The Arguments for Atheism

(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.

If atheism is a denial of abstracts such as love and spirituality, I’m not sure where I stand? I have a ‘gut feeling’ that there is more to life than this physical husk, but nothing I have read or heard has managed to reinforce it. In the stark light of analysis though, I am less inclined to believe it. It’s another one of those human abstracts “Hope”, that makes those thoughts more bearable.
p.s. I hope that doesn’t make me religious?
p.p.s. On second thoughts, if it does, I can live with that.

There was a period in my life where I read everything I could from the best atheist writers and also the premier thinkers of faith.

If there’s one thing I got out of all that, it’s that there is no fundamental Truth with a capital “T”

Atheism doesn’t diminish feelings of love or hope in the slightest; on the contrary, to me, it only reinforces their importance, because they are realized in the here and now, as opposed to some abstract after-world or spiritual domain. Also, those looking at this world in all its magnificence and claiming it is just a ‘physical husk’, those that expect ‘something more’ or ‘beyond’, either need glasses or are just unreasonably greedy. The universe ranges in size from 10[sup]-35[/sup] to 10[sup]26[/sup]m, and every order of magnitude is full of countless wonders to marvel at; to merely look at this and say ‘meh, is that supposed to be it?’ seems a strange attitude to me.

Well, I didn’t capitalize it, and it’s true that there’s none we know currently, that we may never know it if it exists, and that it might not exist at all; however, there is also the possibility for a concise set of natural laws that govern all phenomena within the universe, and to discount it out of hand seems a bit rash.

Yes, but all the natural laws described by any mathematics/physics can be always be explained as “God created the very mathematical tools you’re using to describe His universe!” That type of answer has that ring of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to it. If you can’t prove or refute a Higher Being’s ultimate transcendence, where can the discussion go?

I’ve been meaning to start another debate thread about this topic but I’ll mention some of the idea here. We are looking for metaphysical truths but we have no metaphysical toolkit to find it. We use “language/speech” and “mathematics” as a poor substitute. We fool ourselves into thinking they are metaphysical “flashlights” into the Truth hidden by darkness. I believe everybody on both sides Christopher Hitchens, Steven Dawkins, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, etc suffers from this.

We’ve had 2000+ plus years of dialogue on atheist vs religion and I’ve seen zero progress on answering the metaphysical question. Each generation rehashes the same arguments… the only difference is updating it using contemporary language and contemporary analogies. (E.g. the old analogy was “watch” and then new analogy is “Boeing 747” – it’s the same argument with a different window dressing.)

Do you see it differently?

Funny, my 11 year old daughter said the same thing to me just yesterday.

Well, actually she said “I don’t believe there’s a God. I mean how could someone create all of this?” I played devil’s advocate and told her that God isn’t a person, but a deity, or an omnipotent presence, but she wasn’t buying into it. Ahh, all that Catholic schooling gone to waste. :wink:

I’m proud of her using her own brain and coming to these conclusions actually.

Your OP was very long-winded, but essentially describes my views on religion and atheism.

However, to me, this would not be a reasonable assumption to make – hence my arguing for atheism as a null hypothesis.

You can go and try to show that the non-existence of the higher being should always be the default stance – that’s pretty much what large parts of my argumentation were about.

Well, to a certain extend, I think that there should not be a debate in the fashion that there is today – I think that, unless evidence to the contrary emerges, the natural position to take is, once again, atheism.

Yeah, I know; it just came out that way and I felt it necessary to deal with the matter with at least some stringency. And hey, other people have written whole books on the subject!

You see, this is my assertion. Phrases like “reasonable assumption”, “null hypothesis”, and “default stance” are language constructions that we hope will transfer from the brain of one human to all others to prove metaphysical truths. To an atheist, your statement is 100% logical and complete. To the person that’s religious, your statement is incomplete and unconvincing. More words have been said but nobody’s belief changes.

When I see the color RED, I label it “red”. Maybe when you see the color GREEN, you also happen to call it “red”. In the language domain, what sentence could we possibly construct to get to the Truth that our brains are actually “seeing” the same color? We could argue for 2000 more years on this and we would never know. If language is an inadequate tool to solve something as simple as RED/GREEN perception labels, how can it prove/disprove the existence God?

Hmm, I guess I disagree here – both concepts have a logical definition, and thus an unambiguous meaning. Their applicability is not part of a subjective picture of the world in the way the qualia of red and green are; besides, qualia are irrelevant since, even if what looks red to me I call green, as long as everybody else calls it green (no matter whether or not they’re ‘really’ seeing blue, or pink, or whatever), there is no ambiguity in the concept. Also, for instance, the assertion ‘it predominantly reflects light of a wavelength of around 550nm’ isn’t contested by anyone.

I’ll just note that the OP seems more an argument for humanism than atheism. Atheism has nothing to do with moral actions or how we interact with other humans.

I’m not sure I get what you’re getting at here – I don’t believe I’ve said anything about morality in my post, or about human interactions? And I’ve given a, well, let’s call it usage note for the word atheism that I’ve tried to abide by; also, humanism is most commonly associated with a certain kind of moral universalism, which I don’t think the arguments in my OP are sufficient to derive.

Humanism simply says “Let’s try and work out this whole thing (living on the planet together) logically rather than follow doctrine.” Your OP is mostly saying, “Doctrine isn’t a very useful tool compared to logic.” So while your OP isn’t concerned with morality per se, it is arguing for a rational approach to ones world view. But of what use is a world view besides for interacting with other people–AKA morality? So while I’d agree that your OP isn’t explaining humanistic thought and morality, it is an argument for going down that road.

Personally, I did not find the OP long winded at all. I think he took us through his logical arguments in a very concise and approachable manner.

I won’t offer more commentary than that, for not only do I agree with him and thus would only be parroting his reasoning and conclusions, but I also wouldn’t be anywhere near as eloquent as he in describing my own thoughts on why atheism is the logical, default position.

I will say, however, that I look forward to reading further discussion. :slight_smile:

Right, I can certainly get on board with that; however, the intent of my post was more along the lines of discussing what we can reasonably say about the world, and of what nature pure knowledge is when viewed from both a faith-based and atheistic perspective, independently of human interaction, and not how the results of this discussion ought to be applied.

I’m going to have to agree with you. Sometimes we need reminding of these things, and to try not to get too bogged down in the “Why?” of everything, maybe?

It’s not like we are ever going to know ALL there is to know. Still, there’s nothing wrong with setting your aims high, I suppose.

As an atheist myself, I would have to give kudos to the OP for the post. Its certainly something that speaks to me and echoes my rejection of faith

I’d have to disagree, obviously. It seems that you’re trying to say that the problem of objective reality is eliminated once we realize that no human can ever objectively know something, the “brain in a jar” position that the OP alluded to, and as such to take a firm position on anything is foolish (you decry Truth because I could see green and you could see red).

But even when its a brain in a jar, certain positions can be said to be valid and others invalid. If you see Red but insist on calling it Yellow, while I see Green but recognize it as Red, then your position is inherently flawed because you know it as Red yet refuse to call it that. My position would therefore be valid, despite whatever objecti color that is, because what I recognize as Red I in fact call Red.

With religions its the same way, not just updated language. Within the confines of our understanding exists fundamental truths applying without exception to our sphere of understanding. Atheism violates none of that understanding. Religion, however, does, because by its very nature it assumes knowledge not within its sphere of understanding. It postulates things that its believers know 100% about things they cannot know, while atheism simply recognizes that limitation and acts accordingly.

Whatever real color that Red is, you’d be mistaken to call it yellow if you recognize it as red, and I would be correct if I recognize it as red even if its something entirely different

I do not believe in any god, but this strikes me as a bad argument:

Surely this can be a proof that the details of any religion is likely not the “True” religion; but one could, just as easily, argue that there exists a Platonic ideal “true religion” that every existing religion attempts to approximate. Some get closer and some further.

Atheism doesn’t exist “independently of human belief” any more than this Platonic ideal. Both are ways of conceptualizing the way the universe is organized, and consceptualization is, fundamentaly, a human (or at least a concious) act.

You’ve misunderstood what I wrote.

I’m not talking about self-denial of a “correct” color so there’s nothing to “refuse.” I’m talking about 2 people perceiving the color red and never knowing through the use of language if they are even “experiencing/perceiving/internalizing” the same color even if they sat and talked it over for 1000 years. Language/speech/writing/words/sentences/symbols are an inadequate tool to figure this out. I’m sure there’s a fancy science term for this and if I knew it, I’d put the wiki link instead of trying to explain it myself. I’m clearly not doing a good job articulating the nuances of this analogy.

I admit, I didn’t read the entire OP. But a couple of things stood out to me that I want to comment on.

This strikes me as being at least somewhat question-begging. If there is no God, then what you said is true. If, however, there is a God, and at least one of the religions was initiated by God or represents a genuine encounter with God, as opposed to being a purely human invention, then that religion can exist as long as God does.

Furthermore, even if humanity were to be wiped off the face of the planet, if religions that claim the survival of the soul beyond the death of the earthly body are true, religion would not necessarily die with the physical death of its adherents.

Huh?

I’ve heard it argued the other way around: that the existence of logical truth is evidence for the existence of God. If our minds are just the random products of a universe that just happened, how can we trust what they tell us to be Truth? Or, here’s a formulation by Peter Kreeft:

I’m not sure whether I buy that, at least as stated, but it at least makes no less sense to me than your claim.

Many theistic thinkers would assure you that God’s omnipotence does not mean the ability to do the logically impossible (like creating a burrito so hot he could not eat it). As I think C.S. Lewis put it, nonsense does not cease to be nonsense just because you put the words “God can” in front of it.