Review: The Six Ways of Atheism

Geoffrey Berg's The Six Ways of Atheism is one of the most important books about Atheism that I have ever read. Berg provides half a dozen arguments to prove that God does not exist or at least that God's existence is improbable. Although all of them may not be valid, they are all intriguing and deserve to have a hearing. My discussion of them that follows must not be treated as a substitute for reading his book, as he goes out of his way to address many possible criticisms that might be launched against his arguments.

Berg's first argument from atheism goes something like this: God is a being who is omnipotent, the creator of the universe, supremely good, and so on. But it must be statistically improbable for the creator of the universe to also possess attributes like supreme goodness which must occur in very few (if any) beings. To see this argument with more clarity, try thinking about it this way: suppose that tomorrow one person will win the lottery and one person will be struck by lightning. What are the odds that the lottery winner will be one and the same as the person who gets struck by lightning? Obviously, the odds are incredibly low that two improbable occurances will happen to the same person. Likewise, the odds that a rare (or perhaps even non-existent) attribute like supreme goodness will happen to exist in the unique being who created the universe is also improbable.

I think that Berg's argument is a valid one, but it only goes to show that the existence of God is a priori improbable. Of course, with enough a posteriori support, the existence of God might be deemed probable in spite of its a priori improbability. Fortunately Berg seems to realize this and he attempts to show that the God hypothesis can recieve no a posteriori support in another argument, which we will examine next.

Berg's second argument is the 'Comprehension Gulf' Argument. Berg asserts that since God is, by definition, immortal and infinite, that man can never recognize God and prove that God exists because man is finite and mortal. Man, being finite in both lifespan and knowledge, can never attain direct proof that something has existed for eternity. Therefore, we can never know if some being actually is God. At best we could only attain proof that some very powerful being exists who might be God, but who also might be simply a very powerful and long-lived spirit (who did not quite meet the definition of 'God').

Now this is a very interesting argument. If it is valid, it would go along very nicely with Berg's a priori proof that God is highly improbable because it effectively destroys any hope the theist might have of supporting the God hypothesis through a posteriori means. But is it valid? I don't know. If it were the case that all of humanity met some spiritual being who could stop bombs from exploding, make pink unicorns appear out of thin air, rearrange the planets of the solar system, and cause my little sister to be a little less stubborn, would we be irrational for reasoning inductively that this being was all-powerful?

The problem is analogous to another: if you have ever heard of Olber's paradox, then you will understand that, if the universe were infinite, we can predict that there would be an infinite number of stars, and thus the sky ought to glow at night because of the infinite starlight. Since the sky does not glow, we may take this as a falsification of the infinite universe theory. But what if the sky did glow? Would that mean that the universe was infinite? Not necessarily. What if the number of stars was not infinite, but just extremely large? How would we know the difference? On empirical grounds we would not know. But on logical grounds we might be able to make a decision. Richard Swinburne advocates the position that the simplest numbers are zero and infinity. Since zero represents no being at all, it follows that the simplest being we could come up with would be an infinite one. I believe that Swinburne was on to something here.

Most readers of philosophy are aware of the age-old problem of induction: inductive reasoning (or generalizing from a limited number of experiences) is not self justifiying, and it certainly is not logically necessary that what we generalize from a limited number of our experiences will hold true in all cases. For instance, if every swan that I have ever seen is white, it does not necessarily follow that all swans are white. Likewise, just because I have always observed the sun rising from the east does not necessarily mean that the sun didn't rise in the west ten million years ago or a hundred million years ago or five hundred million years ago. So why is it that inductive reasoning is valid? I believe that the answer lies in Occam's razor: the principle which states that the simplest explanation is most probably correct. Since it is simpler for the sun to rise from same direction throughout the history of sunrises than for it to rise from one direction for half of its history and another direction in another half, we can rightly say that the simplest (and therefore most probably correct) hypothesis is that the sun always rose in the east.

This piece of philosophy is completely applicable to Berg's argument. Suppose that there was a God who was only too willing to prove to us that he was omnipotent, and the God did all kinds of fantastic things like rearranging the stars, raising the dead, etc. After numerous demonstrations of power it would be simpler to suppose that, as had always happened before, the God's power would prevail over anything and everything, and therefore this God would be all-powerful.

Berg's third argument against the existence of God is the 'God has no explanatory value' argument. The argument has a very familiar feel to it. All too often I am asked, "If there is no God, why is there something rather than nothing?" I often respond by asking "Why is there a God rather than nothing?" Berg has taken this reply, which is applicable to so many theistic arguments, and actually used it as an argument against God's existence. Berg argues that if we are positing a God in order to explain questions that the God hypothesis does not really answer, then we ought to apply Occam's razor (the simplest explanation is most probably correct) and avoid postulating God in the first place. Theoretical entities should not be postulated when they explain nothing, so let us avoid them and arrive at the simpler (and more probably correct) explanation: atheism. I agree with this line of reasoning completely.

Berg's fourth argument is a brilliant variation on the age-old argument from evil. If we define God as an all-powerful and all-good creator of the universe, then it follows quite naturally that such a being would be expected to create this world in its best possible state. This world must be the best of all possible of worlds if God created it. If it is not the best of all possible worlds, then God did not create it. Berg observes that the world has improved quite a bit over the ages. After all, few of us would care to live in the Middle Ages or in the iron grip of the Roman empire. If I may bring up a quick point, I remember PBS airing a series called The 1900 House, a reality series in which a family lived in a house with conditions like those of the beginning of the twentieth century. After watching that series, I am very grateful that I was not born in that time period. And the reality series did not even fully recreate what that era was like, since many things had to be altered slightly from the way they actually were back then due to health and safety concerns. Anyway, back to the argument: Berg observes that, since the world has been improving, it follows that the world was not created in the best possible state (by definition you cannot improve something that is perfect). Therefore God does not exist.

Of course, there are some theodicies that might pose some difficulty for this argument: for instance, Richard Swinburne might counter that God did not create the world in the best possible state because he wanted to give man the responsiblity and freedom of choice to improve it (Swinburne sees these things as being good in and of themselves). Then again, such a defense seems to presuppose a libertarian or contra-causal account of free will, which I personally have chosen to reject because I view it as incoherent and unintelligible (see Daniel Dennett,Freedom Evolves, and Richard Carrier, Sense & Goodness Without God, Section III.4).

Overall, I agree with Berg's 'Best Possible World' argument, but I believe that he should make a more thorough and exhaustive attempt to defeat threatening theodicies which may, in the eyes of some, nullify his argument.

Berg's fifth argument is the 'Universal Uncertainty' argument. He argues that God must have certain knowledge of anything (if it is to be called 'God'), but that there some to be some things that God could never be certain about. How would God know if he is not simply one of many Gods who exist separately from one another and unaware of one another? However, I think a theist could suggest that perhaps God has some self-evident, a priori proof to answer these questions. Although it seems unparsimonious to postulate the existence of unknown a priori proven answers to difficult questions like the one mentioned previously, I don't see any reason to suppose it is impossible, and therefore I don't find this argument too convincing.

Berg's final argument does not feel like a single argument as much as it does a few left-over arguments slapped together to make a sixth chapter. He argues that God cannot exist because some of God's defining qualities cannot exist. Berg moves through several qualities, from his previously discussed argument against omniscience to the old argument against omnipotence (As J.L. Mackie put it: "Can God beings that he cannot control?"). He even suggests that God could not be anything more than a "grand showman" if God is not capable of giving meaning to human life (which Berg argues is impossible). It seems to me that he does not argue this very well, and does not justify it very well on logical ground. Moreover, I think Mackie's argument against omnipotetence is not very convincing: an omnipotent being could indeed make beings that he could not control. Prior to creating the uncontrollable beings the God would be omnipotent; after creating the uncontrollable beings he would not be.

Overall, Berg's book is very thought-provoking, original, and convincing. I highly recommend it to philosophers of the amateur and professional stripes.

You can purchase it here.

Refuting Presuppositionalism

Presuppositionalism is one of the strangest, and indeed, one of the most difficult-to-understand approaches to defending the existence of God. The basic idea is that you cannot believe that something (i.e. the uniformity of nature or the reliability of your mind) unless you presuppose the existence of God. The reasoning behind all of this is very peculiar and seldom clearly stated by its proponents.


Are the Laws of Logic Proof of God?

Matt Slick, a well-known supporter of Presuppositionalism, has attempted to break down the line of reasoning behind his form of Presuppositionalism (The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God, hereafter known as TAG). I think Slick has simplified it about as well as can be done, although I feel he ought to have put it into a standard syllogistic form. I’m going to attempt to do this, as I feel it will make it much easier for us to understand where the argument goes wrong.

Allow me to define some terms before I begin: I’m going to use LA to stand for “logical absolute” by which I mean the Law of non-contradiction (actual contradictions cannot be true), the law of identity (things are what they are and they are not what they are not), the law of excluded middle (something cannot be both true and not true), Etc. By “conceptual” I mean a mental representation of an actual or possible thing. Here is the series of syllogisms which comprise the TAG:

(A)
1. LAs do not arise from matter, motion, time, space, etc.
2. Something that does not arise from matter/motion/time/space/etc. is not physical (by definition).
3. Anything that is not physical is conceptual.
4. Therefore, from 1-3, LAs are conceptual.

(B)
1. Conceptual Things depend on a mind to exist.
2. LAs are conceptual.
3. Therefore, LAs depend upon a mind to exist.
4. LAs exist.
5. Therefore, one or more mind must be authoring LAs (follows from 1-4).

(C)
1. LAs are authored by a mind.
2. Minds are either perfect or they are not.
3. LAs are not authored by a non-perfect mind or mind. Follows from the principle of sufficient reason: A cause cannot be greater than its effect, so a concept could not be more perfect than the mind creating it. Since human minds are universally imperfect, human minds could not create LAs, which are completely perfect.
4. Therefore, LAs are authored by a perfect mind.

(D)
1. LAs are authored by an absolute mind.
2. Minds must exist to author concepts.
3. Therefore, the absolute mind authoring LAs exists.


Questionable Premises of TAG

The first questionable premise is A (1). Logical absolutes do not “arise from” physical things, rather logical absolutes are expressed by physical things because everything (whether possible or actual) must follow logical absolutes (for example, all possible or actual things must be what they are and cannot be what they are not). In fact, for something to even be considered “possible” it must, by definition, be in accord with the laws of logic (it must be what it is and not what it is not).
The second questionable premise is A (3). Just because something is not physical does not automatically mean that it is conceptual. Perhaps logical absolutes constitute a category in and of themselves and are not part of the categories of ‘conceptual things’ or ‘physical things’. They aren’t physical. And they are not conceptual: something that is conceptual is a mental representation of an actual or possible thing. But the mental representation of, for example, the law of non-contradiction, is not identical with the law of non-contradiction itself. The law of non-contradiction is an objectively true statement that applies to all possible or actual states of affairs.


A Strange Similarity

While I was thinking about TAG, I noticed that it had a striking resemblance to another argument I had once heard. Alvin Plantinga put it this way:

“[It] seems plausible to think of numbers as dependent upon or even constituted by intellectual activity; indeed, students always seem to think of them as "ideas" or "concepts", as dependent, somehow, upon our intellectual activity. So if there were no minds, there would be no numbers.”

Plantinga goes on to talk about how all numbers are probably not due to human intellectual activity, and so Plantinga draws the conclusion that they must be due to some higher intellectual activity (i.e. God’s intellectual activity) therefore God exists.
This argument is wrong for reasons similar to the reasons that TAG is wrong: It confuses the mental representations of numbers with numbers themselves. Numbers are simply amounts of some type of thing. And the amount of some type of thing is not the same as our mental representation of the amount of that thing. So numbers are fundamentally not conceptual, and since they are not conceptual, we do not need to account for them with a mind. If we do not need to account for them with a mind, then we do not need to account for them with God’s mind.


The Argument from the Uniformity of Nature

Dr. Jason Lisle of Answers in Genesis summed up the argument this way:
1. Science requires uniformity.
2. Uniformity requires a biblical worldview.
3. Therefore, science requires a biblical worldview.
The first premise is definitely true, although I wonder how creationists think they can advocate the uniformity of nature while simultaneously proposing that the rates of radiometric decay were super-fast in the past (to explain away radiometric dates).
The entire argument really hangs on the second premise: Uniformity requires a biblical worldview. The reasoning Lisle offers in support of this is:

“The Christian worldview gives us a reason to expect uniformity: a God who is beyond time, who upholds the universe in a consistent fashion, and who has told us so.”

How would a God beyond time give us reason to expect uniformity? I suppose that Lisle might be thinking that since physical laws are changeless they must have come from something changeless (like a changeless God). But what about all the things that God allegedly made which can change? Did changing things come from a changeless God? If so, then it seems that there is no reason to expect uniformity on the basis that there exists a timeless God.

Besides, I would claim that one can be completely justified in believing the uniformity of nature without reference to a Creator. Ask yourself: Is uniformity simpler than variety? Is it simpler for things to behave the same way throughout all time rather than behaving several different ways over the course of time? It certainly is, and since Occam’s razor tells us that “the simplest explanation is most probably correct” then it follows that certain regularities in the behavior of matter that we observe today were very probably the same in the past, and very probably will be the same in the future.
This brings us to another question: atheists and agnostics may be justified in believing that nature is uniform because of their experience, but wouldn’t it still be true that theists have a reason to expect a uniform universe in advance while atheists do not? Perhaps so, but then again there is no more reason to presuppose that a consistent God exists (prior to examining the real world) than there is to suppose that a consistent universe exists (prior to examining the universe).
Lisle’s third point, that he has reason to expect a uniform universe because God told him so, is simply ridiculous. The men who wrote the Bible would have been perfectly aware that the universe exhibits some regularity (as all people are) and so sticking such a thing in there is not really a sign of divine inspiration.

Bertrand Russell mentions further problems with Lisle’s argument:

“[W]here you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was.”


Must We Presuppose the Existence of God Before We Can Trust Our Own Thoughts?

C.S. Lewis once asked, “If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it?” Well, perhaps because the process of natural selection has, in a sense, ‘designed’ our brain and nervous system to give us accurate information about the world.
Alvin Plantinga has attempted to resuscitate this argument by arguing that unguided evolution probably will not produce a reliable brain. Plantinga says,

“Perhaps Paul [a prehistoric hominid] very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. ... Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. ... Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behaviour.”[i]

But wouldn’t natural selection favor reliable and accurate memory? Does accurate memory not increase an organism’s chances of survival? Wouldn’t our prehistoric hominid Paul eventually realize that running away from the tiger is not the best way to pet it (since he could remember how things turned out the last time he ran away from the tiger)? A plethora of other problems exist which completely undermine the plausibility of Plantinga’s argument, which I do not see the need to go into here, since they’ve been covered elsewhere.[ii]


Conclusion

Presuppositionalist arguments are often difficult to refute on the spot if you’ve never heard them before. Chances are you haven’t heard them before, because Presuppositionalism represents a minority view that has only recently made a splash on the scene of Christian apologetics. I suspect that Christians are now using these arguments precisely because of their obscurity: the rarity and complexity of these arguments are such that many atheists won’t be able to respond to these arguments immediately, whereas more traditional arguments like the first cause argument and the argument from design are arguments that practically every atheist can immediately tear down (because atheists have heard these arguments used so much). However, once presuppositionalist arguments are carefully examined, they can quickly be shown to be fallacious and invalid. So my advice to fellow atheists and agnostics who frequently argue with Christians is this: be familiar with these arguments and be prepared to expose the errors in them whenever you hear them. Chances are that sooner or later you will come across someone in person or on the internet who uses these arguments. Please take my advice and arm yourself in advance.

REFERENCES

[i] Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.225-226.

[ii] See Stephen Law, "Plantinga's Belief-Cum-Desire Argument Refuted" forthcoming in "Religious Studies". Also: Paul Draper "In Defense of Sensible Naturalism"

And Section III.9 of Sense & Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism
by Richard Carrier.

Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Pat Condell

Stephen Fletcher Flogs Stephen Meyer

See here:

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/the-rna-world-lives-on-the-tls-letter-page/

Here's an excerpt I liked:

In the prologue to his book Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer states that it is an attempt to make a comprehensive, interdisciplinary argument for the Intelligent Design view of the origin of life. But as the author himself concedes (in an appendix on page 496), the discovery of a precursor to DNA (such as RNA) would demolish the whole edifice. A “key prediction” is that “Future experiments will continue to show that RNA catalysts lack the capacities necessary to render the RNA world scenario plausible”. It is Stephen Meyer’s bad luck to have published his book in 2009, the very year that the RNA world scenario became eminently plausible. In February of that year came the discovery of the self-sustained replication of an RNA enzyme, by Lincoln and Joyce (Science, Vol 323, pp1,229–32). In March came the identification of the prebiotic translation apparatus (a dimer of self-folding RNA units) within the contemporary ribosome, by Yonath et al (Nature Proceedings, Posted March 4, 2009). Finally, in May came the discovery of the synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions, by Powner et al (Nature, Vol 459, pp239–42). I am afraid that reality has overtaken Meyer’s book and its flawed reasoning.

Take the Science Knowledge Quiz

Right here:

http://pewresearch.org/sciencequiz/

I got all 12 right, which means that I know more than 90% of the general population.

Goosebumps Are Proof of Evolution

Chicago Biologist Jerry Coyne wrote a really cool (and really short, for all you with ADHD, like me) post about how goosebumps are evidence of evolution:

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/vestigial-organ%e2%80%94goosebumps/


In other news, LiveScience had a really cool article about the four winged dinosaur:

http://www.livescience.com/animals/dinosaur-birds-glided-trees-100125.html

And PloS Biology published a really cool article that I will be blogging on shortly about evolutionary robotics:
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000292

The Panda's Thumb blog linked to that article through a post titled "It is still a robot" (lol).

After All These Years... Proof!