misleading, [to] grant[] to theism the theoretical possibility of gaining a foothold by dislodging naturalism through argumentation. There is no such possibility.”
Contrary to the New Atheists, the best case for atheism is not founded on skepticism or evidentialism or the burden-of-proof principle. Rather, the best case for atheism -- both as the absence of belief in God and the belief in the absence of God -- is founded on reason, logic, and the primacy of existence.
The words God exists, then, actually assert precisely nothing. The sentence therefore does not qualify as a claim. It is nonsense and so, strictly speaking, is neither true nor false. It is noise. And since it asserts nothing, one properly would not demand evidence. If I told you that Treblig exists, would you ask for evidence? Evidence for what? If you don’t know what Treblig is, how could you possibly know what would count as evidence. The same goes for God.
Why do I say that God translates to “a bundle of contradictions?” Atheists have often shown that the word God purports to signify a nonmaterial entity (itself a contradiction) with a set of attributes that conflict with each other. For example, an omniscient God would know the future perfectly. But that would mean the future is unchangeable -- even by God -- else he could not have really known it. So God can’t be both omniscient and omnipotent. Yet, logically, omnipotence entails omniscience. So omnipotence both requires and precludes omniscience.
Or an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God would not allow bad things to happen to good people, but since such things do happen, God either perpetrates, allows, or is unable to prevent them. God therefore cannot be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. But is he even omnipotent, pure and simple? God’s existence is said to be necessary, so could an omnipotent God, A. C. Grayling asks, commit suicide? And so on.
As for the second part of my translation, why do I say God would have to exist like nothing else exists? Because being supernatural, God would have to dwell (at least part of the time, certainly before God created the universe) outside or beyond the natural world. Synonyms for the natural world include universe, being, reality, and existence. God, then, would have to exist outside existence. How could that be? How could anything beyond reality be real? God would have to be both real and unreal, which violates the Law of Contradiction and makes a mockery of our concepts, indeed, of reason itself.
Theologians and other apologists respond that these questions show that God is beyond our ability to understand. That’s why we must accept the assurances of the special people (prophets, etc.) who report their revelations. But why should these allegedly special ancient people be believed even when their statements defy logic? They need not be suspected of lying to be disbelieved. They might have been dreaming or fooled by someone else.
Regardless, the idea of the supernatural attacks reason and logic. It reduces the human mind to a delusion. That ought to terminate the discussion, which presupposes the validity of reason. We need not debate the existence of God because the theist can’t get over the first hurdle: saying exactly what he’s talking about. There is something that logically precedes the burden of proof: the burden of coherence. (See Antony Flew on this point.) The New Atheists consistently miss this point. (The burden of plausibility falls between the two other burdens.)
Again, an absurdity masquerading as a meaningful proposition need not be -- and strictly speaking cannot be -- refuted. One should not demand evidence or proof. Those concepts are derived from the natural world; that is, they presuppose existence as we know it. They cannot be yanked out of that context and applied to nonexistence. There can be no proof of nonexistence. Simply put, anything said to be outside existence simply does not exist. Let us take the believers at their word. (If anyone wants to make a case for a fully natural God, good luck to them.)
All of this indicates that the most prominent atheists of the day are offering a rather shallow and self-subverting case for their position. And they have no excuse for that because they often acknowledge that the Abrahamic God has conflicting attributes, which ought to rule God out as a real thing. Yet they also strike what they apparently suppose is an edgy radical skeptic’s pose: “You show me evidence, I’ll reconsider, but in the absence of evidence I do not believe.” They then rest on this square because they fear being pegged as dogmatists if they go any further and say that they know for sure that God does not exist. Since they accuse religious believers of dogmatism, that’s the last thing they want to be accused of. But why one would ask for evidence of a contradiction, I don't know.
(Aside: A a truly radical skeptical atheist would not ask for evidence because that would presuppose the efficacy of reason and hence the possibility of knowledge. If you doubt the efficacy of reason, how can you assess evidence? Rather, he would ask -- incoherently, mind you -- “Can human beings know anything at all?” Asking for evidence for a specific proposition may be called skepticism -- the better term is evidentialism -- in the ordinary narrow sense. But the request for evidence is merely a recognition of the uncontroversial fact that we are fallible, which is not an argument for hardcore skepticism, whose adherents, again incoherently, doubt everything claimed in general or in a particular domain. Everyday you hear people ask, “How do you know that?” It’s hardly edgy to do so. It’s just common sense.)
As noted, while the New Atheists unabashedly say they do not believe in God, they refuse to say that they believe that no God exists. While they are willing to say, correctly, that the supernatural is not needed to explain the natural world, they are unwilling to say that the supernatural cannot explain the natural world and would undercut the very possibility of explanation. (An all-powerful God would negate the Law of Identity, for example, because he could make anything be or do anything.) Almost without exception, I have not seen a skeptical (or evidentialist) atheist make this point in a debate, in a podcast, in a video lecture, or in writing. (The exceptions include the keeper of the TMM YouTube channel, whose name I do not know, and perhaps the philosopher A.C. Grayling.) Ironically, the only time I’ve seen the point made in a YouTube debate was when Dinesh D’Souza, a theist, raised it against noted atheist Matt Dillahunty. When Dillahunty asked for evidence of an afterlife, D’Souza said that of course there could be no evidence for the supernatural -- yet he chooses to believe in an afterlife anyway. D’Souza at least understands that the concept evidence cannot be ripped out of its natural-world context and applied to the supernatural. Why don’t the New Atheists see that?
In staking out this position, the New Atheists offer a false analogy. (For an example, see Matt Dillahunty’s false gumball analogy.) As supposed skeptics, they hold positions on many empirical provisionally. They don’t believe the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot exists but wouldn’t say with certainty that neither exists -- only that it's probable that neither one exists. Who can say with certainty that tomorrow good evidence won’t emerge that one of them exists? Therefore, they say, the reasonable person would have to think it is possible (however improbable after so many failed tries) that someday good evidence might emerge that God exists. (More on this below.) Of course, believers think they already have a growing array of good evidence; so the New Atheists are stuck quibbling over whether the evidence for God is as good as the believers say it is. What a waste of time and energy!
Here's the problem: epistemologically one cannot slide from the natural to the supernatural as if they were similar. If evidence of the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot were to be discovered, it would merely reveal a hitherto unseen part of the same natural world in which we find gila monsters and gorillas. Human beings have discovered many things that were once unknown. No problem there. The problem is with the supernatural, for the reasons already described. That we reasonably hold positions on some empirical matters about the natural world provisionally does not license us to hold a position, pro or con, about the supernatural provisionally. To think that it does is to commit a grave epistemological error that paves the way toward the very irrationalism that the skeptics seek to avoid. After all, the concept evidence presupposes objective reality (existence), identity, consciousness, and reason, and without those things, provable knowledge would be impossible. Thus the rules for discussing the natural world must be different from those for “discussing” the supernatural. Again, theism doesn’t suffer merely from a lack of strong evidence; it suffers from a lack of coherence and logic.
By analogy, imagine people who called themselves unabashed a-square-circlists. They don’t believe square circles exist. Why not? Because, they reply, “in the absence of evidence I do not believe.” Since their position rests on skepticism, they refuse to say, “I believe there are no square circles.” As good skeptics, they say, “You show me evidence, I’ll reconsider.”
You can see the problem. One need not -- indeed does not -- hold out the possibility of evidence for the existence of square circles no more than one would hold out the possibility of evidence that A can also be not-A. The skeptic’s position would be irrational because the word combination square circle is utterly and literally absurd. Even Walt Disney could not draw a square circle. The phrase communicates nothing and therefore cannot be the subject of a meaningful conversation. One properly says in response to the pseudo-claim that square circles exist not, “How do you know?” but rather, “What are you talking about?” One is not a dogmatist for thinking with absolute certainty that square circles do not exist. Evidence and reason depend on the laws of logic, not vice versa. "Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits..." Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote. "What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think." Certainty about the nonexistence of God is thus not faith-based, despite what the theists and the New Atheists would have us believe. It’s not empirical science that destroys theism. It’s logic.
I should note for the record that at least one among the group of New atheists I’m referring to would be unimpressed with my argument because he takes the laws of logic (and hence reason) to be provisional and defeasible assumptions that, although practical up until now, cannot be confidently assumed to be absolute. Presumably he thinks that, however unlikely, we cannot rule out that someday we’ll discover a cat that is simultaneously not a cat. And no doubt creature/non-creature will both be and not be on what is both a mat and a not-mat.
For a fuller exposition of this matter, I recommend George H. Smith’s classic, Atheism: The Case Against God (Prometheus; originally published by Nash in 1974). In that masterwork, the philosopher Smith shows that supernaturalism is not even a potential candidate for explaining the world that for now ought to be set aside because, per Occam’s Razor, it is more complicated than its opposing explanation, naturalism. Smith writes that it is “wrong, or at least misleading, [to] grant[] to theism the theoretical possibility of gaining a foothold by dislodging naturalism through argumentation. There is no such possibility.”
(Yet another aside: theists and atheists alike often say that the absence of evidence regarding God is not evidence of the absence of God. Is that so? In his follow-up book Why Atheism? (Prometheus, 2000), George Smith unravels this seemingly reasonable proposition. But is it reasonable? Smith asks: if we can't affirmatively deny with certainty the existence of God merely because the evidence offered for it has been refuted many times over, shouldn't it follow that we also can't affirmatively deny with certainty the existence of Santa Claus on the same grounds? But can you think of an atheist or theist who allows that Santa Claus might exist -- that is, who is an agnostic on the Santa question?
(Smith notes that just because Santa Claus is logically possible (no logical contradiction is involved), it does not follow that Santa Claus is materially possible. [The distinction was made by Immanuel Kant.] Logical possibility -- conceivability -- is not evidence of material possibility. The former refers to the coherence of a proposition or lack thereof, the latter to the truth of a proposition that is judged coherent. The claim that X is materially possible, like any other empirical claim, requires (credible) evidence, and it almost must be plausible. If no evidence is offered and if the claim is implausible, we have no reason even to entertain the claim, let alone accept it. Thus despite our obvious lack of omniscience, we are entitled affirmatively to believe that the highly implausible Santa Claus does not exist. And if we can reasonably believe that about Santa Claus, I ask the New Atheists why we can't do the same for the highly implausible God [ignoring God's logical impossibility for the sake of argument].)
Contrary to the New Atheists, the best case for atheism is not founded on skepticism or evidentialism or the burden-of-proof principle. Rather, the best case for atheism -- both as the absence of belief in God and the belief in the absence of God -- is founded on reason, logic, and the primacy of existence.
UPDATES, June 3, 2029
*For the record, Matt Dillahunty objects to being called a "New Atheist." I respect his wishes.
**Since watching more of Aron Ra on YouTube, I can see that his approach is much broader than simply "I await the evidence." I've heard him say that a supernatural god is impossible and that something that is not logically impossible can still be impossible in the other sense.
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