Category: Atheism and Theism

Atheism, Materialism, and Intellectual Respectability

Joseph A.  e-mails:

Just a quick question. You recently posted that you think atheism can be intellectually respectable. Fair enough. But wouldn't you agree that intellectual respectability in general seems to be assumed more often than it should be?

To put a point on the question: Do you think materialism is intellectually respectable? I seem to recall you saying that (at the least) eliminative materialism is a view you wouldn't bother teaching in a philosophy course. Yet it also seems that some people, even those who would argue that theism isn't intellectually respectable, would bend over backwards to deny that EM isn't as well.

We should begin with a working definition of 'intellectually respectable.'  I suggest the following:

A view V is intellectually respectable =df V is logically consistent with (not ruled out by) anything we can legitimately claim to know.

People claim to know all sorts of things they do not know, which explains the qualifier 'legitimately.'   Note also that truth and intellectual respectability are different properties.  What is true might not be intellectually respectable, and what is intellectually respectable might not be true.  Truth is absolute while intellectual respectability is relative to the class of people to whom 'we' in the definition refers.  And which class is this?  Well, it would include me and Peter Lupu and other astute  contemporaries who are well apprised of the facts of logic and mathematics and science and history and common sense.  It would not include a lady I once encountered who thought that the Moon is the source of its light.  That opinion is not intellectually respectable. 

There are indefinitely many views that are clearly not intellectually respectable, and indefinitely many that clearly are.  The interesting cases are the ones that lie in between.  Let's consider two.

1. Eliminative materialism.  This is defended by some otherwise  sane  people, but I would say it is not intellectually respectable.  For it is ruled out by plain facts that we can legitimately claim to know, such facts as that we have beliefs and desires.  It is a  position in the philosophy of mind that denies the very data of the philosophy of mind.  Here is an argument that some might think supports it:

(1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs. 

But anyone with his head screwed on properly should be able to see that this argument does not establish (4) but is instead a reductio ad absurdum of premise (1) according to which beliefs are nothing if not brain states.  For if anything is obvious, it is that there are beliefs.  This is a pre-theoretical datum, a given.  What they are is up for grabs, but that they are is a starting-point that cannot be denied except by those in the grip of  an ideology.  Since the argument is valid in point of logical form, and the conclusion is manifestly, breath-takingly,  false, what the argument shows is that beliefs cannot be brain states.

2.  Theism.  Not every version of theism is intellectually respectable, obviously, but some are.  If you think otherwise, tell me which known fact rules  out a sophisticated version, say, the version elaborated over several books by Richard Swinburne.  ('Known fact' is not pleonastic in the way 'true fact' is; a fact can be unknown.)

a.  Will it be the 'fact' that nothing immaterial exists?  But that's not a fact, let alone a known fact.  Abstracta such as the proposition expressed by 'Nothing immaterial exists' are immaterial but indispensable.  Arguments to the effect  that they are dispensable merely show at the very most that it is debatable  whether abstracta are dispensable, with the upshot that it will not be a known fact that nothing immaterial exists.  No one can legitimately claim to know that nothing immaterial exists.

 b.  Will it be the fact that nothing both concrete and immaterial exists?  Even if this is a fact, it is not a known fact.  I am arguably a res cogitans.  We do not know that this is not the case the way we know that the Moon is not fifty miles from Earth.

c. Will it be the fact of evil?  But how do you know that evil is a fact at all?  Can you legitimately claim to know that the people and events you call evil are objectively evil and not merely such that you dislike or disapprove of them?  But even if evil is an objective fact, what makes you think that it is logically inconsistent with the existence of God? The Hume-Mackie logical argument from evil is almost universally rejected by contemporary philosophers. 

My claim is that there is no fact which we can claim to know — in the way we can claim to know that the Moon is more than 50 miles from Earth — that rules out the existence of God.  But I also claim that there is no such fact that rules it in.  Both theism  and atheism are intellectually respectable. I take no position at the moment on the question whether one is more respectable than the other, or more likely to be true; my claim is merely that both are intellectually respectable — in the way that eliminative materialism and the belief that the Moon is its own source of light are not intellectually respectable.

Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable? On Romans 1:18-20

Joe Carter over at First Things argues that "We have to abandon the politically correct notion that atheism is intellectually respectable."  My own view is that  theism and atheism are both intellectually respectable.  Carter makes his case by invoking St. Paul:

In Romans, St. Paul is clear that atheism is a case of vincible ignorance: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Acknowledging the existence of God is just the beginning—we must also recognize several of his divine attributes. Atheists that deny this reality are, as St. Paul said, without excuse. They are vincibly ignorant. 

Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth.   There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork.  Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is  planted firmly in Athens (philosophy, the autonomy of reason). And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism.  It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident.  It is not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact. 

I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me" (Kant).  But seeing is not seeing as.  If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework.  But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.

At the end of the day you must decide which of these interpretations to accept. You will not find some plain fact that will decide it for you.  There is no fact you can point to, or argument you can give, that definitively rules out theism or rules it in.

If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many of the cyberpunks over at Internet Infidels and similar sites, not to mention such luminaries as Russell and Sartre, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Paul appears to be doing what ideologues regularly do when pushed to the wall in debate: they resort to ad hominem attacks and psychologizing:  you are willful and stubborn and blinded by pride and lust; or you are a shill for corporate interests; or you are 'homophobic' or 'Islamophobic' or xenophobic; or you are a fear-monger and a hater; or you are a liar or insincere or stupid; or you are a racist, etc. 

Joe Carter does the same thing. 

Objection: "You are ignoring the deleterious noetic consequences of original sin. Because our faculties have been corrupted by it, we fail to find evident what is in itself evident, namely, that the world is a divine artifact.  And it is because of this original sin that unbelief is inexcusable."

This response raises its own difficulties.  First, how can one be morally responsible for a sin that one has not oneself committed but has somehow inherited? Second, if our faculties have been so corrupted by original sin that we can no longer reliably distinguish between the evident and the non-evident, then this corruption will extend to all our cognitive operations including Paul's theological reasoning, which we therefore should not trust either. 

For a different take on Carter's piece, see Michael Liccione's Why Atheism Can Be Respectable.

Is There a ‘No God’ Delusion?

A certain popular writer speaks of a God delusion.  This prompts the query whether there might be a 'No God' delusion.  Is it perhaps the case that atheism is a delusion?  Bruce Charlton, M. D. , returns an affirmative answer in Is Atheism Literally a Delusion?  In this post I will try to understand his basic argument and see if I should accept it.  The following is my reconstruction of  the core of Charlton's argument:

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J. P. Moreland on Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (Part One)

(The following review will be crossposted shortly at Prosblogion.  Comments are closed here, but will be open there.)

Apart from what Alvin Plantinga calls creative anti-realism, the two main philosophical options for many of us in the West are some version of naturalism and some version of Judeo-Christian theism. As its title indicates, J. P. Moreland’s The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM Press, 2009) supports the theistic position by way of a penetrating critique of naturalism and such associated doctrines as scientism. Moreland briefly discusses creative anti-realism in the guise of postmodernism on pp. 13-14, but I won’t report on that except to say that his arguments against it, albeit brief, are to my mind decisive. Section One of this review will present in some detail Moreland’s conception of naturalism and what it entails. Sections Two and Three will discuss his argument from consciousness for the existence of God. Section Four will ever so briefly report on the contents of the rest of the book. In Part Two of this review I hope to discuss Moreland’s critique of Thomas Nagel’s Dismissive Naturalism. Numbers in parentheses are page references. Words and phrases enclosed in double quotation marks are quotations from Moreland. Inverted commas are employed for mentioning and ‘scaring.’

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Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept

I had an excellent discussion with Mike Valle on a number of topics yesterday afternoon.  The following post exfoliates one of the themes of our discussion.

One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006)  is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation." (206) He speaks of "the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts." (205)

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Is Religion the Problem? Why Isn’t Belief As Such the Problem? The Special Pleading of Some Atheists

One of the arguments against religion in the contemporary atheist arsenal is the argument that religious beliefs fuel war and terrorism. Rather than pull quotations from such well-known authors as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I will quote a couple of passages from one of the contributors to Philosophers Without Gods, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. His piece is entitled "Overcoming Christianity." After describing his movement from his evangelical Christian upbringing to a quietistic rejection of Christianity, Sinnott-Armstrong tells us how he became an evangelical atheist:

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The Trouble with Continental Philosophy: Tillich

Today’s example of Continental muddle-headedness is not from a philosopher, strictly speaking, but from a theologian who was influenced by a philosopher, Heidegger, and who has had a great deal of influence on philosophers. Paul Tillich (1886-1965) writes:

Atheism can only mean the attempt to remove any ultimate concern – to remain unconcerned about the meaning of one’s existence. Indifference toward the ultimate question is the only imaginable form of atheism. Whether it is possible is a problem which must remain unsolved at this point. In any case, he who denies God as a matter of ultimate concern affirms God, because he affirms ultimacy in his concern. (Dynamics of Faith; quoted from White, Eternal Quest, p. 94)

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Attaching Useful Senses to ‘Negative Atheism’ and ‘Positive Atheism’

I have already sufficiently explained why 'atheism' and 'negative atheism' cannot be usefully defined in terms of mere absence of theistic belief.  (See also Peter Lupu's comments on this topic.)  But sense can be attached to these phrases and to their near relatives 'negative atheist' and 'positive atheist.'  I suggest that a negative atheist is a practical atheist while a positive atheist is a theoretical atheist.  But what do these terms mean?

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Sam Harris on Whether Atheists are Evil

In Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), in the section Are Atheists Evil?, Sam Harris writes:

If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. (pp. 38-39)

Harris then goes on to point out something that I don't doubt is true, namely, that atheists ". . . are at least as well behaved as the general population." (Ibid.) Harris' enthymeme can be spelled out as an instance of modus tollendo tollens, if you will forgive the pedantry:

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Against Terminological Mischief: ‘Negative Atheism’ and ‘Negative Nominalism’

This from the seemingly reputable site, Investigating Atheism:

More recently, atheists have argued that atheism only denotes a lack of theistic belief, rather than the active denial or claims of certainty it is often associated with.

I'm having a hard time seeing what point there could be in arguing that "atheism only denotes a lack of theistic belief."  Note first that atheism cannot be identified with the lack of theistic belief, i.e., the mere absence of the belief that God exists, for that would imply that cabbages and tire irons are atheists.  Note second that it won't do to say that atheism is the lack of theistic belief in persons, for there are persons incapable of forming beliefs.  Charitably interpreted, then, the idea must be that atheism is the lack of theistic belief in persons capable of forming and maintaining beliefs.

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The Definition of ‘Atheist’ and the Burden of Proof

Some define atheism in terms of the absence of the belief that God exists.  This won't do, obviously, since then we would have to count cabbages and sparkplugs as atheists given the absence in these humble entities of the belief that God exists.  But the following could be proffered with some show of plausibility: An atheist is a person whose psychological makeup is such as to permit his standing in the propositional atttude of belief toward the proposition that God exists, but who as a matter of fact does not stand in this relation, nor is disposed to stand in this relation were he to be queried about the existence of God.  Note that it does not suffice to say that an atheist is a person in whom the belief that God exists is lacking for then the neonatal and the senile would count as atheists, which is  surely  a bit of a stretch.

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The No True Scotsman or No True Atheist Fallacy

In logic, a fallacy is not a false belief but a pattern of reasoning that is both typical and in some way specious. Specious reasoning, by the very etymology of the term, appears correct but is not. Thus a fallacy is not just any old mistake in reasoning, but a recurrent mistake that is seductive. A taxonomy of fallacies is useful insofar as it helps prevent one from seducing oneself and being seduced by others.

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A. C. Grayling and a Stock Move of Militant Atheists

Since A. C. Grayling has surfaced in the ComBox here, it it will be useful for people to see just what sort of fellow he is.  So over the next few days I will reproduce  three or four of my Grayling posts from the old site.

Militant atheist philosopher A. C. Grayling writes,

Religious belief of all kinds shares the same intellectual respectability, evidential base, and rationality as belief in the existence of fairies.

This remark outrages the sensibilities of those who have deep religious convictions and attachments, and they regard it as insulting. But the truth is that everyone takes this attitude about all but one (or a very few) of the gods that have ever been claimed to exist.

No reasonably orthodox Christian believes in Aphrodite or the rest of the Olympian deities, or in Ganesh the Elephant God or the rest of the Hindu pantheon, or in the Japanese emperor, and so endlessly on – and officially (as a matter of Christian orthodoxy) he or she must say that anyone who sincerely believes in such deities is deluded and blasphemously in pursuit of "false gods".

The atheist adds just one more deity to the list of those not believed in; namely, the one remaining on the Christian's or Jew's or Muslim's list.

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