Atheism

« difficult to find a plausible explanation in something other than the activity of an intelligent being.

So, although thegrowth of the natural sciences did much to remove human dependence on the gods to explain events within nature,a foothold in ultimate explanations still remained; and certain phenomena in nature, particularly the apparent designin plants and animals, continued to suggest an intelligent being exercising a causal influence within nature.

Anattack on the need and possibility of ultimate explanations was left to philosophers, particularly to Hume (§6) and Kant (§8) , although the argument from design received its most devastating blow from the work of Darwin and Wallace in the nineteenth century.

It is not surprising, therefore, that atheism has flourished in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries, being advocated by such influential thinkers as Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Russell andSartre. 3 Justification of atheism: insufficiency of proofs of the existence of God As noted above, this entry will focus primarily on the reasons given in support of atheism in the narrow sense, theview that the God of traditional Western theology does not exist.

If atheism in the narrow sense is to be establishedor shown to be probably true, two different sorts of reasons need to be given.

First, one must give reasons thatwould be sufficient to justify disbelief in God if they constituted the only reasons we have that bear on the questionof God's existence.

Second, one must refute or show the insufficiency of reasons that have been given to justifybelief in God.

The necessity of the second undertaking is due to the possibility that reasons in support of a claimmay outweigh reasons against the claim.

The necessity of the first undertaking is due to the general principle thatin the absence of good reasons in support of a claim the proper response is suspension of belief rather thandisbelief.

However, if we were to have sufficient reason to believe that the God of traditional Western theology (ifhe existed) would make available to us clear evidence of his existence, we would be entitled to adopt atheism onceit had been shown that the reasons given in support of theism are inadequate.

But it has been argued that if Godmade it altogether clear that he exists we would not be cognitively free in relation to him - that is, we would not beindependent autonomous persons free to make our way in the world with or without God.

Since it is difficult to knowthat this is not so, and difficult to know that God's purpose for us would not involve our being cognitively free inrelation to him, we cannot be confident that the absence of sufficient reasons to believe in God warrants disbelief inGod rather than suspension of belief.

Thus the justification of atheism requires reasons in support of atheism as wellas refutation of purported sufficient reasons in support of theism.

One popular argument for theism relies on theclaim that belief in some sort of deity is universal among humans.

What better explanation of this fact than thattheism is true and God has implanted some recognition of himself, however poorly grasped, in the peoples of theworld? Against this argument there are two decisive objections.

First, if the argument supports anything, it moredirectly supports polytheism than theism, for the peoples of the world tend to believe in many distinct deities ratherthan the single supernatural, perfectly good, all-powerful, all-knowing being of traditional theism.

Second, there areplausible naturalistic explanations of the near universal belief in some deity or other.

For example, it has beenargued that before our ancestors gained any significant control over nature - or at least an understanding of itsworkings - they personified the forces of nature, made gods of them, and thus sought to control nature by prayingto the gods.

Such naturalistic explanations of the near universal belief in gods add to the implausibility of using thisbelief as support for the existence of the theistic god.

In addition to such popular arguments, there are the moreserious arguments advanced by philosophers and theologians.

The most important of these are the argument fromthe idea of God, the argument from the existence of the world, the argument from the existence of a worldsupportive of life and consciousness, the argument from objective moral values and the argument from religiousexperience.

The argument from the idea of God as a being exhibiting every perfection in the highest possible degree(the ontological argument) has been found wanting by most philosophers.

In its place, a modal version has beenadvanced that rests on the premise that it is logically possible that a being having all perfections in the highestdegree exists in every possible world.

But if it is logically possible that there is at least one possible world in whichevery being has some minor defect, the premise of the modal version is false.

So although the argument is valid,there is no good reason to think it is sound.

The argument from the existence of the world (the cosmologicalargument) reasons that the world is contingent; it either might or might not have existed.

Since whatever existsbut might not have existed must owe its existence to some being that brought it into existence, the world owes itsexistence to a being that produced it.

If the being who produced the world were itself contingent, then it would bepart of the world and could not be the cause of the world.

Therefore, the being who produced the world does notowe its existence to anything else; it exists necessarily.

This argument faces two difficulties.

First, if it is correct, itestablishes only a necessary cause of the contingent world.

It does not establish that the necessary cause of theworld has the properties definitive of the theistic God.

Attempts to carry out this further task have not beenparticularly successful.

Second, the argument rests on a rather strong but unsubstantiated causal principle: everycontingent thing (or collection of such things) has a cause of its existence.

The argument from the existence of aworld supportive of life and consciousness is the successor to an earlier argument from apparent design in plantsand animals (the design argument), an argument that has been seriously weakened, if not damaged beyond repair,by the naturalistic explanation based on Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection.

According to thenew argument, we know that a universe with initial conditions and laws permitting the emergence of life andconsciousness is only one of vastly many ways the universe might have been.

Had it been slightly different in anyone of ever so many ways, life and consciousness would not have been possible.

For example, had the rate ofexpansion after the Big Bang been slightly slower or slightly faster, life could not have occurred.

Thus, it isextremely improbable that life should have emerged, given the vast number of alternative ways things could havegone.

Of course, the initial conditions and order necessary for the emergence of life could have occurred randomly,but on the hypothesis of theism it is much more likely that these conditions and this order would occur.

So, giventhat they have occurred, theism is more likely than any purely naturalistic account.

This argument has meritprovided we assume that our universe is a one-time affair.

But if the present universe is only one of vastly many. »