[Preface to Atheism is a blog I started on SubStack. What follows is the first post from Aug 18, 2023]
In this Substack, I will advocate atheism as entailed by the meta philosophy of naturalism rather than atheism based on doubt about God or religion. There’s nothing wrong with doubting God or religion, of course, but I hope to convince you that the benefits of atheism based on naturalism are immense and often overlooked by many atheists.
To an extent, this is because of my own history.
For the first 20 years of my life, I was a “student” of Christian Science—a 19th century New Age religion founded by Mary Baker Eddy. As a religion it was progressive for its time, a relatively feminist blend of spiritualism, Christianity, and philosophical idealism.
The philosophical idealism part of the mix is paramount to my story. You should understand that Christian Scientists reject dualism and embrace a monism in which mind—Divine Mind—is the only reality. Our individual minds are a reflection of Divine Mind, but if that reflection gets clouded we subject ourselves to sin, disease and death.
This is because our bodies are seen as the spiritual reflections of our thoughts. Correcting our thoughts so they properly reflect Divine Mind is how Christian Scientists attempt to cure the body (which is the primary goal of adherents).
This brief description of C.S. leaves a lot unexplained, and perhaps I’ll fill in more in a future post. Right now the focus is my own intellectual history, and the key element I want to convey is that as a child I grew up in a religion steeped in philosophical idealism.
But in 1974, at age 20, I became an atheist—not from doubting God’s existence but due to a sudden, unexpected flip in my brain to a natural framework.
(It was as if the very moment my brain perceived a new option possible, I flipped.)
Instead of a monism with mind (Divine or otherwise) primary, I flipped to one where physical matter was primary. It solved many problems (we will get to those in later posts).
At the time I didn’t know what to call my new worldview, so I settled on atheism—which I had grown up to think of as the “evil idea.” But notably determinism—another “evil idea” closely associated in my mind with atheism—did not flip to my new worldview. Determinism got excluded because mind and its explanations were, per my new framework, no longer primary.
I had a worldview that gave up God while excluding determinism. Did it really work?
I have spent most of my life trying to find out.
Zeno
My flip occurred because for years I struggled with the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, particularly the Arrow paradox. My 9th grade English teacher, Miss Blumenstock, introduced me to Zeno and, once introduced, I couldn’t let it go.
However, one of the risks of learning philosophy in English class is that stuff may get garbled. That happened here.
For years I did not understand that Zeno presented the arrow’s movement as a paradox intended to challenge contemporary thinking.
Instead, I misunderstood Zeno to have a theory of motion, specifically: that motion is not continuous as we naively suppose, but rather the result of an object jumping through a series of discrete locations one after the other. (For example, Zeno’s arrow would start in location A1 then be in location A2, next A3 and so on, and thus the arrow is never actually in movement between locations.)
But rather than presenting a theory of motion in which there is no actual movement, Zeno instead was asserting a paradox: if the arrow has a known location, it’s not moving; if it’s moving, it doesn’t have a known location.
In short, Zeno used paradoxes like the Arrow to throw in doubt our ability to know the world as it really is.
His paradoxes are particularly devastating for mathematics, for they demonstrate that formulas can’t be used to know reality; rather mathematics only pertain to “appearances”.
This distinction between appearance and reality comes from Parmenides, Zeno’s teacher, mentor, and (according to ancient rumor) lover.
Zeno’s paradoxes were intended to support Parmenides and to demonstrate that in attempting to know the world, we interface with how the world appears to us, not with actual reality (which Parmenides called “the One”), and that this discrepancy generates paradoxes which (according to Zeno1) apply even to our use of mathematics when we describe the world.
I believe Zeno was fundamentally correct.
Most importantly for today, modern philosophy has to take this mismatch between knowledge and reality seriously, or it stumbles.
Anyway, after five years of struggling with Zeno, I finally grasped the inevitability of Zeno’s mismatch between knowledge and the world. It was this new understanding which drove my brain flip after I turned 20.
The result was that in a moment I went from theism to atheism, from idealism to physicalism. I became an atheist without first having doubts about God’s existence.
Naturalism
I had flipped to a natural worldview, but I didn’t call it naturalism.
Why not?
Because in those days the definition of naturalism did not seem to be compatible with the inevitability of a mismatch between knowledge and the world. Even today, most definitions of naturalism embrace scientific realism (which is a denial of the mismatch) or else embrace something pretty close to scientific realism.
Still, if we back up and look at naturalism as a meta philosophy, this is where my worldview fits. And because naturalism as a meta philosophy entails atheism, the latter serves as a reasonable enough tag for my beliefs. But naturalism is the better tag.
Anyway, in 1974 I embraced physicalism and called myself an atheist—at the same time dismissing determinism. My new outlook was all about rejecting the primacy of mind, and as I saw it this rejection entailed not conflating the world with our understanding of the world.
I embraced the mismatch.
Since then, I’ve tried to understand if this was the right move. Is it sound? In Preface to Atheism, I’ll explain why I think it is.
Footnotes
This of course is my interpretation. Unfortunately Zeno’s writings do not survive, and all we have today are a few references by his intellectual opponents to a small subset of the paradoxes (9 out of 40+). Much of what we have comes from Plato’s Parmenides, an account of an encounter between Socrates, Parmenides, and Zeno which occurred before Plato was born, and which is undoubtedly biased. For example, Plato seems to associate Parmenides’ description of “the One” with his own subtle conception of Platonic forms. In my mind, this cannot be reconciled with Zeno’s paradoxes, which every ancient commentator (including Plato) agrees were constructed to support Parmenides. The paradoxes, in my view, place geometry and mathematics squarely into the world of “the many” (appearances), and thus represent Zeno’s attempt to prove that observations and measurements of the world we see and experience around us cannot provide “true” knowledge of reality (i.e., reality is mismatched with our thoughts and conceptions). With this (admittedly questionable) interpretation of Zeno, I draw a line from him to early Greek skepticism and in particular to the academic skepticism of Carneades and Clitomachus a couple of centuries later. As I hope to show in future posts, modern biology (in light of evolutionary theory) forces us to skepticism about our ability to know the physical world “as it is,” yet this biology-driven skepticism is no barrier to modern science. Indeed, it explains why the sciences are necessarily empirical and why the scientific method is successful (and why other methods are not). It is a viewpoint, as far as I can determine, surprisingly similar to that of Carneades and Clitomachus (if only we had their writings, which we don’t).
