That’s the atheist program. Though the average person may not realize it, atheism is based on honest observations about ourselves and the world around us. Some of these observations are the work of scientists, others part of our everyday experiences, but together they make a compelling case for a world without God.

What is the theist program? Theists say God, who is non-physical, existed first. Then God made the physical world. Then God made us with a physical body but placed inside us a soul or consciousness which is non-physical. When our bodies die, this conscious soul that once was inside us escapes and can be punished or rewarded by God.

It is a story with tension, drama, compelling plot lines and, if we pick the right religion, the promise of a happy ending. It’s got everything we expect from a good novel or movie. But is it fact—or fiction?

Let’s open our eyes and look at the world for an answer.

What Thought Can’t Do

Our consciousness comes from our brain, from neurons. How do we know this is true? If neurons get damaged, consciousness gets damaged. Brain scientists have confirmed this fact again and again. But even without the input of scientists, we know it already. We know that alcohol and drugs alter the brain and in turn mess up our consciousness.

On one hand, the physical brain directly affects consciousness. On the other hand, consciousness cannot directly affect the world around us. Our thoughts can’t make physical things come into existence. Thoughts can’t think objects into being. We can think of objects, of course, but thinking of them doesn’t make them exist. Consciousness doesn’t work that way.

Our thoughts, in fact, can’t affect anything in the world around us. Not directly, at least. If we want to affect something in the world, we must engage it with our hands, with our bodies. Otherwise nothing gets done. Although many have claimed that they could bend spoons or move objects with their minds, every scientific attempt to verify such claims has failed. Minds simply don’t work that way.

Thoughts & Neurons

And yet, there must be some location where matter and thought engage each other. It makes sense, for example, that our consciousness and our neurons have a two-way interaction. After all, our thoughts seem to influence our behavior. But the evidence, quite overwhelming, is that interaction between consciousness and matter occurs only in the brain. It is specifically interaction between neurons and consciousness. My thoughts and feeling can’t affect the pair of scissor sitting on the desk in front of me. I can’t move or do anything to the scissors with my consciousness. Except in one specific manner: I can influence my brain to move my arm to pick up the scissors. My body can affect the physical world. My thoughts can only affect the neurons in my brain.

In fiction, of course, things are different. In The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, one of my favorite movies, Lattis and Kro-bar attempt to use Marva mind-meld to control Betty and thwart the Lost Skeleton’s own mind-control efforts over her. Our movies and fantasy novels are full of this kind of thing. But in the real world, we know life doesn’t work that way.  We have only one way of influencing other people’s consciousness and that is through our actions or through physical lines of communication—talking, writing, art, music, movies and so on.

The reality is that we are all experts on consciousness—if only we pay attention to what we know.

And this is what we know: consciousness is intimately associated with the neurons in our brain. Those neurons somehow create our conscious experiences, and in turn our thoughts and feelings can alter our behavior from what it would otherwise have been. We also know that it is the brain—those neurons again—that moves our muscles and makes our bodies do things. And we also know that only by our bodies doing things (or tools we have built with our bodies) can we affect physical changes in the world. We can’t bypass our bodies or our tools and affect those changes directly from consciousness.

We can’t even communicate consciousness to consciousness directly without our bodies being there to mediate the exchange—those physical lines of communication again. The Marva mind-meld doesn’t work in real life, and we all know that. We may wish or dream, but reality is otherwise.

If it requires a body in order for thoughts to have any hope of affecting the world, then it follows—again this is simple common sense—that bodiless beings are powerless. The God and gods of our imagination can’t do anything in the world even if we grant their existence. It takes a body to act. Indeed, scientists have learned that it takes neurons—a brain—even to think or feel. Without a body, God can’t even have consciousness.

Evolution and Consciousness

These are the common sense observations from which atheism springs.  If we take these observations seriously, they lead us not just to atheism but to a natural worldview that contrasts sharply with the supernatural worldview of theists. In the natural worldview, physical reality—not any kind of consciousness or God—comes first. In some form or other this physical reality has always existed. From it, organic life evolved into existence. Later, the brains of some organisms evolved to the point where their neurons began producing experiences—the beginning of consciousness. The ability to experience helped species survive and thrive, and led to more types of conscious experiences evolving: pain, visual and auditory simulacra, and so on.

Among the striking features of experiences is that they are assigned a location (inside the body, on its surface, or outside), they simulate useful information about the world or about the body of the organism, and at varying levels they create value toward action. This last is a difficult concept to put into words, but essentially it means that each experience has a meaning for the organism, and these meanings deliver varying levels of influence upon the organism’s decision-making process.

Eventually (in our own species at the least) higher-level experiences of symbolic thought evolved, enabling us to construct knowledge models of the world around us. It is important to realize that because it’s a product of evolution, knowledge is inherently pragmatic in nature. We never know the “true reality” of the physical world; what we know is a simulacrum of reality which is valuable for its usefulness. What this mean is that in the natural worldview there is no ‘underlying intelligence” to be found in the world; intelligence is something that evolved into existence much later and exists only in organisms with brains that create that sort of consciousness.

It also follows that our way of knowing the world must be based on pragmatic empiricism. Thus if we assert that some statement about the world is “true,” what we mean is that the statement is useful to us, and specifically that it’s more useful to us than competing statements which we might invent in terms of it’s reliability and predictability. If this sounds something like a description of the scientific method, it’s because the scientific method is a codification of the most effective way of developing statements about the world that are useful and reliable. What is important to understand about the scientific method is that it does not and cannot verify knowledge against the “real” world—instead one hypothesis is pitted against another (or against its negation) and then controlled tests are run to see which is more useful for describing and predicting what happens. If an hypothesis is less useful than its negative, we say it’s been falsified. We never know the world directly, never extract knowledge from the world (because that’s not where knowledge exists); instead we invent knowledge and test it against possible alternatives for it’s usefulness to us in our interactions with the world.

Counter-Attack

I’ve laid out in brief the common sense basis of atheism. It is based, as we have seen, on what we all know about how consciousness and thinking actually works in the world; knowledge that comes either from our common experiences or from the careful observations of scientists. And simply, the way that thoughts and consciousness work just doesn’t fit with there being a God.

Still, I can imagine theists admitting that, on the surface, things may seem to be the way I have described. But—and it’s a big but—asserting that there are nevertheless very good reasons to believe the atheist viewpoint, the natural worldview, just can’t be right.

First of all, theists argue, atheists can’t explain why the physical world exists. Every physical thing has a cause, and the physical world must have a cause too. There has to be a beginning. (This doesn’t apply to God because God is not physical.) But if there is a beginning of the physical world, it can’t be from nothing. Something can’t come from nothing—there is no logical way to explain how it ever could. So atheism doesn’t work. No matter all our common sense observations about thinking and consciousness, the physical world just can’t pull itself up by it’s own bootstraps. There  must be a non-physical cause behind everything.

On examination, however, the argument falls apart. The problem is that causes are confused with explanations. If we look carefully at the natural worldview, we see that the word “cause” means in effect “useful explanation” (or “explanation more useful than any other explanations we’ve come up with so far”). So to say that everything must have a cause is really to say that everything must have a useful explanation. But that’s not true. Nothing has to have an explanation at all. It’s just that we human beings have found that useful explanations are, obviously, useful to us. We like them. They enable us to reliably manipulate the world.

If everything did have to have an explanation, then God would have to have an explanation too. It would be very fair to ask, what explains God’s existence? Who or what created God? Nothing? Then the theist believes something came from nothing.  But that’s impossible, right?

God, in fact, is not very useful as an explanation for the physical world if we can’t actually explain how God creates or causes that world. And we can’t. We can’t because God has no physical attributes. Literally, God can’t touch the world. How can he create it?

Physical & Spiritual Causes

But theists will object to this entire line of argument. I began it with the assertion that causes were being confused with explanations. But I can see theists insisting that causes really exist, over and beyond whether or not we know or can explain what those causes are. Every physical thing really does have a cause. And spiritual things do not, therefore God doesn’t have to have a cause, and doesn’t in fact have one. But why don’t spiritual things have causes? It seems arbitrary.

Perhaps spiritual things have spiritual causes and physical things have physical causes. Granted. But this doesn’t solve the theistic problem. It still means God, being spiritual, should have a cause. And it doesn’t provide an explanation for how physical things, which have physical causes, can have a spiritual cause instead. How does the spiritual interact which the physical in a causal manner? What spiritual something interacts with what physical something to do anything? We have no way to imagine a spiritual entity creating a physical entity except by the fantasy—which we know from experience isn’t true—that physical things can be thought or felt into existence. Consciousness simply doesn’t work that way, and we know it.

Everything physical must have a cause. That is the theist mantra. But in reality God can’t be that cause, because causation of the physical world must include interacting with it. God can’t interact. We know by our extensive common experiences with thoughts and consciousness (after all, we are experts), that bare thoughts cannot create or even move physical things. This brings us back to the original atheist observation: thoughts can’t interact with material things except through the intermediary of a physical body. God doesn’t have a physical body, so he can’t begin to interact with, much less create, the world.

Is God something or nothing? Of course God is something, the theist will say. But God is not something physical. How then can God’s non-physical something cause the physical world’s something? We can fantasize that somehow it does. But that’s as far as anyone can go toward making God an explanation for the world.

A Final Sally

But theists have another objection, and it’s a much better one. The physical world is full of evidence of intelligence, and that intelligence clearly predates the advent of human beings and predates, for that matter, the evolution of organisms. The natural worldview simply can’t account for the intelligence we find in the structure of the physical world. Where could it have come from? Therefore something supernatural—and intelligent—is afoot. No matter what atheists assert or science implies, something intelligent existed first and evidently formed the world. Say all you want about how impossible it is, it must have happened.

But we’ve already blown this up, unfortunately for the theist. Intelligence is a property of minds, and information is mental currency. It is an illusion that these are attributes of the world outside our minds. Everything modern neuroscience reveals about the workings of the brain reinforces this point.

For the mind to do its thing, for it to know the world, it must invent information and map it into a simulacrum of the world. Actually, it is not exactly the mind that does this, but the brain. And the result of the brain’s creation of an information simulacrum is this thing we call knowing. It’s not the brain’s only simulacrum: vision and sound and feelings and tastes are some of its other experiential handiworks. But here’s the rub. When we build hypotheses and theories, when we know, it all happens within the simulacrum. And the subject of our knowledge, the data-source, is not the real world outside of us but rather the collection of other simulacra, the sense experiences, which our brains are constantly creating for us. These stand-in for the presumed world outside us.

Neuroscience tells us that nothing we know is knowledge of the real world outside. Instead it is knowledge of the simulacra of sensations which the brain is constantly creating for us. It follows that only indirectly, through pragmatic empiricism, can we test our knowing and maximize its usefulness. This indirect relationship between knowledge and the world, together with the fact that we directly know only our own simulacra, means that our knowledge of the world is necessarily covered with a patina of our own intelligence.

We think we see intelligence in the universe outside us, but in fact what we see is the patina of our own minds as they know the world.

Yet a God who is imperfect or not the Creator is not really God at all, and hardly worth worshiping. What follows is a recap of the argument as I presented it a few years ago in Agnosticism Revisited and the Case for Atheism.  After examining the weaknesses of believing in ghosts and imperfect deities, I turned to the question of God.

In fact, the case for God is weaker than that for Aphrodite. Not only does God come with all the difficulties of ghosts and goddesses, but God is defined with two additional attributes which make his existence even less likely: God is perfect, and God supposedly created the natural world.

A perfect being created an imperfect world? On its face that would seem to be impossible. —Which is enough by itself to render the case for God weaker than the case for Minerva and Mithra, who to their benefit aren’t saddled with perfection.

Theists like to tell themselves there is a way around the perfection problem. One option is to deny that God is perfect. But that demotes him to a god, cavorting (probably) after every Venus or Virgin Mary he sees. Most theists can readily see the problem with adopting this particular option.

A second option is to admit that the world is imperfect but insist that God is not responsible. God created a perfect world, but it “fell” because one of the free beings in that world chose—freely—to disobey God. But this “free will defense” completely misses the problem. Sure, it might explain imperfect decisions made by certain sentient species, but it completely ignores the massively larger and more important imperfection which is the result of the world’s flawed design.

Almost every living thing in existence, due to its inherent physical nature, must eat some other living thing in order to survive. This isn’t the result of disobeying God. It’s the result of anatomy and physiology. It can’t be blamed on sin. It can only be blamed on God—if God is the creator.

My moral decisions can’t change the fact that other living things need to eat me to survive, or that I need to eat other living things to survive. The world of life is designed on deadly competition at its core.

The concept of “the fall” is thus laughably inadequate to explain the imperfection of the world. The only option that remains is for the theist to argue that the world “is the best of all possible worlds”—that a perfect God could do no better.

But this approach only works if we lack imagination. For example, we don’t usually think about it, but in the world we have around us physics trumps everything, even morality. For example, a criminal with a gun can kill a Pope or a saint as easily as he can kill another criminal. To kill the saint all he must do is aim the gun at the right part of the body. Physics is no respecter of goodness.

But why not? Why didn’t God create a world in which goodness trumped physics? In our fantasies and movies, in fact, that is what we often make happen. If he had enough imagination, God could have codified the nature of things so that violence never paid. So that when the bullet from the gun of the criminal reached the body of the saint, it suddenly jumped to the body of the criminal instead. Morality would then trump physics. In such a world violence could only be inflicted on oneself. Or, to put it another way, violent perpetrators would receive immediate punishment, exactly proportional to the harm they would have caused. Since God created physics, he certainly could have chosen to allow goodness to trump it.

Isn’t that the way it is, supposedly, in Heaven?

The advocates of “the best of all possible worlds” excuse have one more shot. Earth isn’t perfect, they explain, because it’s a testing ground for souls. In order to find out which of the “free will” beings he created are ready for the perfection of heaven, this argument goes, God created earth as a kind of testing ground or “vale of soul-making”—something along those lines. But a world that doesn’t need a testing ground is clearly more perfect than one which does, just as a factory which produces cars which don’t need to be tested for defects is more perfect than a factory whose output can’t be trusted. But beyond that, this argument still fails to account for embedded imperfection of the world mentioned earlier. How can earth be an adequate testing ground for heaven if in fact it’s nothing like heaven? If a car is built for the road, it needs to be tested on a road—not by dropping it into a volcano. That’s the wrong kind of test.

Other problems with the soul-testing hypothesis abound. If the idea of the test is to help God determine which free-will souls are inherently good and which are only good for an ulterior motive, then it would be essential that the souls being tested not know they are being tested. It would be best, in fact, for the souls not to even know there’s an afterlife or a God: only then could God be sure their goodness was inherent and genuine, not gamed for the test.

There is also the difficulty which results from God’s prescience. if God has foreknowledge of human events then there is simply no need to run any kind of earthly test. If God feels compelled to run the test anyway despite knowing exactly how it will come out, then it raises the serious difficulty of human freedom. It would appear that choices which are foreknown are effectively foreordained. We can not be free to change our behavior during our “test” because to do so would turn God from infallible to fallible. It would destroy divine perfection.

Other difficulties: why does God only test human embryos and fetuses for a few days or months—completing the trial even before they are born—yet spend 80 years testing the soul of a mass-murderer? Makes one suspect its not testing that’s going on at all. Then there’s the whole problem of natural disasters. Why must a 3-year old child be burned by molten lava, crushed by an earthquake, or racked with leukemia or some other incurable disease? Can there be a legitimate point to such a “test”? Isn’t it obvious that no imaginable future could make a milkshake of perfection out of such experiences.

That is the problem with sentient experience: it is real. What is experienced is really experienced; it can’t be undone. The Biblical story of Job is very instructive here. In a single day, as part of a test (the product of a little side-bet between God and Satan) Job suffers the loss of his livestock, the death of most of his servants, then the death of his ten children. But it’s ok. Because in the end, God “makes it all right” by giving him new livestock, new servants, and new children.

Could that in any way make up for the emotional pain Job endured—could it really bring things back to the way they were before God and Devil entered into their evil little agreement? New sons and daughters are nice, but still, still the first ten died. They lost their lives. And Job suffered the loss. Nothing ever undid that suffering or those lost lives: nothing could ever undo it.

When a child is lost to a tornado or a washed-out bridge, how can the pain of the loss ever be undone. There is only one way: to make it so the loss and the pain never occur in the first place. Wiping away the memory of it, even that is not enough: the loss is still a loss even if the survivors don’t remember. (If anything the loss is greater—more tragic—for not even being remembered.)

This world can’t be the best of all worlds because, put simply, it is too easy to improve upon it. One less deadly hurricane or lightning strike or killer virus. One less fetus lost to natural abortion. In fact, humans have proven time and again by the application of technology that the world can be improved. Every levee or dam, every medical advance, every hurricane warning, every antibiotic improves on God’s original creation and prevents evils which God allows.

This is the point at which theists usually throw up their hands and declare that God’s perfection is beyond human understanding.

When I hear this it always sounds like a concession: an admission that their story about God “doesn’t make sense” as far as human reason is concerned.

But to say “only God can understand it” doesn’t work against the argument from perfection. The reason is pretty simple. A world whose perfection is evident to God but not evident to the sentient beings he created is not as perfect as a world whose perfection is evident to both its creator and the creatures within it.

The problem is that as soon as God creates other sentient beings, the world has to be perfect not just for God but for those other sentient beings as well. God’s perspective is no longer the only one that exists. Even to argue that in the end those beings will also see the perfection of the world—that doesn’t work, because in a truly perfect world its perfection would be evident from the beginning. A perfect world would be perfect all along, to everyone’s experience, beginning to end.

To tell Job, for instance, after the death of his 10 children not to worry, that he will eventually experience perfection—that doesn’t work. The loss of his children and the sorrow he experienced from it was still real, not to mention the experiences of the children and servants who were killed. There was no perfection for them even if God thinks otherwise. When their lives came into existence their point of reference also came into existence, and from that moment on God’s point of reference is no longer the only one. Perfection has to be perfection for everyone.

There is really no way to get around the common sense observation that a perfect God would create a perfect world, and that our world isn’t perfect. And that our experience, our human point of view, is just as valid as God’s when it comes to the experience of evil. Perhaps mores so. If only God experiences the world’s perfection, then things are indeed imperfect.

To put the Argument from Perfection into a logical form:

1 – There is a God.

2 – This God is perfect.

3 – And created sentient beings and the world which these beings experience.

4 – But this world sometimes causes terrible experiences due to its design.

5 – What is terrible is imperfect.

6 – Imperfections cannot be the result of perfection.

7 – Given that 4 is confirmed by human experience and 5 & 6 are true by definition, it follows that either 1, 2, or 3 must be false.

8 – Therefore either God does not exist, God is imperfect, or God is not the creator.

————-

Addendum:

One obvious solution for the theist is simply to admit that God is imperfect. But this strikes me as very unsatisfactory—why would I or anyone else want to worship an imperfect being? We might as well worship each other if we are going to worship imperfection. We know with certainty that our fellow human beings exist, and we already care about them. Why not redirect our worship to earth and ourselves if, after all, there is no perfection elsewhere.

If we worship an imperfect God, how do we know we are not worshipping the devil? How can we be certain we have not thrown our support to the author of all that is evil? Why should we give allegiance to a being who is at worst our enemy and at best indifferent to sentient creatures like us.

Another solution—to me just as unsatisfactory—is the Manichaean or Zoroastrian approach.  Theirs is a worldview which essentially sets up two cosmic Creators, one good and one evil, who battle for control of the world. In Manicheaism what is spiritual (God) is good and what is material (Satan) is evil. Similiarly, in Zoroastrianism Ahura Madza is the good creator, Ahriman the evil principle. Both religions involve multiple deities and the rejection of monotheism.

Admittedly, the Christian concept of the devil reminds us of the polytheism of Zoroaster and Mani, and likely borrowed from them. But the Christian devil is not a full-fledged God, only a rebellious angel. Though he causes mischief and waylays those who fall for his beguiling temptations, in Christianity God—not devil—is responsible for the nature of the physical world.

By abandoning monotheism, the Problem of Perfection can be avoided. But it seems to me that it comes at the cost of coherence. The hypothesis of a single, perfect Creator holds the promise of a unitary, satisfying explanation for existence—that is its appeal over polytheism. If instead we hypothesize two Creators, one responsible for good and the other for evil, we are left wondering why. Where did these two opposites come from, how did they originate?  Is two enough? Indeed, why stop at two. Why not imagine a God for each and every opposite trait: good and evil, justice and injustice, action and inaction, wisdom and folly, strength and weakness, and so on. Before we know it, we need the full pantheon of the Greeks and Romans.

Furthermore, Manichaeism sets our physical body at war with our spirit, evil against good, and although Christianity has never quite managed to extricate itself from the conflict of body with soul, it has mostly managed to substitute an uneasy peace between them. I can see no advantage, and no appeal, in reverting to an earlier and starker dualism. Our bodily needs are not the enemy, and religions which recognize this are vastly preferable to religions which don’t.

Just as scientific explanations have replaced the various roles that polytheistic gods played in controlling and explaining nature, we find that the difficulty of explaining good and evil in our world disappears when approached from an evolutionary perspective. No need for Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, no need to pit matter against spirit in eternal warfare. Evolution allows us another possibility.

If we abandon the concept of a perfect, pre-existing consciousness (or plural consciousnesses) as creator of the world, we no longer have a problem explaining why sentient beings have imperfect experiences. If consciousness or sentience evolved in a physical world via the evolution of species, then the competing interests of conscious animals like us (including the “design” of the physical world which results in our bad experiences) are things which become both comprehensible and coherent. The problem of explaining how imperfection follows from perfection simply goes away.

The Cosmological Argument is perhaps the classic argument for the existence of a God. Thomas Aquinas included it in his famous Five Ways, although over the years his argument has been constantly refashioned. It lives on in several distinct versions. I bring this up because of a “customer review” I came across on Amazon.com of a book by John Allen Paulos. The book is Irreligion: a mathematician explains why the arguments for God just don’t add up. The review is by M. Stringer.

Full disclosure: I read the review, I have not read the book.

Stringer, as it turns out, is quite critical of Paulos and his work.

As for Paulos’ book I would hesitate to describe it as even schoolboy philosophizing as it fails to reach any level of academic respectability and is, if anything, even worse than the aforementioned efforts from the `New Atheists’.

His first area of attack is the ‘first cause argument’ which Paulos states can be slightly amended to become the ‘cosmological argument’;

1. Everything has a cause, or perhaps many causes.
2. Nothing is its own cause.
3. Causal chains can’t go on forever.
4. So there has to be a first cause.
5. That first cause is God, who therefore exists.

There are however two major problems with Paulos’ version. Firstly no one in Western philosophical/theological history has even advanced the first cause/cosmological argument in this form. Paulos appears to have just made it up for this book. Secondly his version is not logically valid as the conclusion (5) does not follow from the earlier statements (1-4). All that is presented is a series of unconnected assertions unrelated to each other.

Stringer goes on to present what he considers a sound version of the cosmological argument (one popularized in recent years by the philosopher William Lane Craig). His seems shorter than what I recall as Craig’s version, but since brevity is a virtue, let’s take a look.

A good example a modern first cause argument is the Kalam cosmological argument rediscovered and improved in modern thought by William Lane Craig.

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe has a cause

This argument is logically valid. The conclusion (3) follows deductively from 1 and 2.

Now, I’m not interested in contesting Stringer’s characterization of the book he’s reviewing—I for one am in no position to do so. Instead what I prefer to do is comment on this rather succinct version of the cosmological argument.  I am aware of course that Craig is a better source for the modern cosmological argument than an Amazon reviewer plucked out of the hat, but, here goes….

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe has a cause

The short problem with this is that it assumes in the 2nd premise what it needs to prove, namely that everything (here referred to as “the universe”) began to exist.

Let’s take a closer look. This is supposed to be an argument for the existence of a Creator—and yet, it never mentions God or Creator. Of course, God is ever-present in the background, lurking, waiting for an opportunity to jump in. Let’s see if an opportunity presents itself.

Under the Microscope

The syllogism begins by asserting that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Why the phrase “begins to exist”?. It’s there so we can exclude God from the requirement to have a cause. Since by definition God is eternal, no beginning no end, premise #1 doesn’t apply to him.

That’s important. For the cosmological argument to work, it has to make the case that (A) “everything has a cause” and (B) “except God.” Obviously, a large part of the debate about whether the argument is successful centers on whether or not the exception made for God is warranted. What is unusual about Stringer’s version is that it doesn’t even mention God. Still, by asserting that physical things like the universe begin to exist and therefore must have a cause, the implication is that their cause must be something that does not begin to exist, i. e. God.

Yet, nothing in the argument requires causes to be non-physical. Nothing seems to prevent an infinite chain of physical causes; nothing, that is, other than the author’s bare assumption that premise #2 is correct. Well, not quite “bare.”  Actually, the idea is that premise #2 has been established by astrophysicists as a fact—after all, aren’t scientists in agreement that our universe began in a big bang which itself exploded from a singularity? Didn’t time itself have it’s beginning with that singular cosmic bang?

A glance at cosmology (the scientific study of the origin of the universe) makes it appear premise #2 is widely accepted as true, since most scientists heartily accept the big bang. And yet, for most cosmologists, I would argue, the term “universe” does not equal “all physical existence”. In fact, most scientists take it for granted that there is some kind of prior physical state which led to the singularity (itself a physical state) which led to the big bang and our current universe. And recently, some cosmologists (e.g. Stephen Hawking) are questioning the singularity anyway. Which means the big bang is not only not the beginning of all physical existence, it may not be the beginning of the universe either.

This is not fatal, of course. There is way too much uncertainty about the science of cosmology to say whether science will or will not end up supporting premise #2. The fact remains that if there is a God who created our physical world, then we ought to find ourselves living inside a world that had a definite origin at some specific point in the past, and prior to that point in the past nothing physical should be detectable. In fact, this fits reasonably well with current science. Sure, scientists talk about strings and multiverses in existence prior to the big bang—but at this point that’s just theorizing without evidence.

The Long and Short of It

So much for the short problem with the Kalem cosmological argument. But there is also a long problem—”long” in the sense that it won’t be as easy to explain, I’m afraid. But I will try.

There is a subtle problem with premise #1, and it involves the meaning of saying something has a cause. If one operates from a worldview based on mind before matter, then this premise is a founding principle. However, if one operates from a natural worldview (which rejects the principle of sufficient reason), then the negative of this premise is your founding principle. From this latter point of view, postulating “causes” is merely a useful way of describing the physical world.

Causes, in short, are a form of mental currency and not something “real” about matter. Technically, you might say, causes are imaginary. This viewpoint follows naturally from neurological constructivism and pragmatic empiricism. These approaches to understanding knowledge and science paint a picture of a relationship between thoughts about physical nature and the actual stuff of physical nature which is loose and indirect. In fact, it is just the sort of insufficient relationship evolutionary scientists should expect from “unguided” biological evolution.

Some of the key elements of this relationship can be summarized as follows. Knowledge is a virtual reality; its relationship to physical reality is like that of a useful map to the terrain the map represents; all of the logical relationships indicated by the map pertain to the map, not to the terrain. That is to say, the map is an analytical construction that has a synthetic relationship to the world it models. The map is only “true” to the extent that we find it a more useful model of the world than any alternative mappings we happen to have thought up. Knowledge, in other words, is something we invent to model the physical world by testing for usefulness. The scientific method codifies this process.

If matter comes first and mind evolves later (the premise of naturalism) then “causes” are just descriptions, and we choose our causal explanations based on their predictive usefulness, nothing else. The same applies for any non-causal explanations we might embrace, as well.

Imagine, now, if we were to restate Stringer’s cosmological argument from this natural perspective. It might look like this:

1. Everything that begins to exist can be usefully described.
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe can be usefully described.

So we see that only by embracing a worldview which presumes that causal descriptions identify innate causal truths about the physical universe can the Kalam cosmological argument become an argument for God’s existence. But the notion that there are innate causal truths about or contained within physical existence is a notion that stems from a supernatural worldview (from mind before matter). It is inherently incompatible with a natural worldview, and no one with a natural worldview should accept it. (Some misguided atheists do, of course, but they are . . . well, misguided.)

We will find that if one accepts the premises of the supernatural worldview, it follows that the premises of the Kalam cosmological argument seem obviously true. If instead one hews to the premises of the natural worldview, the Kalam premises seem obviously false. We can be sure that the reverse is the case as well. Premises which seem obvious to advocates of the natural worldview will likely seem far from obvious to supernatural worldview advocates.

Here Comes the Judge

What we need, then, is a way to judge between the two worldviews independent of their inherent premises. I think this can be done. It involves first finding conclusions which differ between the worldviews and then comparing those conclusions to what we pretty much all agree are facts about the world. In short, which worldview best fits the facts, as we know them? This is not a philosophical endeavor so much as an empirical one—there will be no definitive answer that all can agree on. After all, pragmatic empiricism is the only tool we have to arbitrate this debate.

Notice that if I am right about this last point, in itself that supports the natural worldview. For the natural worldview entails that all matters of fact about existence must be brokered through pragmatic empiricism, the scientific method. But the supernatural worldview, it seems to me, entails that a shortcut to direct knowledge is possible, indeed that classical logical arguments can reveal facts about the world. I believe this contention can be shown to be unuseful, and has been shown unuseful again and again, as far as the determination of facts (rather than logical truths) is concerned.

There is another way to say this, which perhaps has more biological clarity. Over the course of the natural history of the earth, the brain has evolved into an organ which creates sensations which we refer to as the mind. This evolution has resulted in a relationship between “minding” and the physical reality that is the subject of that “minding” which is synthetic rather than analytic. Because the relationship is synthetic, pragmatic empiricism has become the best route to factual knowledge. Were the relationship analytic instead, then analytic statements would provide factual content about the world, and thus would have become the best route to factual knowledge. Yet things don’t work that way. That’s not the way the mind evolved.  Instead, only empirical statements provide factual content about the world—and this is just what we would expect if the premises of naturalism are true.

So what then are analytic statements “about”? They are about the organization of the mind itself, or perhaps more accurately, the organization of the brain’s “minding” faculty. In a real sense, of course, the brain’s “minding” faculty is something physical. So logical statements do have factual content in that limited sense. If I make an analytical statement, eg, 2 + 3  = 5 , I am making a factual claim about the organization of the minding faculty in my brain. Fair enough, but the organization of the minding faculty in my brain exists for the purpose of developing useful facts—descriptions, explanations and causes—about the physical world which lies outside my minding faculty. 2 + 3 = 5 tells me nothing factual about the world outside my minding faculty. That is precisely why we call math statements like that analytic rather than synthetic.

But this very state of things, it seems to me, supports the natural worldview and does not support—is not what would be expected in the case of—the supernatural worldview. With the latter, we would expect analytic statements, purely logical arguments, to provide factual knowledge about the world outside the mind. They do not, and that is one reason why I believe the natural worldview is far more useful as a worldview, why it “wins” the debate.

Terminology and Necessity

At this point let me say something about my terminology. Note that “fact” and “factual” in my usage do not equal “true”—when we say something is a fact we mean simply that it’s the most useful knowledge we’ve got (so far) on the matter, utilizing the pragmatic empiricism of the scientific method. Logical/mathematical knowledge can be “true” but it cannot, under this usage, be factual. Empirical knowledge, on the other hand, can be factual but it cannot be “true.” We can only continue to call factual knowledge “true” if first we redefine the term as a comparative meaning “more scientifically useful” than the alternatives it competes against. Again, this is just the method of pragmatic empiricism.

Now let me make a comment or two about another argument mentioned the book review above.

1. Everything has a cause, or perhaps many causes.
2. Nothing is its own cause.
3. Causal chains can’t go on forever.
4. So there has to be a first cause.
5. That first cause is God, who therefore exists.

As the reviewer points out, no one makes the cosmological argument this way because premise #1 forces God to also have a cause, and premise #2 prevents Him from being his own cause, which vitiates the conclusion. Note also that premise #1 and premise #3 are in flat contradiction: if everything has a cause then causal chains must go on forever. #4 follows from #3, but neither can be true if #1 and #2 are true.

So theologians try to make the argument work by asserting that premises #1 & #2 don’t apply to God but do apply to the physical world. But this is simply a case of special pleading based on confusing the physical world with our knowledge of the physical world. (I will explain this presently.)

Specifically, theologians traditionally define God as a “necessary” being and define the physical world as “contingent” instead of “necessary.” As I say, this is mere special pleading. But even if we accept it, the argument fails because if God is not a contingent sort of being then God can’t be a cause for contingent things—causality, in short, is a two-way street. Causes must be the sort of thing that can bring about what they cause. I have written about this in discussions of the cosmological argument elsewhere.

What does it mean to say something is “necessary”? Well, what is intended is that God’s existence be logically required, whereas the existence of physical things be not logically required. But really it is only another way of saying that something does or doesn’t have a cause—and we are back to special pleading. Can the theologian make a factual case for this distinction? Is there some way to show it is not special pleading? I don’t see how. Look at it this way: just because God was never created, why does it follow that God necessarily exists? Isn’t it just as possible that if God was never created God does not exist? Moving God outside the causal chain does not transform God into a necessary being.

I’m going to come back to this point in a minute, but now let’s consider the contingency side of the matter.

Contingency and Knowledge

The idea behind contingency is that if something has a cause or causes, then had those causes not occurred the something would never have come to exist. While this may seem to be true for individual things in the physical universe, importantly it is not true for the collection of all physical things. The existence of the collection of all physical things is logically necessary—therefore shouldn’t the entire collection (the physical universe in toto) fall into the same category of being necessary rather than contingent—and therefore like God, shouldn’t it be exempt from premises #1 & #2? The special pleading which supposedly exempts God must also exempt the universe taken in its entirety. (Note that the collection necessarily exists even if it’s an empty set.)

I think if we analyze this carefully we see that factual (synthetic) knowledge is “contingent” and analytic knowledge is “necessary”. The distinction is really not about the things known but about the manner in which we know them. Contingent things must be known empirically. Necessary things must be known logically.

There is a problem in this for the theist. It effectively denies that God’s existence is a factual matter and makes it a logical matter instead. That at once puts God into a category that prevents him from interacting as cause with the physical world (the “lack of contingency” problem). 2 + 3 = 5 is necessarily true, but that is because like all analytical knowledge it is not a reference to the world outside our “minding”. It is not a reference to anything factual. So the problem with the subtle cosmological argument is that its premises amount to simply asserting that the central claim of supernaturalism—that mind precedes matter—is true. This assumes what is to be proven, the fallacy of begging the question.

And anyway, it is not at all clear to me why individual physical beings which actually exist aren’t therefore “necessary” beings. True, our knowledge of them is synthetic, therefore merely factual, therefore uncertain to some extent. But it is a fallacy to assume that what it true for knowledge is equally true for the physical subject of that knowledge. We may always know through a glass darkly, but that is because knowing is a synthetic process based on pragmatic empiricism. Regardless of the uncertainty of what we know about a physical being, if it exists then it exists, it necessarily exists.

Whatever “contingent” steps led to your coming into existence, if you exist then you absolutely exist—you necessarily exist. What is, is. Things that exist exist regardless of logical argument or anyone’s factual knowledge of the matter. They exist regardless of what we know about them or how they came into existence.

A Different Necessity

But perhaps theists will reply that this is not what is meant by the term “necessary being”. What is meant is “a being who does not have to have a cause” a being who, if it exists, necessarily exists causeless. To this the special pleading objection obviously applies. For as I pointed out previously, advocates of the natural worldview maintain, as a necessary consequence of that worldview, that “causes” are simply knowledge-descriptions created by our brain’s ”mindings”—that it is a mistake to think that “causes” are true things, or that real physical things have innate causes. They only have the causes our minds find it useful to assign to them—causality literally exists in our minds and not outside our minds. Again, it is the mistake of confusing physical things with our mindings about them.

Thus to say something is contingent is simply to say that we can create knowledge about it through our minding process of pragmatic empiricism. That is, it is something that can be factually addressed. That’s all contingency really boils down to: if something is empirically knowable, subject to synthetic statements, it is contingent. If it is not empirically knowable then it is not contingent. Now we see the problem with defining God as non-contingent. It does serve to effectively distinguish God from the physical world, but at the cost of no longer being able to claim that God factually exists. God only theoretically exists, and the logical arguments which are supposed to “prove” that existence can only do so if we start them with premises which make God necessary rather than premises which do not. They amount to saying, “If things are such that God’s existence is entailed, then it follows that God’s existence is entailed.” True enough. But if things are such that God’s existence is not entailed, then God’s existence is not entailed.

Analytical arguments can’t settle factual questions. And ultimately, God’s existence is a factual question. Pragmatic empiricism, scientific method, is the only way to approach it. But any answer obtained this way will lack the certainty of truth. At best it will only be a fact, and therefore not a final answer.

Before proceeding, it is important to define God — otherwise no coherent discussion is possible. I define God as “the solitary, perfect, non-physical being who created the physical world.” By non-physical I mean “bodiless, not consisting of matter/energy (as those terms are used by physicists and other scientists).” Here then is an outline of my reasons for rejecting the existence of God, in order of importance:

A) In an argument to the best explanation, naturalism trumps supernaturalism.

My argument here is that a natural world view fits reality and is self-consistent. Supernaturalism (and therefore God) is not needed to explain existence and, more importantly, can’t explain it anyway. Whether we are attempting to account for the existence of human consciousness or the human body, of morality or the value of life, naturalism provides better explanations across the board. I’ve touched on some of these points in Why Are We Alive?, Does Life Have Meaning?, Thoughts, Feelings, & Faith, C. S. Lewis’ Moral Argument, Can General Atheism Be Proved?, The Key to Happiness, and An Irreverent Look at God, Sex, & Design. I’ve laid out the framework of the debate in What Atheists Have in Common and Naturalism’s Touchstone Proposition.

B) God Can’t Exist

B1 – The nature of the physical world makes a non-physical source impossible (the world isn’t something that could have been thought or imagined into existence)

My argument here is that the world is not informational in nature, and does not contain any mental substrate. If so it can’t be thought or conceived into existence. Furthermore, any attempt to define the nature of the physical world in a manner that avoids the impossibility of a creator results in a definition of the physical world which simply does not match reality (see reason A).

Note that a judgment about what physical existence is not lies at the heart of this second argument for atheism. The obvious issue for debate is whether this judgment about the nature of physical existence is correct and therefore whether it is possible for physical things to be conceived or thought into existence — ie, whether it is possible for essence to cause existence. It is my argument that essence is just explanation or description, and neither explanations nor descriptions can cause the physical existence of that which they describe. This represents a rejection of thousands of years of Western thought, yet is supported by modern science as well as arguments as old as the pre-Socratic Zeno of Elea. I have not written much on this yet, but will.

B2 – The nature of God makes creation of a physical world impossible (God has no means to create or interact with physical things)

I’ve introduced this argument in various forms previously. See God & Rocks, Thoughts & Trees, God’s Physical Problem and also Contingency and Necessity.

B3 – The nature of God is incompatible with the particular world we have (God is perfect but the world we have is imperfect)

The argument from perfection, also referred to as the problem of evil, was presented in Agnosticism Revisited and the Case for Atheism (this link should take you to the beginning of the perfection argument within that post).

C) There is insufficient evidence to believe in God or any supernatural world view

Many atheists start with C, implicitly assume A, and hardly touch B (except B3 when considering the problem of evil). Although I consider C the weakest of the three reasons for atheism, it has an important place — especially when considering imperfect gods and deities.

This is only an outline, of course. It’s gradually being fleshed out on this site.

Atheists don’t have a religion — but they do have something in common beyond what they disbelieve. What atheists share is a natural worldview.

Sometimes that worldview is a bit confused, incorporating too much from the still dominant supernatural worldview. But understood clearly, the natural worldview is simply the belief that body precedes mind. The supernatural worldview, of course, takes the opposite tact: that mind precedes body. We see right off from this that naturalism is not merely a refusal to believe in supernaturalism. It’s based on its own specific hypothesis about the nature of the world.

Logically speaking there are 3 possibilities concerning existence: physical before mental, mental before physical, and mental/physical concurrent. The first is naturalism, the second supernaturalism, and the third a hybrid which deserves a name of its own. We might call it “non-physical naturalism” or “hybrid supernaturalism” or, perhaps, pantheism.

A good many people today embrace this 3rd possibility, but whatever it is, it is not naturalism. An essential tenet of naturalism is physicalism, and physicalism locates naturalism firmly in the camp of “physical before mental.”

But isn’t it impossible to know which worldview is correct? Aren’t we forced to simply take our preferred choice on faith?

As a matter of fact, we are not. This may seem surprising, but it shouldn’t be. Whether mind or matter is primary is an empirical question, for the answer makes a difference to how we must acquire knowledge of the world. By studying how human knowledge actually works, scientists can reliably infer which worldview best fits our universe.

Now, it might be objected that no inference to the best explanation can be definitive. That’s true, of course. The scientific method is always a matter of inferring the best explanation for the evidence at hand, and as such it is always falsifiable (which simply means that new evidence may come to light and/or a better explanation be devised).

But this aspect of the scientific method is itself one of the key clues we have about which of these worldviews is correct. It’s long been recognized that the human mind employs two types of knowing. Following Kant, these are referred to as analytic and synthetic. All our knowledge about the world itself is of the synthetic sort, and we have found that we most reliably obtain synthetic knowledge when we employ the scientific method of inferring which abstract model best fits our evidence.

But our abstract models themselves consist of logical and mathematical relationships which we apprehend not synthetically but directly and analytically. Why would such a dual knowledge-system have evolved in humans? Well, it’s easy to comprehend its necessity in the context of naturalism. If existence has no underlying mental blueprint, then the world can’t be known directly. The only practical way to “know” such a physical world would be by the two-step process of devising analytic models and utilizing something like the scientific method to pick the most useful model based on its predictive value. Knowledge of the world therefore consists of “virtual” models (consequently “synthetic”) which are inherently falsifiable because none could ever be a match with any underlying mental reality (since under the model of naturalism no such mental substrate exists).

Since this seems to be a good description of how humans (especially those most successful knowers who are called scientists) actually come to know the world, the natural hypothesis fits well.

On the other hand, interestingly, there would be no need for such a synthetic process of knowing to evolve in humans if naturalism were false, since in that case the world would have an underlying mental substrate that could be known directly and analytically. The alternative worldviews do not fit well, since they cannot account for the necessity of knowing the world synthetically.

Put simply, we are forced to rely on synthetic knowledge of the world because we cannot in fact apprehend the world directly. The strong implication of this is that the physical world contains nothing capable of being apprehended directly: it contains no mental substrate. If so, naturalism is true and the other two worldview options are false.

My intent here is not to make a full-fledged argument for naturalism, but rather to buttress my point at the beginning: determining the correct worldview is something that can be done by investigating the nature of the world and of ourselves as knowers. Consequently, which worldview is correct is not a matter of faith but of scientific inference.

Summary: (1) We don’t have to rely on faith to know whether there is an intelligence behind the universe. (2) Atheists agree on a positive worldview: physical naturalism.

However that article received a comment from Max, an agnostic, which deserves serious attention. Although agreeing that I did “a good job pointing out the irreconcilable difficulties in a particular concept of God,” one which “embodies specific attributes,” Max argued that I “left the basic idea of god untouched.”

Although Max doesn’t “believe in Allah, or Jesus, or any and all specific mythic representations of god,” he is still agnostic rather than atheist since he doesn’t “disbelieve in the very idea of god.” In fact, Max wrote,

You did not present an argument at this level. Nor will you ever, since the concept of god in abstract of a specific mythic tradition is a completely non-falsifiable proposition, and thus cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.

He fleshed this objection out at the end of his comment this way:

If you argue against the existence of god, must you not pin that argument on some imagined attribute(s) of god. The problem is that as soon as you imagine god’s attributes you cease talking about the idea of god, and start talking about some specific imagined representation of god. You can disprove a billion representations without ever even addressing the concept of god itself.

Although Max left his comment over a year ago, I never got around to replying. I’m rectifying that now.

When Is a Concept Not a Concept?

My first question for Max is this: what is the concept of God if that concept involves no specific attributes? If the nature of a concept is unspecified, then it seems to me that the concept can’t be discussed because no one has any idea what is being discussed.

If I say, “X exists, but X has no attributes and no one can say what X is,” what am I claiming? I suppose Max is correct in saying that my “X” is non-falsifiable, but maybe that is only because “X” doesn’t have a meaning, and no actual concept is being asserted.

Likewise, if “God” is a meaningless word, one which doesn’t refer to any specified concept, then yes “God” is non-falsifiable — but only because meaningless words aren’t claims or propositions at all. There is no idea behind them.

I suspect that Max’s “abstract” concept of God does have “content” of some sort or another. It must, or else nothing remains. It is evident from his comment that Max rejects “perfection” as an attribute of God. Remove that attribute and the concept of God still has meaning. But what if we also remove the attribute of “creator”, the attribute of “being” and (for good measure) the attribute of “existing”? As far as I can see, nothing usable would remain: “God” would become a meaningless word, unfalsifiable but also undiscussable.

A Minimum God

Max doesn’t reveal what he believes the abstract concept of God is, but I’m confident that it involves a God with attributes. Existence must be one of those attributes, otherwise Max could have no good objection to calling himself an atheist. It is also likely that Max would posited this God as the cause of the physical world and our human existence. God, no matter how abstractly conceived, would hardly be God (or worth bothering about) otherwise.

Such a God need not be conceived as a personal being. Perhaps what is meant by the term is simply the intelligence behind the physical universe, an intelligence responsible for the world’s existence and nature. Max, I assume, would say that such a concept of God

is a completely non-falsifiable proposition, and thus cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.

But Max would be wrong.

The notion that there’s an intelligence behind existence is nothing less than the claim that naturalism is false. If naturalism is true, it follows that there is no intelligence behind or prior to the physical universe, so to maintain otherwise is to deny the truth of naturalism. The assertion above therefore amounts to the claim that philosophical naturalism “cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.” This claim is false and I will show why.

To do so, all that is required of me is to reveal by what rational means the truth or falsity of naturalism can be determined. In fact, I don’t have to provide a convincing case for naturalism, I only have to demonstrate that a rationally convincing case is possible.

Naturalism v Supernaturalism

Naturalism maintains that intelligence is a product of brains and that brains are a product of evolution. It follows from this that intelligence did not exist anywhere in the universe until organisms with brains evolved into being. Supernaturalism maintains the contrary: that intelligence existed well before brains were created. Intelligence (whether personified in a being or not) necessarily lies behind and prior to physical existence, according to the supernatural canon.

The question Max poses, then, is whether there is a rational way to decide between these two alternatives. There clearly is. We simply have to compare the intellectual case for believing intelligence preceded the existence of brains with the intellectual case for believing intelligence did not. If one case is stronger than the other, we will know which viewpoint — naturalism or supernaturalism — better fits the evidence we have. This is an inherently rational process, and is the sort of thing that scientists (as well as non-scientists, of course) do all the time.

I wrote that we “simply” have to compare the two intellectual cases — but of course the debate on this point is hardly “simple”. But the complexity of the debate only underscores the fact that it is a rational debate, one in which both sides vie to provide the most satisfactory account of the evidence we have about when intelligence entered the picture.

In Agnosticism Revisited and the Case for Atheism I wrote about the distinction between specific atheism and general atheism. Specific atheism, I said

is that atheism which purports to disprove the existence of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic monotheistic God

and the Argument from Perfection which I presented there pertained to specific atheism. On the other hand, I wrote that general atheism

is an outgrowth of the scientific/philosophical case for naturalism. Advocates of general atheism like to begin their arguments with well-established science (evolution, the physiology of vision or of the brain) and move on to conclusions about the nature of human knowledge and its relationship to the world—conclusions which if correct eliminate supernaturalism (and therefore eliminate any supernatural God or gods).

It is general atheism which pertains to the debate we have here.

Smoking Guns

The case for naturalism (or the opposing case for supernaturalism) is far too complex to present now, and at any rate that is unnecessary for the scope of this entry. That scope, it is important to remember, is to refute Max’s claim that the most abstract concept of God “cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.” I have taken the most “abstract” concept of God to mean some kind of pre-existing intelligence responsible for the creation of the world (hopefully Max would agree). And I have pointed out that this gets us right to one of the central disputes (perhaps the central dispute) separating naturalism from supernaturalism: Is intelligence the product of brains or are brains the product of intelligence?

This is answered by investigating the world to determine whether the evidence we find fits better with the notion that intelligence existed at the beginning of the universe (before brains existed), or whether intelligence appeared with the evolution of organism with brains. I maintain that such an investigation can be done, and that doing it is a rational process which will lead to a rational answer.

In fact, I believe there are some smoking guns which indicate that naturalism is the correct answer. I have mentioned a couple of these in other blog entries.

1) Thoughts (and by proxy disembodied intelligence) can’t do anything without a physical body to do the doing. Therefore intelligence cannot bring the universe into existence or be its cause. I’ve presented the case for this position in God & Rocks as well as in Thoughts & Trees and God’s Physical Problem.

2) The existence of two types of knowing (analytic and synthetic) is prima facie evidence that there are two types of things to be known: the physical world and concepts. If supernaturalism were true we would expect there to only be one type of knowing — analytic. If naturalism were true, both analytic and synthetic knowing would need to exist in order for physical organism to “know” the world. This is touched on in Two Types of Knowing as well as in Thoughts & Trees

3) Although the Principle of Sufficient Reason holds for analytic knowledge, it appears to be false for synthetic knowledge. If there was an intelligence behind the universe, the Principle of Sufficient Reason would be true for both synthetic and analytic knowledge (thus one type of knowledge would suffice — see #2). But the fact that synthetic knowledge is best acquired through the process of methodological naturalism (together with the factual possibility of incomplete and incorrect synthetic knowledge), makes it clear that the Principle of Sufficient Reason is false for synthetic knowledge. It follows that synthetic knowledge is not something innate in the physical world which our minds discover, but rather is the result of pragmatic empiricism. This fits naturalism perfectly, but can hardly be reconciled with supernaturalism. I touched on this in Thoughts & Trees — but much more attention needs to be given it.

As for the arguments presented by the other side, such as the design and information arguments, I dispelled them in Theism’s Rose-Colored Glasses. (See also Mind, Matter & Divine Creation.) Other atheists have written volumes dispelling these supernatural assertions.

Of course, Max may not find my smoking guns convincing. But he must admit that those of us who are atheists have not “left the basic idea of god untouched.” And he must admit that the concept of God in its most abstract form (as some kind of pre-existing intelligence) can be investigated by rational means and — it is at least a possibility — be found false.

Atheology.com is all about rectifying this situation, of course. But first, what do I have in mind when I say that most atheists don’t have a robust enough argument against this higher-class theism?

Blind Atheism

The most common argument for atheism goes something like this:

1) there should be a presumption of atheism – i.e. the burden of proof falls on those who assert the existence of God (you can’t expect non-believers to prove a universal negative)
2) there is no adequate logical or empirical evidence for God’s existence, therefore the burden has not been met
3) personal experiences (“God spoke to me”) can never be substantiated, so they can’t be used to meet the burden.
4) faith is wholly inadequate, so don’t even bring it up.

The famous atheist philosopher Antony Flew wrote the book on the presumption of atheism (see Flew’s “The Presumption of Atheism”), but a few years ago Flew came around to the viewpoint that theists have indeed met the burden of proof. Flew has now concluded there is a God, and he has become a deist. Flew’s conversion represents a serious challenge to atheism, and also represents one of the best examples of intelligent theism. To be sure, Flew still rejects revealed religion and does not believe in a “personal” God — despite the glee of some Christians, Flew is nowhere near to becoming a Christian. But just as certainly Flew is no longer an atheist. He no longer accepts point 2 above. There is in his view adequate evidence for the existence of God.

Goodbye Courtroom Analogy

But the situation is worse than this implies. Why? Because the burden of proof / presumption of atheism argument Flew popularized never really made much sense anyway. Flew used a courtroom analogy, where the burden quite properly falls on those who assert the positive: that x did y. But the debate between atheists and theists does not take place in a courtroom: no one is on trial, no one is at risk of jail time for their belief or non-belief. There is no defendant whose right to a fair trial needs to be protected by a presumption of innocence.

Even the argument that you can’t prove a universal negative is not necessarily true: we can be very certain there are no married bachelors anywhere, even in the most distant galaxy. But there is something else flawed about this whole burden of proof approach. Philosophical “proofs” can never establish matters of fact. The debate about God’s existence is a debate about which hypothesis — the natural one or the supernatural one — is most convincing. It is a factual question, not one that can be “proved” philosophically. Failure to provide that kind of “proof” means nothing. The better model for determining matters of fact is found in the method of science.

If we look to science we find that Flew’s assertion about burden of proof doesn’t apply: in actual practice the burden of proof is on new proposals and the presumption is in favor of the established scientific position. For example, if someone wants to argue that quarks are a myth, the burden is on them to make a convincing case for their assertion — not on the vast majority of scientists who believe in quarks. Imagine if the quarks-are-a-myth minority presented no alternative hypothesis and merely announced,

You can’t expect us to prove that no quarks exist, because after all no one can prove a universal negative. No, you need to show us a real quark and not merely rely on inferences and the quark hypothesis. We need to see real proof.

Obviously they would be ignored, or if not ignored ridiculed. If we want a real life example of the same principle, we need only look at the small cadre of scientists who are evolution-deniers. In their mind the burden of proof is on evolutionary scientists to find all the “missing links” in the fossil record; whereas they, the small minority of scientists who are deniers, see no obligation to produce scientific evidence for their own position.

In actual practice (outside of the courtroom) the burden is always on the minority to convince the majority, not the other way around. Extrapolating from this, it is clear that since we live in a world dominated by belief in God, the burden of proof is on atheists to make the case that God’s existence is unlikely, that naturalism better fits the evidence.

Atheism Out of Context

This is where atheism has a problem. You see, most atheists don’t recognize that they even have an alternative hypothesis to offer. They are stuck on the notion that atheism is simply the withholding of belief in God and nothing more. For them, atheism has no context.

They fail to see that what animates atheism is naturalism. Without its connection to naturalism, atheism is blind.

They also fail to see that intelligent theists have some pretty good arguments. Atheists need to be able to knock those arguments down. Unfortunately, my experience is that typically atheists aren’t good at doing that. Most atheists don’t even know about informed theism, since they have only come in contact with puff-ball theists. And on the other side of the coin, most are completely unprepared to make a case for naturalism.

Atheists tend to be arrogant. They are too stuck up on saying to the overwhelming majority who represent the dominant consensus: “prove you are right”. That simply won’t fly. Atheists have the burden because they are a minority. It is the same burden all scientists in a minority have: to show that the dominant consensus is seriously if not fatally flawed, and to demonstrate that they have a better hypothesis.

If atheists do this will they convert puff-ball theists? Probably not. But the door will be opened to intelligent debate with informed theists. And atheism will no longer be quite so blind.

Even if we concede the doubtful proposition that God can think thoughts, those thoughts can’t get anything done. And we all know this. A thought of a tree can’t bring an actual tree into existence. Thoughts are simply incapable of being anything other than, well, thoughts. If anyone doubts this obvious truth, they can prove me wrong by simply imagining a tree into real existence.

Thoughts can’t move, create or destroy anything in the physical world. This is not because our human thoughts aren’t strong enough, or because we are “only human”. Rather, the limitation is inherent to the nature of thoughts. Thoughts can’t do any real, physical work because thoughts are a type of experiencing, and nothing more. We use thoughts to guide our physical actions, but it is those physical actions (using our hands and arms and legs and so on) which do all of our actual doing.

Thoughts, in other words, are useful only because we have bodies with which to carry those thoughts out. God has no body, and therefore God’s thoughts would be useless.

In face of such an obvious difficulty, how can theists continue to think that the concept of God as Creator remains viable? The answer, I believe, is that they have a very fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the world. This misunderstanding is encapsulated by the “principle of sufficient reason.”

The principle of sufficient reason is the idea that physical reality can be sufficiently — that is to say, completely — explained. It assigns a kind of magic to words, so that the right combinations of words, it is imagined, can equal the essence of something. In fact, the very word essence is often used to mean the sufficient reason behind a thing or object.

It is all a kind of word magic. Theists imagine that our explanations of the world somehow capture the essence of physical things, indeed that the essence is those explanations. This allows them to fancy that God can think the explanation behind physical things and in so doing bring those things into existence.

Explanations simply aren’t like that.

The first clue that physical things don’t have an explanatory essence of this sort lies in the fact that we have two types of knowing instead of just one. Some knowledge does indeed have an inherently knowable essence: when we acquire this such knowledge we recognize it immediately as necessarily true. The certainty that 212 + 212 = 424, the impossibility of married bachelors, the discovery that the interior angles of a triangle = 180 degrees; these are all examples of knowledge which is necessarily true. Philosophers call this type of knowing analytic.

But there is a different kind of knowledge, that which we acquire empirically about the physical world. This type of knowing is termed synthetic. There is nothing necessarily true about the colors of physical objects, nor about their shapes, hardnesses, and so on. We can indeed develop explanations why they have the color, shape, or hardness they have, but those explanations are never necessarily true.

In short, those explanations do not lock into an underlying sufficient reason or explanatory essence behind physical objects for the simple reason, I submit, that no such thing exists. Physical objects are, at least in this ultimate sense, unexplanable. It might be better to say it this way: there is a mismatch between explanations of the physical world and that physical world itself. Furthermore, such a mismatch does not exist for analytic knowledge. In the case of analytic knowledge, there is a match between explanation and essence.

If there are two types of knowing, synthetic and analytic, it suggests (strongly, I would say) that there exist two types of things to be known: physical things and concepts.

So now, let’s go back to the question of God creating the physical world by thinking it into existence. We know now that the principle of sufficient reason applies to concepts, but not to physical objects. This means that words should be capable — should be magical enough, you might say — to bring concepts into existence simply by stating them. This certainly seems to be the case.

But since the principle of sufficient reason does not apply to physical objects, it follows that there is nothing to state about them that could ever bring them into existence. Words belong to a different realm. Concepts likewise belong to a different realm. They are powerless to bring the physical things of our world into existence.

Thoughts and concepts cannot be a means of creating the world. This leaves God, who has nothing else, powerless.

But it has always been the wrong question. The more important question is this: can God lift any rock at all? The answer would appear to be no.

God’s problem, of course, is that He’s not a body-being; He doesn’t have a body. (Which means also, strictly speaking, God can’t be He since God lacks genitalia — but we’ll politely ignore that little detail.)

Theists, we know, scoff at the notion that God requires a body to do anything. Even atheists generally consider this a pretty weak argument. And yet no one, theist or atheist, can imagine how God, a purely spiritual infinite being with no specific location in space, interacts with the physical world.

It’s not that God is in a different location than the universe; rather God has no location at all. God is also timeless: no moving parts. And that’s the crux of the problem: logically speaking it’s impossible for any being defined as God is defined to do anything.

Doing involves change, and the changeless — as a matter of definition — can’t change. Doing something with a physical world involves being someplace, in some physical location, and then interacting with constantly changing physical things. At every step required for doing anything with the physical world, God’s definition gets in the way and makes the interaction impossible.

Ah, but God can just have an idea and it will happen. God doesn’t have to interact with anything, He merely has to think a thought.

The Limitation of Thought

But this doesn’t work either. Even if we concede the doubtful proposition that God can think thoughts, those thoughts can’t get anything done. And we all know this. A thought of a tree can’t bring an actual tree into existence. Thoughts are simply incapable of being anything other than, well, thoughts. If anyone doubts this obvious truth, they can prove me wrong by simply imagining a tree into real existence.

Thoughts can’t move, create or destroy anything in the physical world. This is not because our human thoughts aren’t strong enough, or because we are “only human”. Rather, the limitation is inherent to the nature of thoughts. Thoughts can’t do any real, physical work because thoughts are a type of experiencing, and nothing more. We use thoughts to guide our physical actions, but it is those physical actions (using our hands and arms and legs and so on) which do all of our actual doing.

Thoughts, in other words, are useful only because we have bodies with which to carry those thoughts out. God has no body, and therefore God’s thoughts would be useless.

At this point, the theist’s typical response is to assert that nothing we know about thoughts applies when thinking about God’s thoughts. His thoughts are not like our thoughts at all but infinitely more powerful, and yes, His thoughts can bring matter into existence. Yes they can.

Which is simply an admission of defeat. Theists insist the answer is God, even though they know it is an answer chock full of contradiction and impossibility. Faith alone makes it work.

If only faith could.

In his excellent book, The Existence of God (Cornell University, 1965), Wallace I. Matson distinguishes between “crude” and “subtle” versions of the Cosmological argument for God’s existence. It is the suble version that interests me here. Put very briefly, it is this:

If the world is intelligible, then God exists. But the world is intelligible. Therefore God exists. – Matson, The Existence of God, page 62

What is meant by intelligibility? It means, briefly, that the world is explainable in terms of causal relationships, scientific laws, “sufficient reason” (“There is a Sufficient Reason why everything that is, is so and not otherwise.” — Leibniz). In investigating the world, says the theist, scientists uncover this underlying causality and framework, that is to say, scientists tap into and thereby discover the intelligence with which the world is imbued. That it is so imbued is unquestionable; that the source of the imbuing is God is obvious, even if not strictly provable.

The atheist position is that the theist has made a basic mistake. Like the kid who puts on rose-colored glasses and sees a rosy world and concludes that the world is rose-colored, the theist fails to realize that the human mind necessarily imparts a patina of intelligibility to everything it illuminates. The theist sees causal relationships and a blueprint of scientific laws imbued in the physical world, whereas the atheist avers that these are only artifacts of the human mind, the currency itself of human intelligence shining on the world.

Intelligence, says the atheist, isn’t out there, it’s in here. And it got in here as a product of evolution, nothing more. We evolved to have minds, and our minds are essentially information-colored glasses which impart — unavoidably — a patina of information, properties, and relationships upon everything we think about.

Intelligibility is in us, not outside us, but no matter: it is just as useful either way.