After really finding nothing impressive in the argument for agnosticism, it’s time to turn our gaze to global atheism and I can already tell you that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy won’t be doing well here. Of course, the kind of people who would take any of this seriously, they won’t care what I have to say, will they?
Granted, that’s just more evidence that a lot of people operate as if they were religious. “You don’t take the Bible seriously because you lack faith!” No, I don’t take it seriously because there’s no evidence that it’s true. The same seems to be the case for these entries in the SEP.
Let’s take a look anyhow. See you below.
“Almost all well-known arguments for atheism are arguments for a particular version of local atheism.” The problem there is the fact that there are no arguments for atheism because atheism isn’t a positive position. It is a lack of theism. It is a rejection of the claims made by the religious because the religious haven’t brought sufficient (or any) evidence to the table. It’s still “I don’t believe you.”
This is where philosophy continues to go wrong because they only want to deal with positive claims, yet that doesn’t change the fact that atheism isn’t one. I don’t know of a single self-identified atheist who says that there can’t be any gods, period. This whole thing is a gigantic straw man.
“One possible exception to this rule is an argument recently made popular by some New Atheists, although it was not invented by them.” First off, there aren’t any “new atheists”. The only difference between modern atheists and those that came before is the fact that the religious can’t shut us up. The same things are being said. It’s only the scope and the reach that are different.
However, let’s see what this argument is.
- (1)The absence of good reasons to believe that God exists is itself a good reason to believe that God does not exist.
- (2)There is no good reason to believe that God exists.
It follows from (1) and (2) that
- (3)There is good reason to believe that God does not exist.
Fine, but that’s still not a positive claim, is it? It’s not a positive statement that there are no gods, only a valid argument to say that we have no good reasons to think that there are. We have not been convinced. I don’t know that I’d agree with the way this is stated, since the absence of good reasons to believe anything is sufficient to not believe, but not to say that proves, somehow, that said proposed thing isn’t real. I’m not interested enough to go back to the original Gary Gutting source to see if this was quoted accurately, so let’s just continue.
“Notice the obvious relevance of this argument to agnosticism. According to one prominent member of the agnosticism family, we have no good reason to believe that God exists and no good reason to believe that God does not exist. Clearly, if the first premise of this argument is true, then this version of agnosticism must be false.” They’re still getting agnosticism wrong too. This isn’t a binary position and never has been. You can believe that gods do exist, you can believe that gods don’t exist and you can be unconvinced that the claims made by the religious are valid or worthwhile. Most atheists fit into the third category, not the second.
“Can the no arguments argument be construed as an argument for global atheism? One might object that it is not, strictly speaking, an argument for any sort of atheism since its conclusion is not that atheism is true but instead that there is good reason to believe that atheism is true. But that is just a quibble. Ultimately, whether this argument can be used to defend global atheism depends on how its first premise is defended.” Nobody is trying to defend global atheism except the philosophers who desperately want it to exist. It’s important to recognize the truth behind the effort. This is the exact same thing that happens with the religious. They can’t accept that atheism is simply the rejection of their own claims, they have to invent a straw man version that we actively believe that their gods aren’t real. This really does come off as an emotional reaction. I don’t care what you want to be true, I care what you can demonstrate to be true and none of these people seem capable of doing that.
“The usual way of defending it is to derive it from some general principle according to which lacking grounds for claims of a certain sort is good reason to reject those claims. The restriction of this principle to claims “of a certain sort” is crucial, since the principle that the absence of grounds for a claim is in all cases a good reason to believe that the claim is false is rather obviously false. One might, for example, lack grounds for believing that the next time one flips a coin it will come up heads, but that is not a good reason to believe that it won’t come up heads.” Welcome to desperate rationalization. It’s not that hard. If someone presents you with a jar of marbles and tells you that the number of marbles is even, you can refuse to accept their claim, based on the lack of any evidence that their pronouncement is correct. That doesn’t mean that you are making a positive claim that the number of marbles is odd. The claimant hasn’t met their burden of proof to show that the number of marbles is, in fact, even. That doesn’t mean it’s odd, that means that we are not convinced by the claim being made.
“A more promising approach restricts the principle to existence claims, thereby turning it into a version of Ockham’s razor. According to this version of the principle, the absence of grounds supporting a positive existential statement (like “God exists”—however “God” is understood) is a good reason to believe that the statement is false (McLaughlin 1984).” No. It is a good reason to think that the statement is unsupported. If someone tells me that Bigfoot is out in the woods, the fact that I reject that claim as unsupported doesn’t mean I am positively asserting that Bigfoot isn’t there. It is an acknowledgement that I have insufficient reason to think that the claim is supported to such a degree as to make it reasonable to accept the claim. It isn’t a positive assertion. Get it through your head!
“One objection to this principle is that not every sort of thing is such that, if it existed, then we would likely have good reason to believe that it exists.” Then you shouldn’t believe that it exists. That is the very basis of evidentialism. You don’t believe things until you have been presented with sufficient evidence to think that they are true! We don’t have to stick to religion to see this. We can look at any claim and, in fact, he mentions one, believing that there is intelligent life in distant galaxies. Zero evidence = zero belief. Not believing there is, that doesn’t translate to a positive assertion that there is not. It’s saying “I don’t know, come back with better information”.
“Perhaps, however, an even more narrowly restricted principle would do the trick: whenever the assumption that a positive existential claim is true would lead one to expect to have grounds for its truth, the absence of such grounds is a good reason to believe that the claim is false.” Yet there are other options as I’ve already said. It’s why an agnostic atheist would say “I don’t know AND I don’t believe”. That’s two different positions. I don’t have to tell you that your claim is false in order not to believe it. I just don’t have to be convinced.
“It might then be argued that (i) a God would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of Her existence and so (ii) the absence of such evidence is a good reason to believe that God does not exist.” Yet that’s not remotely what’s going on here. I don’t define gods. That’s for the believers to do. I simply look at the claims made by the religious and either accept them or reject them, provisionally, based on the quality of the evidence that they present to me. If it is insufficient for me to assent, then I don’t. So far, every god-claim I’ve ever seen has been insufficient for me to assent. Easy peasy.
“This transforms the no arguments argument into an argument from divine hiddenness. It also transforms it into at best an argument for local atheism, since even if the God of, say, classical theism would not hide, not all legitimate God-concepts are such that a being instantiating that concept would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of its existence.” Divine hiddenness isn’t an atheist argument, it’s a religious one. It’s just playing god of the gaps. “God doesn’t want you to know he’s real!” Well how do you know that? Where did you get your information? Straight out of their asses, that’s where!
This whole thing really looks like they’re trying to defend theism as some kind of rational proposition when it simply isn’t. Now Paul Draper isn’t a theist, he’s been a generally outspoken critic of religion, debating people like William Lane Craig, but where I think he’s going wrong is that he’s assuming that theism is a credible position to hold in the first place. He seems to be assuming intellectual honesty and that simply isn’t in evidence. Theism is an emotional position, not an intellectual one. There is no good reason to think theism is true. Theists just WANT to believe it for emotional reasons.
This is where I think this whole thing is going sideways, for the same reason that I see a lot of philosophers accepting basic Christian claims for the sake of argument. If they don’t, then the Christians won’t talk to them. They lose out on having a discussion, which unfortunately, seems to be a lot more valuable to a lot of philosophers than actually getting to the truth. It’s the same reason people like Bart Ehrman, who isn’t a philsopher, keeps pushing the idea of a real, historical Jesus, even though it isn’t defensible. If he didn’t, theologians would reject him as a crank and there would go his career.
I’m therefore still rather confused what the point of all of this is. Are they trying to force it into a philosophical mold? If so, then maybe the mold is wrong. Maybe they need to go back to the drawing board because they seem very off-kilter here. Never time though, they try to make a case, several cases, for local atheism. I can’t wait to see how they get that one wrong.