(Note: This has gotten a little long, and therefore, hard to read on a screen – since I’m reluctant to break it down into even smaller paragraphs for fear of losing coherence, it may be a good idea to increase font size for easier readability; I believe in most browsers, hitting ctrl and + works, and ctrl and 0 resets it to standard)
I’m not sure how to start this thread – perhaps I should best note straightforwardly that it is not my intention to change anybody’s mind, i.e. convert people to atheism; I merely wish to illustrate why I think that, in attempting to form a consistent picture of the world, atheism is the only valid null hypothesis.
I also should mention that I use the word atheism probably somewhat different than most other people to, in two ways: one, for convenience, I use it as describing the absence of all faith, not merely the absence of faith in god, or gods; two, I use it as describing the absence of all faith, not the belief in the non-existence of a god, or gods (or related supernatural beings) – some might accuse me of covertly advocating agnosticism instead of atheism with that last point, but the original meaning of agnosticism (which I’d like to stick to, because it is an important concept) is, in fact, a disbelief in the possibility of directly experiencing god (or more generally, deciding the truth value of a specific claim towards the existence of god, or a similar proposition), which essentially means that you can both be a theist and an agnostic, if you believe that god exists, yet not manifestly so/cannot be proven to in the physical realm.
Now that I hope to have made that position clear, let’s get to the meat of this post, and start with what I like to call the argument from human fallibility. There are a great many faiths in this world, and there have been a great many more in the past; from there, it trivially follows that each faith’s claim to be exclusively true is likely to be false, even if one of them should be right. Thus we can at least conclude that whether atheism is true or not, at least it isn’t any more wrong than almost all religions. However, we can take this argument a little further, and derive a fundamental epistemological difference between atheism and religion: Every religion dies with its last follower; atheism exists independently of human belief.
To illustrate this, let’s say that humanity gets wiped from the face of the planet, leaving no trace behind; eventually, in due time, perhaps another race of sentient beings develops, and takes reign over the Earth. While they may develop their own faiths and belief systems, it is negligibly likely that any of them will bear close resemblance to any human belief system in more than the most superficial of ways – they may, for instance, develop a sun worshipping cult, but it is unlikely that they will call that sun god Ra, and have him ride a fiery chariot across the sky; however, they can develop atheism just as well, as a simple negation of all faith. They are unlikely to re-discover any tenets of any given faith, but the findings of reason are as accessible to them as they are to us – just look at how nobody (well, except maybe for some fringe) today believes in the gods of the ancient Greek, yet Pythagoras’ theorem is today as true as it was then.
Now, even if you say that the god of whatever faith you follow can just as well assert himself to the intelligences of the far future, that still does not remove the fundamental difference, for atheism requires no such assertion and can be arrived at by reason alone. This holds even if there really exists the one true faith.
There are even further consequences of this regarding the nature of knowledge in faith based and atheist world views: the atheist can always be wrong, with everything he knows, but he can at least be certain of the existence of logical truth (like Pythagoras’ theorem – independently, I should add, of the fact that it is only true in a specific geometry); for the believer, such truth cannot exist.
Any faith based knowledge exists only subject to that faith; for instance, the belief in the existence of an omnipotent god implies that every logical inference may be wrong if god wills it so. Thus, any form of logical reasoning is strictly invalid, or valid only under deferral to the tenets of faith. That, however, means that any increase in knowledge is strictly impossible within a faith based system; the believer cannot, strictly speaking, know that the sum of the squares of the sides of a right angled triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse, since god could will it otherwise. Of course, I am by no means insinuating that believers are idiots that can’t do math, but in principle, in a faith based system, any rule is subject to exceptions and can have no absolute validity; in atheism, rules are at best not valid everywhere and in every case (as Pythagoras’ theorem does not apply in hyperbolic geometry, for instance), but absolutely valid, fundamental rules may exist (and if they do, describe the world fully).
The last (parenthetical) statement can be taken to describe the ‘closedness’ of an atheistic world view: Everything is, in principle, accessible to reason (note that that doesn’t imply that mankind will ever know everything). This is closely related to another argument I’d like to make, which will illustrate why I called atheism a ‘null hypothesis’ above: If, as some believers assert, there exists no evidence for god, i.e. if god’s existence is unprovable, this implies that the universe, as a whole, is indistinguishable from one in which no god exists, since any difference could be pointed to as evidence for god’s existence.
This, however, either means that god’s existence, and therefore the question of belief vs. non-belief, is irrelevant, or that the hypothesis of god’s existence can be treated as any other scientific hypothesis, i.e. we can look to prove it via evidence. And what’s more, this means that in looking for proof of the existence of god, we have to take an atheistic point of view from the outset! This, again, illustrates why I view atheism as the more fundamental position: One ought to be naturally atheist until convinced otherwise.
Now I will deviate from my original intention to merely make the case for atheism a little and try to pre-emptively address a criticism of the logic in the previous paragraph that’s likely to be raised by believers – the special pleading, or claim for a special status of god/the supernatural. Most commonly, there will be assertions that god is extra-universal in some way, or that the metaphysical does not have to abide by physical laws. However, despite ostensibly rebutting scientific criticism of supernatural argumentation, it raises another, equally difficult to resolve, problem, which I call the interface dilemma. If a metaphysical agent is to effect any change of state in the physical world, it is unclear by what mechanism this could happen, or, in other words: How can a metaphysical process affect physical reality without itself necessarily being physical? Note that by physical, I mean describable by a finite set of laws; there is no requirement for the knowledge of a root cause; it was Niels Bohr who said: “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”
Thus, if this ‘outside influence’ happens according to rules, it is describable as (and indistinguishable from) a physical law; if it happens according to chance, there can at least statistical statements be made to describe it – compare how, for instance, we can’t exactly know position and momentum of a subatomic particle (and in fact, that information doesn’t even exist in the universe), yet we can still make astonishingly precise statements about their behaviour. (As an aside, a ‘mind’, essentially, is just a rather complex set of rules.)
However, I freely admit that this is probably so far the weakest spot in my argumentation.
I’d like to take a step back now, in order to have a clearer view at the world as it is – in fact, I shall attempt a brief outline of the construction of a world view using what I would call the principle of reasonable assumptions, and try to show how, using such reasonable assumptions, one will necessarily arrive at an atheistic view of the world.
The tool with which we can accumulate knowledge about the world is, trivially, observation. Now, some might contest that observation can mislead us; however, from such a solipsist position, it is impossible to arrive at valid conclusions, since everything can always be explained as me being a brain in a jar imagining everything else – but that position is devoid of substance, and thus should be discarded; however, it is true that one has to accept that observation is not completely misleading (it need not be completely true, however, since any errors in observation can be corrected by repeated observation as long as there is at least an arbitrarily small nugget of truth in it) in an axiomatic way. While that at first seems to be at odds with my characterization of atheism as opposed to all faith, this axiom has to be accepted in any purported description of the world in order for it to be meaningful, i.e. communicable and of some substance.
On to the reasonable assumptions: First, for some definition, I consider a reasonable assumption to be one that’s consistent with observation, and minimal in a kind of Occam’s razor sense: if you observe a stone to fall down upon release, the reasonable assumption to make is that it will do so the next time it is being released; a non-reasonable assumption would be to expect it to grow butterfly wings and flutter away. Any supernatural assumption is always a non-reasonable one, since it is equivalent to infinitely many other supernatural assumptions: ‘god did it’ is the same as ‘aliens/ghosts/underpants gnomes did it’, or as postulating some acausal relationship, i.e. ‘a rice sack falling in China caused it to happen’.
So, starting from observation, and using only reasonable assumptions (in the way I have defined them; I wouldn’t want anybody to accuse me of equivocation), one will invariably arrive at an atheistic view of the world, because a supernatural view is not uniquely defined and equivalent to any other supernatural view, and what’s even more, a sequence of reasonable assumptions eventually converges onto the truth, as much as it exists. To see this, consider how each successive assumption refines our picture of the world: each previously unobserved case is added to the total amount of knowledge, and, given even a finite amount of cases, ultimately leads to a complete picture; if we now also have laws governing all those cases, and a finite amount of those, the process merely works that much faster. In contrast, any view relying on non-reasonable assumptions has no explanatory power whatsoever, which harks back to the earlier point about the epistemological difference between faith-based knowledge and that arrived at by reason alone.
So, to provide a little digest of the preceding points, I am an atheist because:
[ul][li]Atheism is independent of human cognition, i.e. nobody has to know about atheism for it to be a valid philosophical stance[/li][li]It allows for the existence of fundamental truths[/li][li]It allows for logical conclusions to be valid[/li][li]It allows for the increase of knowledge about the world[/li][li]It is unique in the sense that it isn’t equivalent to any faith-based system, whereas all faith-based systems are equivalent to each other[/li][li]It holds explanatory, or at the very least descriptive, power[/ul][/li]
And as I said in the beginning, I am not out to convert anybody, I just want to make my case why I chose atheism over faith, and consider that a reasonable choice; however, any debate is obviously invited (or else I wouldn’t have posted it in here). Also, to re-iterate, I have no explicit faith in the non-existence of any of the countless gods and supernatural entities so far devised, however, as I hope to have shown, I consider each of them to be a hypothesis either to be decided by evidence, or else wholly irrelevant.
Anybody is welcome to both add arguments, or argue against those that are already present or those yet to be brought up.