I have no problem or quarrel with people who simply lack a belief in God, Gods, a God, don’t use the word “God” to refer to anything the consider to exist, etc etc…
Where I get crossways with atheists is when they start up with what I think of as “hard atheism”: the assertion that nothing exists except the physically concrete and whatever objectively discernable energy-states it may possess as properties; the assertion that the explanation of anything and everything is prior causation, with all other explanatory models or understandings being illusions that are themselves attributable to prior causality; the dismissal not merely of “God” but all philosophical abstractions as artifacts of the mind’s blank-slate receptivity + the location of the individual harboring those abstractions in cultural time and space; absolute determinism, whether biological determinism or social determinism; the denial of the existence not merely of “God the creator” but of creativity entirely, the denial of intentionality, the denial of the capacity to cause, because the cause of everything is the state of everything in the moment preceding.
It is an atheism that essentially says “You aren’t here”. It says the consciousness you think you have is an artifact of neurochemistry, executing various trajectories in an environment dictated by causal determinism. The neurochemistry includes, of course, the matrix of neurochemical responses to external stimulation (the famous five senses, plus things like presence or absence of nutritional food, etc), but all those external phenomena are also explicable as the consequences of prior events.
Why (in case it’s not intrinsically & compellingly obvious) does it piss me off so?
First off, to an increasing extent in philosphy and physics, and also as a long-present perspective within religious (if not necessarily western/christian) thought, there is and have been ways of stepping beyong the simple binary opposition of causal determinism and volition. There’s no intrinsic reason, in other words, to seize on the phrases and vocabularies that stress only the mechanical and deterministic aspects of reality. Just because reality can be described ONE way, accurately, doesn’t mean it can’t also be described ANOTHER way, accurately, and on this level in particular the single description provided by causal determinism is insufficient and demonstrably so. (You don’t think so? Let’s see you go a week without acting on the assumption that you are a creature of free will with choices to make, and that you possess volitional thought and control over your actions…)
So a choice has been made, a selection of one way of looking at the world, an emphasis at the expense of other possible perspectives on reality and life, perspectives which do not intrinsically require Invisible Pink Unicorns for their validity, or respect for homeopathy or ESP or horoscopes… although I suppose they do reopen that whole hallway of closed doors for reëvaluation if the doors were slammed shut for lack of empirical evidence.
It’s a choice that embraces the descriptions and understandings that make us most powerless. (You can’t usefully have an effect on your environment if you are already totally caused by your environment. At best you can be a puppet of forces already in play within your environment, those already being caused by prior circumstance as well, just as everything else is).
It’s a choice that ridicules thought. Once you’ve been told and convinced that your deepest and most heartfelt feelings and insights and cogitations are actually just the momentum of prior causation on several different levels having their way with your neurons, you’ve been effectively alienated from your own mental production. It ain’t yours anymore.
It’s a choice that shrugs and says nothing matters. It’s the old game of switching Martin Luther King and Adolf Hitler at birth and observing each to take the role of he with whom he was switched (the social determinism model), or transferring the mental state of Martin Luther King into the body of Adolf Hitler and vice versa and observing each to take the role of he with whom he was switched (the biological determinsim mode). The ugly part of the game is the covert assertion that your assessment that Adolf Hitler’s way of being in the world was somehow problematic or less desirable than Martin Luther King’s is itself an artifact of your location in cultural time and space and/or your biological makeup: you can defend your premises until your typing fingers hurt, but gee you only hold to your precepts and priorities and judgments as a consequence of factors that determined you; and there’s no place you can go to for an objective moral assessment. Ain’t none. Nothing is right or wrong, there are only sequences of causes to explain why you happen to think this or that is right or wrong.
Now, having said all that, I want to stress that those observations aren’t WRONG, they’re just incomplete (and politically/socially/philosophicall loaded; choosing those perspectives is a non-neutral CHOICE). Science has given us many techniques and toys derived from thinking of the world as caused by its immediate prior state.
Look at yon swimming pool. Measure its length if you will. Use meters or feet or cubits, I don’t care. Got a number? OK, is there any portion of the water in the swimming pool that isn’t measured within that length parameter? No, the water of the swimming pool contains not a water-molecule that isn’t properly delineated by the length. It’s at zero or it’s at 13 or it’s at 17.19145 or whatever.
Does that make width wrong? I could measure the pool’s width. It actually has width. I could be oblivious to length and act like by having described all the water in the pool according to where it is on my width-line, I’ve told you everything you need to know about the water in the pool. I could make fun of you LENGTH people. I would be wrong. But I would also be right.
So we get all enlightened and embrace each other’s perspectives and the water in the pool is described equally and jointly by the confluence of length and width. And in our sophistication and the precision of our grid-map equations, we can sure make fun of that guy who came in talking about “DEPTH”, right?
Hard atheists piss me off because they’re so fucking sure they’ve got the world knocked down (as Jim Morrison once said) into a plastic box, and anyone who begs to differ is obviously and totally wrong, Ockham’s razor says their description of reality hits all the water molecules so anything else is superfluous, imaginary, or delusional, if not all three.
There’s another swimmer here who says everything in the swimming pool is a consequence of TIME, can you believe that?
