No, Atheists Needn't Prove There’s No God
Pragmatic epistemology and playing the odds with rational generalizations
Why does atheism confuse theists and atheists alike?
Perhaps the confusion is because atheism and irreligiosity in general used to be beyond the pale. But then came the Scientific Revolution when the tides turned, and now theistic statements are no longer regarded as self-evident in educated parts of the world.
Thus, the connotations of “atheism” have changed, which means theists and atheists may be talking past each other or switching between the pre- and post-scientific conceptions. Even if you’re clear on the word’s present dictionary definition, that doesn’t mean everyone agrees on atheism’s epistemological context.
Some historical context of atheism
Even in the ancient world, atheism wasn’t conceived of just as disbelief in the existence of the home deities since the gods were mascots for the society’s brand or ethos. To be skeptical of the gods was akin to being antisocial or traitorous. Plus, the gods weren’t thought of as existing as a matter of objective fact because the contemporary sense of “objective fact” prevailed only after the Scientific Revolution. (Mind you, the materialistic idea of such a fact was foreshadowed in certain ancient Greek and Indian philosophical schools.)
In any case, to speak of objects in the modern sense is to presuppose secularism. Properly speaking, objects are godless in that they’re part of nature. There may be abstract objects such as numbers, but to speak of an “object” that’s involved in a miraculous, supernatural event would be self-contradictory since positing an object is a way of specifying how something works. Ghosts, for example, aren’t objects exactly, which is why the New Testament’s notion of a “spiritual body” sounds oxymoronic to modern ears.
Moreover, objectivity goes together with objects in that objectivity is supposed to be a form of rational neutrality so that when you’re being objective, you’re setting aside your biases and preferences and letting the facts speak for themselves.
Thus, to assume that God exists as an objective fact is to contradict yourself. In the twenty-first century, we assume that stars, rocks, and trees exist physically as objective facts because we have in mind the idea of a self-organizing universe of such things. That’s precisely the universe that’s subject to scientific explanation, and the latter explanatory mode is godless in eschewing appeals to magic and miracles.
Scientists never explain something by positing a miracle, a supernatural dimension, or the activity of a deity because scientists are in the business of talking about only what they can, in theory, fully control with technological applications of their models. And the monotheist’s God is supposed to transcend nature and the power-hungry mode of scientific (Promethean or “Satanic”) investigation.
But let’s move on to a theistic confusion about the nature of atheism.
Proof, probability, and pragmatic epistemology
Theists or so-called agnostics like to say that atheists are foolish for not being agnostic since there’s no way to prove God’s nonexistence. Atheists would have to be omniscient to know there’s no God, which is impossible, so atheists should say instead that they don’t know whether there’s a god.
The theist’s confusion here is that she mixes up her methods. Proof is for games or sports like mathematics or basketball, in which the rules are stipulated so inferences proceed by pure logic in an artificial space, or the players’ moves are judged as legal or not on the court or playing field. A formal system like mathematics evokes a domain of discourse and the mathematician stipulates not the existence of what’s being modelled but the subject’s worthiness of being conceptualized. This stipulation is like the suspension of disbelief when you entertain a fictional story as you’re reading or watching it.
As for figuring out what really exists, neither armchair reasoning nor deductive logic, conceptual analysis, or any other formal procedure is decisive. Neither does even direct observation prove that something’s real since just because you observe something doesn’t mean you’ve correctly identified it. Perceiving something isn’t the same as having the right conceptual category in your head. You can see something and not know what you’re seeing.
Moreover, to paraphrase what Rene Descartes showed with his skepticism about perception, we can feel certain we’re seeing a tree, yet we can’t discount the possibility that we’re only brains in a vat or that we’re trapped in a computer simulation.
Thus, the question of what exists in nature isn’t like the question of whether Harry Potter wins at the end of the story. The latter is stipulated by the author, while the former isn’t up to us. To know what exists is to wrap our minds around what the universe has to offer. We do that by humanizing what’s inhuman, which is of course a stretch for us. We say we “understand” or have an “overview” of the facts, but those are only figures of speech.
Our brain perceives a tree, and the thought of a tree pops up as our way of recognizing what’s out there. But what’s the relation between the tree and the thought? Certainly, the one isn’t physically like the other, and there’s no literal agreement between them, contrary to the so-called correspondence theory of truth. No one reaches down from the clouds and gives you a gold star for having the right concept of trees.
The best explanation of truth, rather, is that our thoughts are neural tools that help us cope with the environment. The concept of trees is to trees as the shoebox is to a pair of shoes. We organize our experience of the world as a condition of choosing how to respond to stimuli.
It therefore makes no sense to say that we’ve proven even the existence of trees, let alone the nonexistence of gods. Proof is irrelevant here because perception in an organism’s interaction with its environment isn’t a game. We don’t operate on a gameboard when we’re looking at a tree in the forest. Instead, we jury-rig a solution to the problem of surviving in a world that creates and destroys living things largely by the luck of a mindless draw. We take what evolution gave us and we think about the world in a useful way; we put our human stamp on the inhuman, natural facts.
As we logically reconstruct this pragmatic aspect of life, what we can say is that the existence of trees is probable, not strictly speaking proven. And what that means is that our conceptual model of trees works. We can induce that there are trees, confidently drawing that generalization because the idea of trees has worked so well that it’s become conventional. Only crazy people would be hyperskeptical about the existence of trees. Still, no one’s proved that there are trees. We could all be wrong, or we might have misunderstood the nature of knowledge or what our thoughts are really for. So at best and as we humans think of them, the existence of trees is highly probable.
And if you want to know what else is probable, you turn to the sciences since scientists have, of course, made a science out of testing observations.
Intuitions and modern skepticism
But what about all the hypotheses that scientists haven’t tested? Or what about the possibilities that aren’t even proper subjects of experimentation such as the myriad paranormal scenarios? Should we confess that we must be agnostic about them because no one knows anything for sure about what’s real?
The answer should draw on the pragmatism that’s inherent in critical thinking. Just as it would be crazy to wonder whether there are really trees, it would be counterproductive to suspect that all paranormal possibilities are actual or that all conspiracy theories are true. The problem is purely practical since our time in life is limited, as is our brain power, our attention span, and our set of personal interests. Yet the bizarre possible interpretations of experience are endless, thanks to our free-floating powers of imagination. Thus, we must manage our cognitive resources and play the odds.
True, we may not ever prove that all conspiracy theories are false since there are more weird possibilities than anyone could hope to disprove in a lifetime. But that doesn’t mean we should be open-minded about them or that we should give fifty-fifty odds to whether Bigfoot, fairies, and aliens are hiding in the woods. That kind of neutrality or “agnosticism” would be like false modesty.
No, we assign probabilities based on how farfetched a possibility is, relative to what we think we’re already justified in deeming probable. There’s a holistic aspect to our web of beliefs, which is why the question of atheism has different epistemic statuses in the ancient and the modern, science-centered worlds. Many centuries ago, the gods were taken for granted because most ancient societies were anthropocentric, which means the ancients often trusted their intuitions and were naïve in projecting their prejudices or “traditions” onto the nonhuman world.
The Copernican Revolution changed all of that. Intuitions now are suspect unless you’re in something like a therapy session. If it feels right, and we’re talking about what the facts are rather than what you feel you should be doing about them, that’s almost a sufficient reason to doubt the intuited possibility. At this late-modern stage of history we know how misleading intuitions can be.
Our intuitions and gut reactions might be genetically determined by-products of our species’ evolution or they could be hangovers of patriarchy, egoism, parental indoctrination, or corporate propaganda. Intuitions may comfort us or keep us sane, but that doesn’t mean they’re realistic. The natural world doesn’t have to “care” whether we’re happy or sane.
Induction and natural human thinking
In any case, some conspiracy theories and paranormal hypotheses have been disproved, and social psychologists can explain how enthusiasts get caught up in tribal derangements. We can rationally suspect that some paranormal scenarios are real, but we also have some reason to think the proponents of other such scenarios might be misled.
Thus, we all apply something like a rudimentary version of Bayes’ Theorem in thinking about how seriously we should take a possibility. We think about an event’s probability based on what we know about conditions related to the event. If Bigfoot were real, what else would have to be the case, and what do we know about those related conditions? In general, we discount wild conspiracy theories because conventional society isn’t as weird as we’d expect it to be if all farfetched conspiracies were true.
Ultimately, as David Hume said, we appeal to what we take for granted in our daily experience, which is why mundane explanations are always more rational than miracle claims: rationality is just a mental process of naturalizing events. To understand is to naturalize, to think in terms of causes and specific reasons or functions. For a person’s daily experience to be supernatural and miraculous, she’d need to have renounced reason and mental modelling, in which case her decisions would be irrational or random. That’s the sort of person who ends up in a mental hospital.
If we’re getting by in life, making some rational choices based on useful classifications of what we’re encountering in the environment, we’re in the naturalization business, which is to say we’re thinking like protoscientists. We’re not positing miracles and paranormal phenomena at every turn. We’re generalizing and drawing inferences, tentatively broadening our conceptual horizons without making wild leaps or getting caught up in our creative imagination.
We also learn to be at least somewhat self-critical since just as we discover that the environment is independent of our whims, we hardly know everything there is to know about ourselves. In particular, the inner working of our brain is a colossal mystery to us. We might also suspect we have certain racist, sexist, or other cultural biases, so we factor them into our assessments.
This is ordinary, informal rationality, yet it’s what makes humans highly intelligent mammals. Assuming our cognitive faculties are working fine, and we haven’t been brainwashed as children or drawn into a bizarre cult that hides from the rest of the world to maintain its delusions, we discount innumerable miraculous possibilities every single minute we rationally cope with life. Whenever you say to yourself, “I need to bring an umbrella because it’s going to rain” or “I need to fill up the gas tank because it’s running low,” you’re thinking in terms of mechanisms, not miracles.
The experience of sane people is therefore bound to be mostly naturalistic rather than chaotic. That experience is our cognitive home base, as it were, the core of our mental identity which we extend in our holistic inferences about novel matters. If you’ve never crossed a particular bridge, you’ll assume it works like the bridges you have crossed, and you’ll adjust that assumption only as additional evidence warrants. We take these risks with our inductive generalizations, betting that the future will be like the past and that our home base of experience can operate further afield.
Intellectual elites and naïve folks
Now, suppose that an atheist reasons that a personal creator of the universe is highly unlikely because no one’s ever seen a person create something from nothing, nor has anyone seen a person living without a brain or a body. Would such an atheist have fallaciously overextended her knowledge, leaping to a false sense of certainty? It seems there would be no such fallacy here. Just as we’re not mindlessly agnostic about all unknowns, but we daily play the odds by extending our home base of experience with intellectual integrity, we can do so in responding to extreme, philosophical, or cosmological questions.
As Richard Dawkins pointed out, even religious people draw these antireligious inferences about all other religions. Thus, the question is whether the exception they make with their favoured religion is arbitrary or intellectually responsible. And here we should observe that religions are obviously still part of most people’s home experience. From a young age, most of us are in fact brought up in our country’s religion. We still take our religion for granted, based on intuitions that channel the core of our identity, just like the majority did in the ancient world.
In addition, then, to the historical divide between pre- and post-scientific periods, we must distinguish sociologically between the intellectual elites and the less reflective masses. Again, all humans are especially reflective compared to birds, reptiles, and insects. But some classes of humans are exceptionally, rigorously rational — perhaps even self-destructively so — compared to others, and this was true in the ancient world too.
This means we can ask two separate questions about whether theism is a rational induction, depending on whether we’re talking about extending the experience of the intellectual elites or of the less reflective, more naïve social classes. The elites in the ancient world were likely not as simplistic in their religious thinking as the illiterate peasants.
Not only were the elites educated in the philosophy of their day, but they were faced with political decisions that called for Machiavellian detachment and even sociopathic tendencies. They would have subscribed to their civilization’s religion more out of political expediency than saintly deference to a creed. And that expediency wasn’t just selfish but was a matter of maintaining the social order. Religious rituals and pieties were the rules of the road for the ancients before the rise of science-based secularism.
We have a sense that the same dynamic holds in our contemporary religions, judging from the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandals, the televangelist’s petty thievery and sex scandals, and the Republican Party’s siding not with Christian principles but with gross Trumpian authoritarianism. Time and again, the lay religious person is ten times as earnest in her faith and practices as the priest who knows too much theology to keep the faith. And such cynicism should be abundant in the Muslim world, as the leaders of Islam work with totalitarian regimes that use oil wealth to enrich themselves and degrade Muslim women.
Obviously, the crusades, inquisitions, witch trials, and pogroms had nothing to do with Jesus-based spirituality, just as Islamist terrorism is an ungodly military tactic. The religious elites have something other than God on their mind, such as the politics of running a religious institution or conducting a guerrilla war to preserve patriarchal privileges against the threat of modernization.
The choice between humanizing nature and naturalizing us
Still, theological assertions will seem natural to the masses, but not to intellectual elites. This was true in the ancient world and it’s even more clearly true in today’s science-centered, self-consciously secular one.
For this reason, the rich, urban masses in postindustrial societies are more likely to think of themselves vaguely as spiritual seekers than as committed members of an organized religion. They have a harder time rationalizing the persistence of religious traditions because there’s cognitive dissonance in going back and forth between such anachronisms and the secular norms of shopping at the mall, voting for a politician, or enjoying all the benefits of technoscientific progress.
But just because the less well-informed or more dependent religionist may infer that God’s existence is probable because such thinking has come naturally to her from a young age, based on her religious upbringing, doesn’t mean the more rationally independent elite errs in dismissing that tradition as parochial. Religious inductions and institutions work as old ways of stabilizing societies, but that has no bearing on whether theological models reconcile us with nature’s palpable indifference to the limits of human intuition.
A universe as old and as large as the one we moderns know we find ourselves in is inherently alien to anything that raw evolution and archaic religious prejudices enable us to understand. These naïve projections would have us humanize nature, whereas we must naturalize or dehumanize ourselves to grasp the scope of nature’s alienness.
I think you misunderstand the problem here. Or maybe I misunderstand you :) Theism is the same idea as that we are living in a simulated universe. A simulated universe has a programmer or sysadmin that from the inside view, appears as omnipotent and omniscient. A creator. Which is exactly why The Matrix was full of religious references. They understood the strong parallels.
This creator is not an object inside the simulation, but is something outside from it, behind it. Therefore, the methods of empiricism fail here, as they only work inside the simulation. You don't look for the creator inside the simulation with a looking glass.
In fact, your first step is not even talking about the creator as by default you know nothing about it. The first step is to talk about whether this looks like a simulation? If yes, then it *logically* implies am omnipotent, omniscient (from the inside view) creator.
So one talks about the characteristics of the universe first. Einstein first tried general relativity with the inductive, empirical method, because he too believed that is how good science worked. Wrote the Entwurf and it absolutely failed. So he reluctantly went for the deductive method, made a number of mathemathical assumptions and ask which would be the simplest possible laws of nature that follow from it. And it worked.
Isn't it strange? It is not supposed to work, induction is supposed to work. This really looks like our universe runs on math i.e. software code and he just managed to reverse-engineer a part of it. And if true, it implies a creator.
So don't even jump directly to talking about god either way. If people talk about something outside the universe, and offer some kind of proof, then you can't reject it by saying it cannot be detected with in-universe methods.
Shakespeare's characters cannot find Shakespeare empiricially. This in itself does not mean Shakespeare's existence is not something one can talk about. The characters might notice that their world is surprisingly story-like.
Talk about the universe. Does it look natural? As in, randomly happening?