The Logical Atheist

From Auburn University philosophy professor Roderick T. Long's post "Defensor Fidei" : Secularists often criticise the notion of “faith,” which they take to mean belief without evidence, or at least belief without sufficient evidence. I think this is a mistake. I do not mean to deny that many doctrines put forward as articles of faith are in fact propounded without sufficient evidence. All that I deny is that their being so is part of the meaning of the word “faith,” either in ordinary language or in theology. Note that I am not saying that being based on evidence is part of the meaning of “faith,” but only that not being based on evidence is not part of the meaning of “faith.” Faith can either be well-grounded in evidence, or not. It is not the purpose of this post to affirm (or for that matter to deny) that any particular article of faith is true, or reasonable, or justified by evidence. I’m in formal rather than material mode here....   It seems to me that what the wor...

To be honest all theistic propositions ought to being with this disclaimer: Warning : what I'm about to say will sound like English, but I won't really be speaking English. When I use words like exist , intelligence , design ,  being , good , and the like, they should not be mistaken for the homonyms that you know. Human beings form concepts ultimately from their sensory material (guided by the principles implicit in that experience, namely, the law of identity and its corollaries). Those concepts are then used to build wider and more abstract concepts based on shared characteristics. Concepts therefore cannot simply be ripped from this hierarchical context and applied to a realm that is said to be in principle beyond anyone's sensory experience, indeed beyond reality itself. Therefore, our normal concepts cannot be the same as the homonyms used to describe the "supernormal" or God. You've been cautioned. 

Whenever theism dons the scientific mantle you will hear that God (or some god) must exist because life exists. The chances of life existing are so small, it is said, that God is the only feasible explanation. The answer here is the same as the answer to the argument from design and other similar arguments: the supernatural can explain nothing. It is a pseudo-explanation: we are simply told nothing when we are told that life was created, via mysterious processes, by an inherently unknowable -- indeed ineffable -- "being" that "exists" outside of and prior to existence. ( Treblig gainges. ) Any scientific theory, however meager the evidence , is superior to a supernatural "explanation" because, being logically contradictory, that "explanation" doesn't even rise to the status of theory . Drawing again on George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God , I note that the argument from life bases its argument on the improbability of a spontan...

Theists have a field day whenever they think a prominent atheist has found God. With glee they point to the last-line reference to God in Stephen Hawking's A Brief History   of Time , or they take a line from Richard Dawkins out of context, or they recite the suspicious story of Antony Flew's alleged late-in-life, dementia-plagued conversion either to deism or Christianity. But as far as the God question goes, these story, even if true, do not matter. They have no bearing whatsoever on whether God exists.  People can have many justifications for calling themselves atheists, some good and some bad, but no reasonable atheist holds his position because someone else, -- someone "special" -- holds it. So an atheist's conversion to theism per se would mean nothing. The only thing that could possibly matter would be the new theist's justification for his conversion. It's the argument, not the person, that counts. I've yet to hear of an atheist-turned-theist...

The theists get it wrong when they say we can spot design in the world the same way that we spot design when we find a watch in the woods. This is a bit strange. We spot a watch in the woods precisely because it stands out against the natural background. If all was designed, the watch ought to blend in. Here's another quote from George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God : The inferential process represented in the design argument is the reverse of what actually occurs. We conclude that a watch is the result of design, not because we see "that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose," but because we know by direct experience that watches are made by men. We do not, as [William] Paley insists, infer that a watch is made-made because we perceive design in it; rather we infer that a watch is designed because we know it is man-made.... ...In order to conclude that an object was designed, we must first establish that it was manufactured. Therefore,...

When people say they see design in the universe, what they are really seeing is order, a very different thing. Order is what you should expect from a world in which A is A, which entails the corollary that what a thing does is determined by what it is. These laws of identity and causality necessarily produce order. And since to exist is to exist as something with a specific nature, no alternative to order is conceivable. The consequences of this point are significant for the God question. George H. Smith puts it well in Atheism: The Case Against God : It is a mistake to confuse "order" with "design." If there is design in nature, there must be a designer, but the same is not true of order. Order does not presuppose an orderer; it is simply entailed by the nature of existence itself.

A variation of the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is the question, "Why is there complexity rather than simplicity?" Of course the point of the question is that complexity proves God. No it doesn't. The question has a hidden expectation: namely, that nature unaided would necessarily be simple. But why would anyone expect that? I've never heard an answer to that question. It's a completely arbitrary expectation, especially in light of the well-established concept of undesigned complex order , or spontaneous order , which is found not only in the natural world but also in the social world. (See the pioneering work of the thinkers who made up the Scottish Enlightenment.) Regarding unwarranted expectations, Ludwig Wittgenstein once was watching the sun set with a friend, who commented that he could understand why people used to think the sun revolved around the earth. To which Wittgenstein replied: Why? How would you expect things t...