Thoughts & Trees

Posted on April 14, 2007 by Dwight

In God & Rocks I wrote,

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.” Continue reading →

Posted in Naturalism, Non-Existence Arguments | 1 Comment

God & Rocks

Posted on April 13, 2007 by Dwight

Given that He is all-powerful, can God create a rock so heavy even He can’t lift it? Theologians have puzzled over this particular nugget for centuries. The general consensus has been that God can’t do anything which involves logical contradiction, and therefore the answer is no. Even God’s omnipotence, in other words, is limited by the rules of logic.

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. Continue reading →

Posted in Non-Existence Arguments | 3 Comments

Bad Faith

Posted on April 6, 2007 by Dwight

Reliance on faith demonstrates bad faith on the part of the faithful. What makes reliance on faith “bad”? It’s bad, I would say, because it is intellectually dishonest. But what makes reliance on faith dishonest?

If the way we determine “facts” is by turning to faith, then yes, that is intellectual dishonesty. As I’ve said before, faith is useless at discerning matters of fact. The reason is simple: faith justifies or proves whatever we want it to. You tell me Osiris doesn’t exist? I have faith he does. I believe it, that settles it, and therefore Osiris does indeed exist.

Faith is not a method for determining truth at all. In fact, faith begs the question of truth. Yet people who invoke faith usually pretend otherwise, and that is dishonest. Bad faith.

If that’s bad faith, what is good faith? Continue reading →

Posted in Articles Highlighted, Faith & Reason | 1 Comment

CS Lewis’ Moral Argument

Posted on March 29, 2007 by Dwight

In Mere Christianity, C S Lewis wrote:

If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling “whatever you say and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren’t all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?” But then that threw me back into another difficulty.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I gotten this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too — for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist — in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless — I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality — namely my idea of justice — was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.*

There must be a source for our moral sensibilities, C. S. Lewis is saying, outside of our own personal preferences and likes. If there is no outside criteria for truth, justice, fairness and the like, no criteria outside of me, then I can never rationally exhort others to behave the way I believe they ought to. Fairness, justice, right and wrong: it’s all merely my word against theirs, my preference instead of someone else’s preference.

Of course I may by force impose my moral viewpoint on others, but I have no basis outside myself for doing so; by extension, the same applies to any government or state: although it can impose by force, it can have no moral authority since there is no basis except the personal preferences of the governors. Continue reading →

Posted in Ethics & Morality, Moral | 41 Comments

Five Revelations

Posted on March 26, 2007 by Dwight

I became an atheist through the back door, as explained elsewhere. It wasn’t until after I had been godless for several years that I began to discover the usual arguments that, for most non-believers, led to atheism. It was only as Christians tried to bring me back to God, ironically, that I began to see how ridiculous Christianity and the other revealed religions were, & how bizarre the jump from believing in God to believing in this or that particular revelation.

So Silent He is Not There

After reading Francis Schaefer’s He is There and He is Not Silent, I realized for the first time how silent God actually was. Sure, it was claimed that God had been loud thousands of years ago, that even today God spoke privately to the hearts and minds of individuals, but — and this is the kicker — publicly God is silent. Imagine, I realized, if Congress passed laws but never published them, instead only letting certain “blessed” individuals know, in private, what laws they had passed. In such a case, how could anyone be certain what the laws were, or whose claims to know the laws were legitimate? Yet that is the situation with God’s laws.

That is the great flaw of revealed religion. It is always a matter of a few individuals claiming to be “blessed” with knowledge of God’s laws and intentions. The rest of us always receive the revelations of revealed religions from other humans, not from God direct. In fact, anyone can claim that God spoke to them and therefore that they speak for God, but there is no way to confirm or deny those claims. Unless God speaks directly and universally to all of us, speaks publicly, we have no reliable way of knowing his intentions — other than by studying the nature of the world itself. Continue reading →

Posted in Christianity, Faith & Reason, Prayer, Religion, Unsacred Texts | 3 Comments

The Key to Happiness

Posted on March 16, 2007 by Dwight

The key to happiness is discovering—and reconciling with—the fact that we are not minds. If you grow up in a Christian culture this is the most important mental health lesson you must learn, and if you haven’t yet than you need to get help form the Inspire team.

We grow up instilled with a lie. Nearly everything in Judeo-Christian culture implicitly or explicitly teaches us that we are a mind with a body to do our bidding. Well, what’s wrong with that, you might ask? It makes sense, doesn’t it? Continue reading →

Posted in Articles Highlighted, Atheist Culture, Naturalism | 2 Comments

Seeing Red – Understanding Consciousness

Posted on February 25, 2007 by Dwight

An article by John Searle (“Minding the Brain”) in the Nov 2, 2006 edition of The New York Review of Books shows how confused most of us (including philosophers & scientists) are about something as everyday as vision. Searle reviewed Nicholas Humphrey’s book Seeing Red: a Study in Consciousness, with which he largely disagrees. In that book (based on lectures he gave at Harvard in 2004) Humphreys asks the reader to imaging they are looking at a large red screen upon which the color red is projected, and proceeds to argue that the normal interpretation of what happens when we view such a field of red is mistaken.

But what is the normal interpretation of seeing red? Searle explains it this way,

According to contemporary scientific common sense, when we look at the red screen the reflection of light waves sets up in us a series of neuronal events beginning at the retina and ending with a conscious visual experience of red. If we assume that there are no hallucinations or pathological conditions involved, the perceiver sees, and in that way perceives, the red object by having a visual experience. The perceiver sees the object, but he does not see the visual experience of the object. He consciously sees real things in the real world and not his experiences of those things. There are not two red things in the scene but just one, the red screen.

If Searle is correct that this is the standard viewpoint, then I’m with Humphrey right off the bat, for I almost don’t know where to begin with my objections. Continue reading →

Posted in Atheology, Naturalism, Simulacrum | Comments Off on Seeing Red – Understanding Consciousness

Atheism as the Defense of Naturalism

Posted on October 19, 2006 by Dwight

In general, types of atheism match types of gods. For example we often hear about “weak” versus “strong” atheism. While the strong atheist asserts that there is no God, the weak atheist claims only that there is insufficient evidence to support belief in God. Without adequate evidence, one should simply withhold belief; that is, the presumption of atheism, rather than an unwarranted presumption of theism, should be the default.

Put another way, weak atheism (which I have elsewhere dubbed “general atheism”) relies on the application of methodological naturalism, following the scientific method. But why should a theist, who after all adheres to a supernatural worldview, accept the validity of methodological naturalism for questions pertaining to the supernatural? On its surface that is a reasonable question, and not one weak atheism can effectively address.

To be sure, most theists wholeheartedly accept the weak atheist approach in respect to each of the ghosts, demons, and deities whose existence they also reject. But for absolute God, they consider methodological naturalism inadequate. God, in their mind, is a special case.

It is here that strong atheism enters the game.

Strong atheism (which elsewhere I have dubbed “specific atheism”) strikes directly at the nature of God, and purports to prove that God (when defined as a perfect, non-physical being) could not have created the world we find around us. Admittedly, the arguments of strong atheism do not apply to devils and demons and imperfect deities, but rather only to the perfect creator worshipped by most modern monotheists. But that is ok. Taken together, strong and weak atheism provide a one-two punch against all supernatural beings.

In 2001, Quentin Smith proposed an additional role for atheism in an article called The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism published in Philo (vol 4, no 2). Atheism, according to Smith, should be conceived as the defense of naturalism. I only discovered his remarkable essay last month, so I come rather belatedly to the matter. But I find Smith’s argument convincing enough that I have reconfigured the tag line for this website (which is meant as a brief definition of “atheology”) to include Smith’s phrase “the defense of naturalism”. Continue reading →

Posted in Articles Highlighted, Atheist Culture | 1 Comment

Zeno & Infinity

Posted on September 19, 2006 by Dwight

Pivotal moments in one’s intellectual development come unexpectedly. For me the key moment arrived in 9th grade English class when Miss Blumenstock gave a brief run-down of Zeno’s “theory of motion” [see footnote] and asked us to write a paper supporting or refuting him. Never could I have guessed it would lead to atheism.

That is exactly where it led, though it would take 5 1/2 years to get there.

Zeno’s “theory”, as she presented it, was that motion was not continuous but rather consisted of discrete segments. The path of an arrow shot across the horizon would actually, according to Zeno, not be smooth (although it might appear so to our eyes) but would in fact jump from segment to segment.

Why didn’t Zeno think motion was smooth and continuous? The answer is mathematics. Zeno realized there could not be an actual infinity of numbers between point a and point b on a numberline: numbers by their nature were inherently finite and countable, and therefore the path of an arrow across the sky had to consist of finite, countable steps.

If we think about it, we realize Zeno’s arrow was an early call for the Cosmological argument, which hinges on the assertion that there cannot be an actual infinity. There can’t be, per the Cosmological argument, an infinite regress of physical causes and there can’t be, per Zeno, an infinite number of steps in the motion of any object.

Just as there are two types of infinity — the macro infinity of going on and on to higher numbers and the micro infinity of more numbers between any two numbers on a number line — so there are two types of physical infinities which one can deny in the world. Zeno denied one, the Cosmological argument denies the other. Continue reading →

Posted in Cosmological, Existence Arguments, Naturalism | Comments Off on Zeno & Infinity

Theism’s Rose-Colored Glasses

Posted on August 13, 2006 by Dwight

Atheists often find it difficult to understand why theists continue to believe in God despite lack of evidence and the nearly insurmountable problem of evil. But the theist position isn’t difficult to understand once we recognize that the divide between theism and atheism results from radically different premises about the nature of knowledge.

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.

Posted in Cosmological, Existence Arguments, Non-Existence Arguments | Comments Off on Theism’s Rose-Colored Glasses