The Logical Atheist

"Skepticism is the beginning of faith." --Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray .

I sadly must report the death of George H. Smith on April 8. He was 73 and had been in poor health. Smith will be no stranger to readers of this blog, which was inspired by his writings. I was fortunate to have known George since the 1970s and to have had many conversations with him. He was self-educated and nothing short of brilliant. He wrote perhaps the best book ever on why belief in gods or God is not just mistaken but illogical: Atheism: The Case against God  (1974). (The 2016 edition has a foreword by Lawrence Krauss.) Smith wrote two other books that deal with the philosophy and history of freethought: Why Atheism?  (2000) and Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies (1991) .  He also wrote dozens of essays on the intellectual history of individualism, liberty, and anarchism. Many of these can be found at Libertarianism.org . Some of his essays have been compiled as books, available at Amazon .  As I've pointed out often , Smith's work in my view is far superior...

The opposite of skepticism isn't faith or trust. It's confidence. In what? In reason, in one's cognitive faculty, and one's ability to evaluate evidence and arguments to some extent and to learn which experts can be trusted in specialized fields. Skepticism and faith (or dogmatism) are not opposed. It's the radical skeptic, demoralized by his self-confessed ignorance, who might embrace mysticism in search of a ray of hope. Without reason, he's left himself no alternative.

Men have been taught either that knowledge is impossible (skepticism) or that it is available without effort (mysticism). These two positions appear to be antagonists, but are, in fact, two variants on the same theme, two sides of the same fraudulent coin: the attempt to escape the responsibility of rational cognition and the absolutism of reality—the attempt to assert the primacy of consciousness over existence.” Ayn Rand,  Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

The new atheists, as opposed to an older generation of atheists, love to portray themselves as skeptics. But they should be careful. It is true that words like  skeptic have a narrow meaning in the sense of referring to doubt about a specific claim only. That's fine: language is a living, changing thing, and words can drift in various ways, such as narrowing and broadening. But skepticism (call it capital-S skepticism) has not lost its earlier radical meaning of universal principled doubt : the literal inability to know anything at all or anything about a particular matter. Atheists who defend reason ought to make clear that this is not what they embrace. After all, if we can't know, then what's the point of asking a believer for evidence of God's reality? What is evidence to a capital-S skeptic? It's an illusion. If in principle we cannot know, then evidence is a bogus category. There can be no such thing! Anyone's claim -- even a theist's -- is as good a...

In this lecture, historian and divinity professor Alec Ryrie shows that in Elizabethan England it was commonly thought, both by theologians and everyday people, that faith and doubt, rather than being opposed, were in fact two sides of the same coin. He quotes William Perkins, whom he calls Elizabethan England's "greatest theology," saying, "True faith, being imperfect, is always accompanied by doubting." Ryrie noted that a common maxim was that if one did not have doubts about the existence of God, then one did not really have faith.

Here's another lecture from the historian and theologian Alec Ryrie. Ryrie apparently is not an atheist, but his lectures have much to teach.

It's often held that skepticism leads to atheism. But it can easily lead to religious faith. After all, if you reject reason and logic--which is what hardcore skepticism is all about--faith may appear as the only alternative if one wants to get through life. (Nihilism is an alternative, but many people have no stomach for it.) So radical doubt is by no means the path to follow. Doubt is a poor principle to live by. Doubt, properly conceived, is contextual; one should have a good reason to doubt. In fact, to reasonably doubt one proposition, you necessarily express confidence in other propositions. As has been said, you have to stand somewhere. You may try to reject reason, but you can't escape it, no matter how hard you try. Skepticism and religious faith (at least by one of its several definitions) both constitute the rejection of reason, so they have much in common. In fact, there is no atheist cause (in the sense of struggle), but there is a rationalist cause. Atheism, far ...

 

Skeptical atheists proclaim that they "believe in science," faulting others for not doing so. That proclamation is misleading, although it helps to shut down debate with qualified dissenters from a official position, if you value that sort of thing. (I don't.) What self-identified skeptics really believe in -- unskeptically, you'll note -- is not science itself but the pronouncements only of  certain  approved scientists and not others who are often equally credentialed. Why do the skeptics take the word of one group of reputable scientists "on faith" rather than others? (I say on faith  because I doubt most of the skeptics have verified their favorite scientific claims.) Criteria, if you please. I'll take the skeptics more seriously when they question the word of government-anointed scientists as much as they do the qualified mavericks, who also believe in science. Science isn't about consensus or head counting; its about truth-seeking through disse...

When will the "skeptical" atheists, who seem to value doubt more than reason, get it? Explanation presupposes existence , not vice versa. How could it be otherwise? How could one imagine anything being the explanation for or cause  everything? If it were explanatory, it would have to exist in its own right and hence be part of existence. Or perhaps it created itself? Yet how could that be? It would defy logic.  Yet atheists who strike the skeptic's pose proudly declare that they do not know why existence exists -- as though it could do anything else. They would rather be ignorant than logical. That makes no sense. "The natural universe sets the context in which explanation is possible," George H. Smith writes in  Atheism: The Case Against God , "so the concept of explanation cannot legitimately be extended to the universe as a whole."

A hardcore skeptic, one that David Hume would call an "excessive," or (unmitigated)  Pyrrhonian , skeptic, would not ask, "How do you know P is true?" Rather he would ask, "Why should I believe anything put forth as evidence for P?" The first question acknowledges the possibility of knowledge and hence is not the question of a philosophical skeptic. The second denies or at least seriously doubts that any knowledge is possible. That is skepticism (in all its self-contradictory glory).

Should it here be asked me ... whether I be really one of those sceptics, who hold that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in any thing possest of any measures of truth and falshood; I should reply, that this question is entirely superfluous, and that neither I, nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly of that opinion. Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determined us to judge as well as to breathe and feel; nor can we any more forbear viewing certain objects in a stronger and fuller light, upon account of their customary connexion with a present impression, than we can hinder ourselves from thinking as long, as we are awake, or seeing the surrounding bodies, when we turn our eyes towards them in broad sunshine. Whoever has taken the pains to refute the cavils of this total scepticism, has really disputed without an antagonist, and endeavoured by arguments to establish a faculty, which nature has antecedently implanted in the mind, and rend...

For here is the chief and most confounding objection to excessive scepticism, that no durable good can ever result from it; while it remains in its full force and vigour. We need only ask such a sceptic, What his meaning is? And what he proposes by all these curious researches? He is immediately at a loss, and knows not what to answer. A Copernican or Ptolemaic, who supports each his different system of astronomy, may hope to produce a conviction, which will remain constant and durable, with his audience. A Stoic or Epicurean displays principles, which may not be durable, but which have an effect on conduct and behaviour. But a Pyrrhonian cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately c...

I hear skeptical atheists (as opposed to the logical variety) laud David Hume, the great 18-century Scottish philosopher, who is thought to have been a thoroughgoing skeptic. Hume famously wrote that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." So I wonder whether these atheists would endorse this passage from Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , section 12, part 1, in which he criticizes Descartes's proposed path to knowledge: There is a species of scepticism, antecedent to all study and philosophy, which is much inculcated by Des Cartes and others, as a sovereign preservative against error and precipitate judgement. It recommends an universal doubt, not only of all our former opinions and principles, but also of our very faculties; of whose veracity, say they, we must assure ourselves, by a chain of reasoning, deduced from some original principle, which cannot possib...

I've heard at least one skeptical atheist say -- and I'm sure many others also believe it -- that one cannot be too much of a skeptic. But they don't really mean it. How do I know? I know because they regularly mock people who express skepticism about things they apparently believe in: evolution, vaccination, the roundness and old age of the earth, catastrophic climate change, the legitimacy of the state, and so on. (I'm doubtful of only the last two.) Why are some skeptics more equal than others? "No," the skeptical atheists are likely to reply. "We good skeptics have sound reasons for our doubt, while the bad skeptics have none for theirs." But both kinds of skeptics think they have good reasons for their doubts. Evolution-skeptics are aware of what evolution-believers regard as evidence, but the former think it is bad and possibly even fabricated. I'm not saying they are right, only that they have their reasons too. We can resolve this disagr...

A popular skeptical atheist celebrity often cites Carl Sagan's maxim that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I think that's right. But our skeptical atheist goes on to show that he's far from a true skeptic. (No true skeptic....) So this person offers this example: if someone tells him that he owns a dog, he's willing to believe this ordinary claim because the skeptic knows that people and dogs exist; he knows that people own dogs; and so on. The purported dog owner might show his interlocutor a dog collar and some doggie treats, which our skeptic is willing to accept as evidence. That's fine, of course. But it shouldn't be fine for a true skeptic. A true skeptic would challenge every piece of evidence for the person's owning a dog. Why? Maybe the person is a liar. Maybe the person is a hologram. Maybe the skeptic is hallucinating. Maybe the skeptic is just a brain in a vat. As W. S. Gilbert has a character sing in H.M.S. Pinafo...

Doubt is not a principle or guide for life. To be taken seriously, doubt has to be specific and grounded. If I wore a badge of self-identity, it wouldn't say Skeptic  but Rationalist .

When someone shows skepticism about certain claims to knowledge, what is required is that the ball be put firmly in his court. He is the one who must produce justification for his position. Skepticism without grounds is empty, and empty suggestions need not be regarded seriously.  --D. W. Hamlyn, The Theory of Knowledge

A wise man who has practised reasoning knows that he is fallible, and carries this conviction along with him in every judgment he forms. He knows likewise, that he is more liable to err in some cases than in others. He has a scale in this mind, by which he estimates his liableness to err, and by this he regulates the degree of his assent in his first judgment upon any point.... To pretend to prove by reasoning that there is no force in reason, does indeed look like a philosophical delirium. It is like a man's pretending to see clearly, that he himself and all other men are blind. --Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man