My problem with atheism
Ive read many religious writings (scriptures, theology, etc.) and much atheist literature (which began when I first found Arsenal for Skeptics about 1976). I agree with many atheist points and often find religion to be childish fantasy.
The same might be said of the alchemists: that many of their beliefs were childish fantasies unrelated to reality. BUT had the alchemists given up, we might never have discovered chemistry. I feel much the same about the atheist, that theyve given up the quest to find a deeper reality.
Of course, atheists may be right in that there is no deeper reality to be found, at least, not a reality that could in any sensible way be called God. But they may be wrong, too.
The atheist may respond that religions have had millennia to get their act together, and have failed. So, there is much justification for rejecting the idea of God. (Or rather rejecting ideas of God, since such ideas are so varied and, at times, contradictory.) But perhaps religions have failed because they use an epistemological method worthy of a child: someone special (prophet, God, God-man, etc.) said or wrote something, and we must believe it. Just like Mommy or Daddy said some something, so you should believe it.
Alchemists used something akin to sciences epistemological method (hypothesize, experiment, no gold? form different hypothesis, try different experiment). Perhaps, if religion employed something similar to sciences epistemological method, real progress could be made.
But how to apply sciences epistemological method to religion? A difficult question. The current draft of my thoughts is available at
https://adamford.com/NTheo/NewTheology.epub
https://adamford.com/NTheo/NewTheology.pdf
Comments welcome.
The same might be said of the alchemists: that many of their beliefs were childish fantasies unrelated to reality. BUT had the alchemists given up, we might never have discovered chemistry. I feel much the same about the atheist, that theyve given up the quest to find a deeper reality.
Of course, atheists may be right in that there is no deeper reality to be found, at least, not a reality that could in any sensible way be called God. But they may be wrong, too.
The atheist may respond that religions have had millennia to get their act together, and have failed. So, there is much justification for rejecting the idea of God. (Or rather rejecting ideas of God, since such ideas are so varied and, at times, contradictory.) But perhaps religions have failed because they use an epistemological method worthy of a child: someone special (prophet, God, God-man, etc.) said or wrote something, and we must believe it. Just like Mommy or Daddy said some something, so you should believe it.
Alchemists used something akin to sciences epistemological method (hypothesize, experiment, no gold? form different hypothesis, try different experiment). Perhaps, if religion employed something similar to sciences epistemological method, real progress could be made.
But how to apply sciences epistemological method to religion? A difficult question. The current draft of my thoughts is available at
https://adamford.com/NTheo/NewTheology.epub
https://adamford.com/NTheo/NewTheology.pdf
Comments welcome.
Comments (61)
That is the impression I get.
I may have described myself as atheist before I studied philosophy and psychology at university and in particular philosophy of mind which raises questions about the physicalist, materialist paradigm and mental states etc.
Now we have prominent Atheists like Dennett and the Churchland's going to the point of denying consciousness exists. Which is ridiculous and indicate they want to exorcise anything that challenges an atheist framework.
I now describe myself as an agnostic.
Quoting Art48
Well we know what happened when atheist and communistic regimes took hold and the level of brutality including The French Revolutions atrocities and their attempt to De-Christianize France.
I think science has failed to rescue meaning and morality or offer something equivalent to religion and can be accused with evidence of dehumanising us.
Hardly! People were brewing beer, poisoning arrows and embalming corpses long before they tried making gold. Chemistry has always been part of human endeavour, as have all the sciences, long before they were formalized into a system. Alchemy was a mere blind alley along the path of science, just as many of the religions and philosophies people have tried and abandoned were diversions along the path of formulating a collective psychological stance toward the vastness of reality.
Quoting Art48
Why would you need or want a reality under reality? I find reality as a whole quite deep enough to be going on with, since humans much smarter than me have barely scratched its surface. And, following from that, since humans presumably smarter that you have barely scratched the surface of reality, do you not consider a little presumptuous to think we're ready and equipped to look any deeper?
Quoting Art48
You don't. Science and philosophy run on parallel rails.
Quoting Art48
Quoting Vera Mont
Sciences epistemological method is itself a remnant of religious metaphysics. Why wee do you think Dennetts and Dawkins doctrinaire atheism comes from? Whats needed is an atheism that overcomes epistemological
method. I recommend Nietzsche, Foucault , Kuhn and Rouse.
Heres Rouse:
I also think a more basic trace of a theological conception remains in many philosophical accounts of science and nature. A theological conception of God as creator places God outside of nature. God's understanding of nature is also external to the world. Such a God could understand his language and his thoughts about the world, apart from any interaction with the world. Naturalists long ago removed God from scientific conceptions of the world. Yet many naturalists still implicitly understand science as aiming to take God's place. They interpret science as trying to represent nature from a standpoint outside of nature. The language in which science represents the world could then be understood apart from the causal interactions it articulates.
Seems to me that theism and atheism generally loiter at the superficial and glib end of philosophy. Most atheists and theists are satisfied with easy answers and unexamined doctrines. Theists tend to hold their beliefs because their parents did and atheists frequently accept science over theistic explanations because we live in secular times. In other words, neither come to their position through deep thinking. None of this says anything about the merits of atheism or theism in themselves.
Quoting Joshs
Without going into the details of these thinkers, can you describe in a few dot points what overcoming epistemological method looks like?
What does a quest to find a deeper reality mean? Are you referring to mysticism; meaning which transcends physicalism? I've kicked around with atheists for decades. Mostly an atheist is just someone who responds 'no' to a single question - Are you convinced a god exists?
As consequence, while an atheist might consider the idea of a god irrelevant to their daily experience, I have met many atheists who believe in idealism, astrology, reincarnation, tarot cards, ghosts, alien abduction, philosophy. Being an atheist does not make you a specific thing.
My response to atheists is that if you don't believe in god, you do not believe in any possible dogma of God, any characterisation, any interpretation whatsoever, old or new.
Interpretations of God or God's abound in the thousands. I doubt atheists have done their homework on all qualifications of such an entity. Furthermore it's not like any new idea about it cannot be formulated, religions develop and die. There are many that have long been lost to time and likely more that don't exist yet.
I woukd ask them if they don't believe in any God, tell me why you don't believe in my personal interpretation. Which of course they cannot, until I describe it.
What if there was a description of a God that satisfies science, evolution, philosophy etc.
You can only be atheist to known religions. For example I myself am Christian-atheist, Islamic-atheist and Judaism-atheist. But I still believe in a concept of God that I enmesh with Eastern hemisphere ideas derived from taoism and Buddhism etc, along with quantum mechanics, philosophy the works.
To be atheist to "all gods" is equivalent to saying I don't believe in any ideas whatsoever. In essence "I believe in nothing, both now and in the future". Which sounds suspiciously like antinatalism/ a direct refutation of all existents entirely.
I think this is absurd as any idea can pertain to a facet of a God concept of one so chooses to unify them under the umbrella term of god.
Quoting Benj96
The atheists I know tend to argue that they have not yet encountered a version of god they are convinced by and they are open to reconsidering their view if someone can make a case for something different that is convincing.
Would that not make them agnostic?
Most atheists and theists are not metaphysicians. Besides, what difference can "finding a deeper reality" make to one's everyday existence or ethical agency? Btw, I'm (usually) a philosophical naturalist and antitheist whatever divinity there might be, I'm convinced it is not "supernatural" (à la Epicurus/Spinoza).
Quoting Tom Storm
:100: :up:
Quoting Joshs
Yeah, and chemistry is "a remnant of" alchemy, astronomy "a remnant of" astrology, philosophy "a remnant of" mythology big whup. I don't see the point of this old canard (i.e. genetic fallacy). Anyway. Care to cite an instance of "religious metaphysics" (1) that quantifies the error of predictions, (2) that experimentally tests its explanations, (3) that is institutionally error-correcting fallibilistic by a peer-review community, (4) that is free of "revealed" "X-of-the-gaps" dogmas, etc etc? :chin:
Religion does not do the things science does. Religion is not an investigation, but a way of living. It does not tell us how things are, but what to do. Confusing these what to do with how things are will not be helpful.
Scientific method is particularly good at reaching a consensus. This aspect may be worth adopting in working out what to do. That would imply a basically liberal attitude towards ethical decision making, without reference to any "Fundamental entity".
Quoting Joshs
I think this view is mistaken. Part of the way in which science reaches a consensus is that it frames its assertions so that they are true regardless of one's frame of reference. Scientific principles are the same regardless of where one is standing. In physics this is made clear in the Principle of Relativity.
Science does not seek a view from nowhere, it seeks explanations that work anywhere.
The claim that science tries to "stand outside of nature" is no more than rhetoric.
Quoting 180 Proof
Your depiction of the methods of science is dependent on normative concepts like error correction and falsification, pointing to the indirect relation between conceptualization and the things themselves of the world. In this move , both our subjectivity and the things in themselves of the world take on the character of the divine in presupposing that which exists in and for itself outside of and before its relation to an outside.
A view from everywhere , or sideways on, is a relative of the view from nowhere. What justifies this stance is a view of nature grounded in a set of normative presuppositions concerning objectivity. There must be something universal within nature in itself that makes it possible for science to work anywhere.
:100:
Rudolf Steiner attempted to do something along these lines with his "spiritual science". Worth researching for the sake of interest if nothing more, if you haven't already.
Yes, as far as a knowledge claim is concerned; but atheism addresses belief. you are unconvinced a god exists. Knowledge claims are of a different order.
Hence in atheist communities I know people often say they are agnostic atheists. They have no certain knowledge of whether god exists, but based on what they do know they are unconvinced.
This is nice.
Quoting Joshs
Not a view from everywhere, nor nowhere, but a view from anywhere.
Quoting Joshs
I think this fundamentally wrong. First, the stance you describe, "a view from everywhere" is not something that science seeks. Rather science seeks to express its assertions in a way that is acceptable to any observer. Second, the emphasis in scientific method is not objectivity, but agreement. What is commonly called objectivity amounts to an agreed description.
Scientific method places the emphasis on reaching agreement amongst its proponents. It does this by insisting on things such as open, critical conversations and reproducible results. Quoting Joshs
No, there need not be any such thing. The notion of "nature-in-itself" is not found in science, but in the babble of phenomenalist philosophers. It's not nature-in-itself, whatever that is, but just nature.
I'm not sure what you mean by this but that's perhaps because I am not keen on the word 'perfect' and do not think it's a genuine category, more like a superlative. I also don't fetishize reason - I think it is often the best we can do to identify useful approaches but I don't think it is a pathway to truth (another abstraction I am suspicious of and seems to mean different things in different areas).
Quoting Benj96
:up:
:strong: :fire:
:up:
Why should anyone do that?? Can you explain?
Why would any of us presume to know where someone else's thinking comes from? My own atheism is a very simple one: I don't buy that brand of insurance. Even more sim[ply put: I think the god idea is a silly one.
Quoting Benj96
Of course we can. Nobody believes in anybody else's personal interpretation: believers all believe in their own interpretation, which is usually, but not universally, based on some description given to them as dogma, but varies slightly or widely from one believer to the next. I believe you have one, which is fine, as long as you don't bully other people or scare the horses, but I don't believe in any.
Quoting Benj96
If it gives you comfort to classify them thus, I'm sure most would be tolerant of your label, but would not choose it themselves. Reason: to call oneself agnostic is to suggest - especially to theists, who tend to grab the slightest hint of uncertainty and run amok with it - that one still entertains the god ideas that have been presented in doctrine form - particularly their doctrine, because they tend to be unfamiliar with any other.
This is not the case for most people who identify as atheist: they reject the whole concept of gods, in any and all forms that have been thus far promulgated in religion, and any future iterations that rely on the same idea.
The periodic table provides a deeper understanding of chemistry. Schrodinger's equation and the Standard Model provide a deeper understanding of chemistry.
Religion's epistemological method has failed to provide genuine knowledge as evidenced by the fact that different religions disagree about reality. Even Christian denominations cannot agree on how to be saved!
Science works. It possesses genuine knowledge which is why just about all nations accept Western science but usually keep their own religion.
Applying a superior epistemological method to religious questions might produce some genuine knowledge.
Then we'll cross that bridge if/when we come to it. All the currently available evidence suggests that theism is false. But nothing is preventing us from updating our beliefs pending future evidence. If someday it turns out that theists were onto something after all, then we can adjust our views accordingly.
But it would be extremely unreasonable to reject what the current evidence supports based only on the mere possibility that maybe, some day, the evidence might support something different. Once the evidence does support something different, that is the time to reevaluate and update your views.
This is at least backwards.
The religious epistemological method is the method of revelation, it's top-down, not bottom-up. God, the divine, or some higher truth is revealed to people, people don't figure it out on their own and they aren't supposed to nor can they.
Because science and religion are NOMAs, so there's no conflict.
How??
The religious epistemological method is regarding writings (some having talking serpents) as a revelation from God. It includes several methods (out of context, the original languages, taken too literally, etc.) to make the bogus revelation say whatever is desired. Thus, for a few centuries, the Bible supported slavery and burning witches, but today does not.
Science tells us that life is a struggle for survival. How does religion not fit this struggle for survival?
I presume to know when it comes to Dennett and Dawkins, and Im far from the only one who has pointed this out about them, because it is patently obvious from their understanding of the role and nature of science that they view science scientistically. What does this mean? Any time you hear someone defend atheism on the basis an argument to the effect that there is no empirical evidence in support of God, or that religious believers cant put their ideas to a scientific test, youre in the vicinity of a scientistic thinking, and a doctrinaire atheism which asserts with authority the truth of their position.
Am I back, or am I here, finally? I registered an account when PF went sideways but I'm not sure I ever posted anything.
Either way, I'm happy to be here now (the philosophy-related subreddits I was posting on weren't quite scratching the itch for me) and especially happy to see so many familiar faces, even so many years later. Many thanks to Jamal/Baden/etc for keeping the party going!
All the sirens went off at once; red flags waving like mad.
No. I know that theism is not true (i.e. theistic deities are imaginary).
I am irreligious because I think, in the wake and wreckage of millennia of servile superstitious veraphobic worship, that faith-based theistic religions are inimicable to human well-being and social justice, therefore are manifestly immoral (i.e. iatragenic) institutions because, to begin with, theistic gods are imaginary.
NB: My use of antitheism is non-standard ...; thus, the only "god" which makes any shred of sense to me consistent with all human knowledge of nature and lived experience and does not insult my intelligence or undermine my dignity as a moral agent is the Pandeus.
And what are those sirens and red flags telling you?
Quoting Vera Mont
From atheist Marxist Terry Eagleton:
Dawkins falsely considers that Christianity offers a rival view of the universe to science. Like the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in Breaking the Spell, he thinks it is a kind of bogus theory or pseudo-explanation of the world. In this sense, he is rather like someone who thinks that a novel is a botched piece of sociology, and who therefore cant see the point of it at all. Why bother with Robert Musil when you can read Max Weber? . . .
Dawkins makes an error of genre, or category mistake, about the kind of thing Christian belief is. He imagines that it is either some kind of pseudo-science, or that, if it is not that, then it conveniently dispenses itself from the need for evidence altogether. He also has an old-fashioned scientistic notion of what constitutes evidence.
Would you like to hear from some more bad-faith atheist debaters with similar comments on Dawkins and Dennett? I can give you plenty.
No thanks. I have no time for bad fate debaters of any stripe.
I call bullshit. Dont blame others for your inability to grasp their arguments. Thats not bad faith, but it is anti-intellectual as well as insulting to me and I dont appreciate it.
I grew up in a religious home but decided I was an atheist in my late teens. It was important for me not to embrace atheism simply as a lack of faith or in any way a rejection of the positive values that are associated with belief in God. My atheism had to be justified as incorporating all that was advantageous about religion while improving on its ability to make for a good society.
Or do you advocate instead that "religious claims" get an uncritical, automatic pass from carefully reasoned scrutiny (e.g. philosophical, historical and scientific analyses) in order to avoid the hysterical appearance of "doctrinnaire atheism"?
So it's simple.
1. God is imaginary, let's stick to the facts.
2. God is harmful. Let's not go down that road.
Pandeism fits in your worldview. You're in good company ol' chap! Albert Einstein, allegedly, was a pandeist and his name is synonymous with intelligence. I wonder why smart folk, if they're at all spiritually inclined, are usually pandeists? What's up with that?
Of course , the same sacred scriptures , once they were canonically frozen into their eventual form as the 5 books of Moses and the New Testament, immediately became interpreted and reinterpreted over the course of the past 2 millennia in ways that prepared tor way for , and then paralleled, the progress of scientific thought. In the era of Philo and Augustine, Platonic readings were in vogue. By the time of Aquinas and Maimonides, Aristotelian interpretations predominated, which emphasized for the first time human rationality, setting the stage for the Renaissance. In Kierkegaards era , a Kantianized , Hegelianized Judeo-Christianity of subjective existentialist faith emerged alongside dialectical materialist science.
The point is, it is not the same sacred scriptures and the same God that each era comes to know , but instead a transformed, reinterpreted text and deity. So how does this evolution of faith square with the publicly accessible facts and practices. One has to appreciate that facts only exist with a systematic order of practices . One could call this organizing frame an empirical episteme. Furthermore , the reigning episteme of an era undergoes a historical evolution that not only parallels that of Judeo-Christianity, but encompasses religious belief, the sciences, the arts and political thought within a single encompassing frame. This is why there were no atheists among Enlightenment scientists. The publicly accessible facts and practices of the day were subsumed under the order of a divine rationalism.
Many are pantheists; few, however, are pandeists. I'm neither, though I find the latter consilient with my naturalist outlook. As for why I think for many "smart folks" pantheism is an expression of nature as the embodiment of reason that 'evolves' in complexity and 'towards' unity (i.e. universality), and thus is the ultimately providential / beneficial (universal) standard for thinking and living (e.g. Logos, Dao). Pandeism, on the other hand, is much more modest (e.g. not 'providential' ...) and more speculative (i.e. cosmogenesis) than pantheism.
Your unwillingness or inability to give straight-forward answers to straight-forward questions is tedious. My apologies for bothering to engage you.
It will probably come.
Pandeism has residual elements of religion while pantheism doesn't. The latter is basically naturalism, but viewed with a religious lens, just as religion is, dare I say, nonsense at worst or security blanket at best to science.
Reading this discussion has been an interesting and instructive experience. I hope I won't be messing up the discussion if I add some comments.
Philosophical discussion often sets its terms around theism, with atheism as its opposite and religion as its subject. But I think that the focus on God misses the point. A religion (or sect) is a way of life, and it is as much about what one does as what one believes. Nonetheless, since the beliefs add up to a way of thinking about the world and the concept of God is meant to be a foundation of that, the beliefs are important. Beliefs and actions interact of course, so there is no separation, just a complexity. The social conditions in which the religion must exist are, of course, an additional complexity.
Not that science and religion are incompatible. There are, are there not, many people who are scientists and have a religious belief. We tend unthinkingly to adopt the idea that there is some sort of competition between the two. This serves the purposes of extreme atheism but is a really relic of ancient battles which do not need to be fought any longer. There are plenty of conceptions of God that allow for peaceful co-existence, from science as reading the mind of God via God as the sustainer of all natural laws to "God, or Nature".
Is science a way of looking at and living in the world - in short a way of life? It seems to have many of the features.
Could atheism be considered a religion? I don't think it is associated with any particular way of life, so my answer is no.
Having said that a religion is a way of life, it does seem to me that, whatever a religion aims to be, it becomes a field across which the tendencies of human nature play out. Sectarian divisions often reflect a personality type, (fundamentalism, liberalism, and so forth) so what exactly the way of life of Christianity (for example) is, becomes difficult to discern.
One problem that I've been worrying about a great deal lately is this. Each religion sets out to be a complete way of life and sees no need to make room for alternative belief-systems. Since it is set up as a minority in a hostile environment, that seems inevitable. Exclusivity is common to all (or at least many) of them. Add to this the belief that the real foundation of religious belief is not argument or evidence or any of that. It is faith (or perhaps "commitment"). What bother is me is that "othering" non-believers seems to be inherent in that. (Hume's argument against miracles - section 10 in the Enquiry - is a good example, if you read it carefully to the end.) So intolerance seems built in. I realize that in practice many religious people are perfectly, generously, tolerant. But the tendency seems built in and history seems to show that it will surface from time to time.
I begin with the philosophical and psychological
model that makes sense of my world, without at first worrying about how this thinking relates to the question of God. Then I examine the different ways in which god can be used. For instance, there is God as a personality , a self modeled on human selves. The. there is God as energy, or God as pantheistic totality of all existing things.
Concerning God as a self, if in my psychological
model, the self is a social construct, a continually changing phenomenon with no persisting identity , you can see how this fragments the idea of God as a self.
What about God as energy or pantheistic totality? Here what is at stake is the idea of an ethical grounding for the world. Not a personal self but a grounding of goodness. God is synonymous with the Good. But what if my psychological model puts into question the persisting identity of the meaning of the concept of goodness? If the meaning of goodness when it comes to human relations is relative to content and culture, then God as Goodness becomes just one concept that is relative to its use , which is constantly changing.
In sum , my atheism is not a matter of saying there is no god, but of saying there are as many meanings of that concept as there are selves within my body, or values within and between culture. So God cant be used as a fundamental explanation or first cause. It is more of an effect of a process that philosophy can describe in other terms, such as Heideggers Beyng.
As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.
Quoting Joshs
God is something like the cumulative result of presuppositions and approaches to meaning which are not sustainable in their traditional sense.
[quote=J. Lennon][i]God is a concept
By which we measure
Our pain[/i][/quote]
:chin:
This is confused, you've got it backwards, mon ami. :smirk:
Perhaps, my intuition has been off the mark for most of the time I exercised it.
-Thats not true. Alchemy was just a bad way to do Chemistry. Alchemy failure to provide real world results rendering itself useless and irrelevant. Logic and instrumental value of the end product (knowledge) is what lead as to shape the rules of the discipline (chemistry.)
If we use your example on Alchemy to construct an analogy, then Theists are the Alchemists (believed in unfounded claims) and Atheists are the result of logic and real life facts.
After all believing in magical answers was not the reason behind our Epistemic Success. Its science and its neutral (atheistic/rejecting the supernatural until it can be justified through objective evidence) principles that allowed us to peel off the layers of reality. As far as we know Religious Tradition and beliefs were always weighing down our epistemic advances.
Quoting Art48
-This is NOT the atheistic position. You are describing the Antitheistic position but that is only a subset of a much larger category(atheism). That a category error.
The minimum position for someone to be an Atheist is to have doubt to the claim and demand evidence before accepting it as true.
Logic (Null Hypothesis) dictates that all unverified claims should be rejected until objective evidence can falsify our initial rejection. So Atheism(not being convinced of the truthiness of the claim), by definition is the most rational position to hold.
Sure atheists and atheists may be wrong, but the moment to accept that is only after God existence has been verified. (the same is true for antitheists)
Do you go around telling people you are millionaire because its is possible to win the lottery later that day? That's not reasonable right? So why theist do exactly that with the God claim?
Quoting Art48
-Correct , the rejection of an unjustified belief is the most rational thing to do
Quoting Art48
-The reason why religions of the past or believers of the presence have failed to demonstrate objectively the existence of the God is irrelevant. The burden is on the side making the claim after all.
Quoting Art48
-Well their hypothesis (turn lead in to gold) was based on wishful thoughts, not on knowledge. So apart from similarities in methodology neither their standards and principles or level of the quality of their methodologies were comparable to science. After all science's methodologies are not something special, between a scientific lab and any other empirical method of knowledge. the rules of evaluations and systematic accumulation and processing of data is what differs.
Quoting Art48
-That's not Science's or Logic's fault. The problem lies with the nature of the religious claims. Again the burden of proof lies with the side making the claim.
-Revelation? that not a method, its doesn't have steps that one can follow in an effort to reproduce the result.
Those are the Claims...not the result of a objective methodology and those claims are subjective (this is why we have claims for more than 4.300 religions and more than 10.000 deities with different characteristics, qualities and roles in reality).
Those claims need to be demonstrated objectively, not assumed to be true. This is the whole issue with religious claims.
Quoting baker
_that could be the case if and only if religion staying in its Magisteria and didn't attempt to introduce its entities withing science back yard. Unfortunately most classical religions do that mistake and their claims are fair game for Science.
Religion was and is "technology", a "tool" humans invented to help them deal with the rough reality of their existence.