I consider myself an infant when it comes to my philosophical stature, but I continue to find it extremely fascinating. This semester I enrolled in a Philosophy of Religion class because it was obviously a topic that interested me and, to be honest, I wanted to refine my arguments so that I could shame my theistic friends for their beliefs. I felt that religious belief was totally irrational and unreasonable; you could say that I entered the class an unfriendly atheist. What I have taken from the class however has been surprising.
William L. Rowe is one of the authors of the textbook we are using in that class. He is a philosopher and atheist and is a professor emeritus at Purdue University. There is an article of his in the book that discusses a few forms of atheism. Rowe points out that there are three ways that an atheist may view the theist. First, “the atheist may believe that no one is rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists.” This he calls “unfriendly atheism.” Second, “the atheist may hold no belief concerning whether any theist is or isn’t rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists.” This he calls “indifferent atheism.” And last, “the atheist may believe that some theists are rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists.” This he calls “friendly atheism.”
To clarify, it may be good to point out that Rowe does not say that the friendly atheist accepts the theistic belief as true, but merely that the theist is not irrational in his or her beliefs. It may also be good to point out that he is discussing the rationality of religious belief and not the reasonableness of theistic belief. A distinction can be seen in an example: an individual may rack up tons of debt because he/she is planning on winning the lottery to pay it off. Yes these thoughts may in the strictest sense of the word be rational, but they are certainly not reasonable.
But here is where it becomes a little tricky. For in this case, both parties are privy to the same information yet they come to different conclusions. Can both be rationally held? Or must one be irrational by necessity? Rowe believes the former. Another author in a separate article in the book uses an example in science. Can two researchers be studying the same scientific question and come to separate conclusions and both be rational in their decisions? It seems that they can.
Rowe then goes on, “What sort of grounds might a theist have for believing that God exists? Well, he might endeavor to justify his belief by appealing to one or more of the traditional arguments: Ontological, Cosmological, Teleological, Moral, etc. Second, he might appeal to certain aspects of religious experience… Third, he might try to justify theism as a plausible theory in terms of which we can account for a variety of phenomena.”
Again, it is irrelevant whether or not you believe these arguments to be true, when considering their rationality. Rowe believes that the arguments put forth by theists are false, but he also thinks the arguments can be rationally held by the believer. He would therefore consider himself a friendly atheist, and I am inclined to agree with him at this point. I am still an atheist, but I no longer look at all religious people as morons. Hopefully I didn’t slaughter Rowe’s argument too much in my interpretation. But anyway, I figured I would toss this out to all of you to see what your thoughts were on the matter.
How do you view religious belief? If you are atheist, are you friendly or unfriendly?
I’m a friendly theist.
Me too. As I say below, it is hard to give a serious read to Aristotle and Aquinas and not be a friendly atheist. Similarly, one cannot read Nietzsche and other thoughtful atheists without being a friendly theist.
I see no argument here of how anyone could rationally believe that a god exists. Any argument I have seen for god I can disprove with simple logic, how can logic be different for different people?
Great post, Tyson. This is, I think, a worthwhile discussion for SHAFTers.
Logan – I’ll take you up on your challenge. Please refute the cosmological argument with “simple logic”.
I cannot help but note the incredible hubris in thinking you have mastered “simple logic” in a way that some of the greatest philosophers in history have not. Keep in mind, Aristotle made a cosmological argument, and he is the one who established logic as a discipline!
Rowe’s is an atheist, but he thinks the cosmological argument is deductively valid. (For a bit of “simple logic” – the question of validity is different from the question of truth. An argument is valid if the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises, without paying attention to the truth or falsity of the premises). So do you think the argument is invalid, Logan? If so, why? Or, rather, do you think it is valid but unsound (its premises are not all true).
The soundness of the cosmological argument really depends upon is the truth of a principle of causality (sometimes known as the Principle of Sufficient Reason or PSR). In Aquinas’ argument, the PSR could be stated as ‘that what does not have existence on its own must have a cause’. On Rowe’s view, depending on how you construe this principle of causality, the argument works or does not work. Rowe rightly recognizes that it is rational to believe certain versions of the PSR (even if he happens to not).
Hume is typically credited with “doing away with” the PSR. He thinks you can conceive of something simply appearing, without a cause (that I can think of an object without conceiving of its cause). It is worth noting that he thinks we must assume the PSR for our day to day living, but he denies it is really true. But can we really conceive of something appearing without a cause? Hume, I think, conflates “imagining” and “conceiving” here. Take this example: suppose you are standing on the Quad with nothing in front of you and then – pop! – there is a car in front of you that came “from nowhere”. Can you imagine that? I suppose. But can you conceive of it? Well, how will you respond to this suddenly appearing car? Will you say, “Gee, Hume was right, there are effects without any necessary connection to a cause.” Or will you say, “Where did that freaking car come from?” (that is, in conceiving of the event you will immediately move to their being some cause for its appearance).
I frankly think that anyone who has read much philosophy at all is a friendly atheist. It is hard, after actually reading Augustine, Aristotle, Aquinas, and others , to come away thinking “What a bunch of irrational morons.” Sadly, the popular prophets of unfriendly “new” atheism (say, Dawkins) are embarrassingly inept in the field of philosophy. Even philosophers like Dennett are frankly ignorant of the historical arguments. Thoughtful atheistic philosophers that I know admit as much. Of course, none of this means you have to be a theist. It just means it is foolish to think that arguments for theism are simply idiotic and capable of being upended by “simple logic.”
I think the reason these debates have lasted for hundreds of years is because both sides make very valid, rational arguments. If it really was that “simple” then I would think this would be a nonissue today.
“I cannot help but note the incredible hubris in thinking you have mastered “simple logic” in a way that some of the greatest philosophers in history have not. Keep in mind, Aristotle made a cosmological argument, and he is the one who established logic as a discipline! ”
Simply wrong. Knowledge, including mathematical knowledge, is cumulative, and it is easier to learn than to create. Everyone who’s gone through a chapter about Boolean algebra in a math book knows more about logic than Aristotle, and everyone who’s gone taken a class on mathematical logic knows orders of magnitude more. The fact that most of them wouldn’t have the wit to create it is irrelevant.
“It is hard, after actually reading Augustine, Aristotle, Aquinas, and others , to come away thinking ‘What a bunch of irrational morons.’”
Rationality is not the same than intelligence, so this is simply a straw man. It is very easy to come away from reading them thinking that they lacked basic knowledge about the natural world that even a child has today, that they trusted their intuition in areas where we know that human intuitions aren’t trustworthy (if you toss a ball into the air and ask someone when it started accelerating downward, the vast majority will give you the wrong answer, and human intuitions function even worse on things like relativity or quantum mechanics.), and that they lived in a time when atheistic alternatives were virtually non-existent or actively suppressed. So we shouldn’t expect much accurate information from them about the plausibility of the god hypothesis.
For the record, given modern cognitive science, to believe in a disembodied mind is highly irrational. Those that so believe are letting their cognitive biases get in the way of an accurate evaluation of the evidence.
Cory is knee deep in chronological snobbery.
Cory –
If you (and any old Joe these days) has so surpassed Aristotle, I invite you to take up my challenge to Logan: Show that the cosmological argument can be “disproved with simple logic.”
Also, along with your chronological snobbery you have a healthy bit of historical ignorance. Have you read Aristotle or any other Greek philosophy? If so, then you know that there were plenty of materialists (Democritus, Anaxagoras, etc), around Aristotle’s time (atheist alternatives were not “non-existent”).
Cory – you think modern cognitive science has demonstrated that a disembodied mind is “irrational”? I think you have far too much confidence in what science has demonstrated. I would submit that cognitive science has not adequately explained intentional thought/language, and is quite far from doing so. In fact, I think it is in principle not possible for it to do so. So please show me the studies that have definitively demonstrated how materialism can explain intentional thought and language. You won’t be able to, of course. I’ll let one of the folks on your side say what needs to be said. Steven Pinker remarked that the hard problem of explaining how subjective conscious experience could arise out of neural computation is a problem that “no one knows what a solution might look like” and that “everyone agrees that the hard problem remains a mystery.” I once read Dawkins similarly remark that consciousness and morality remain deep mysteries. When you are saying things more over-heated than the the zealously over-confident leaders of modern atheism, it is time to dial down your claims.
I have suggested this book many times to atheists – In Defense of the Soul by Ric Machuga. It is accessible (you don’t have to be a philosophy major to understand it), but offers a thoughtful argument for why an immaterial mind is necessary (even in light of modern cognitive science). I have offered this before – I would be happy to have a reading group with SHAFT students on USU’s campus if there is interest. And if one wants to read a polemical attack on the new atheists, read Feser’s The Last Superstition.
A more general point: I am skeptical of any kind of argument that requires thinking that everyone on the other side is stupid or deluded. It would seem that on Cory’s view, anyone who believes the mind is immaterial must be one or the other (or both). Again, the pride of scientism is such an ugly thing.
Excellent post, Tyson. Having spent years as a friendly theist, I now fit Rowe’s description of ‘friendly atheist.’ Yes, many theists have a faith that is rationally justifiable, and I’m lucky to count so many of them as friends. Actually, most rationally-justified theists share my dislike of less thoughtful atheists and theists–and, as Nietzsche would say, the best indicator of someone’s capacity for friendship is their ability to make enemies.
If I disagree a little with Rowe’s description, it concerns the ambiguity of the term ‘friendly.’ For those of us who like friends who question our assumptions and challenge our thinking (even while recognizing their own limitations), then the term works. But on some level ‘friendly atheism’ sounds too much like other contemporary shibboleths like ‘tolerance’–it can easily deteriorate into ‘lets agree not to criticize each other, and just let everybody go on as before.’ There’s a very real pressure for atheists to try to portray themselves as ‘just like anyone else,’ as if to assure people that they pose no threat to common beliefs or society’s values. In my estimation, this robs secularism of what may be its greatest power–its ability to critique even those values and ideas that seem most foundational. Yes, many theists are rationally justified in their beliefs–but to qualify as each others’ friends, both theists and non-theists shouldn’t diminish the threat each other pose to the others’ worldview.
You make a very good point, and perhaps I should have mentioned that more in the article. Thanks for pointing that out!
Cory,
I am a rare commenter and a theist (Creedal Christian).
Your suggestion that anyone having taken (and understood) a modern mathematics class (e.g., Boolean Logic) has surpassed Aristotle in logic ability. This is just untrue. I am a physicist and make a living with my mathematics. The abilities of ancient Greek mathematicians is often quite stunning (Archimedes, in particular). Certainly we have improved and polished our understanding of nature and the scientific process, but we have also gained insight into the limits of logic and mathematics. The obvious limit of mathematical logic in determining truth has been identified by Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness theorems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems). First, a system of logic beginning with consistent axioms and used to develop theorems about a set of objects (numbers) cannot prove the truth of all relations of the objects in the set. That is, some truths about the objects cannot be proven. Second, this system cannot prove is self-consistency.
Thus, even mathematicians must have an element of humility in their world view.
Another stunning revelation to me is made in Bernard Lonergan’s book “An Introductory Guide to Insight”. He demonstrates that mathematical proofs are not really proofs of truth, because they inevitably require a leap of intuitive insight to establish the proof. For example, Zeno’s Paradox, of the arrow that never reaches its target because Zeno mentally infinitely divides the distance into “1/2″ segments. Or mathematically, add a series of numbers where each number is sequentially half of the previous number so the distance to the target is
D = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + … on to infinity.
Zeno’s logic fails by stating that adding an infinite number of numbers is necessarily infinite (i.e., the arrow never arrives at the target). However, can we have a modern mathematical pride because we can prove that some infinite series converge to a finite number? (By the way Archimedes developed geometrical methods to demonstrate the convergence of a sum of increasingly smaller numbers.) The convergence of Zeno’s series is demonstrated by the common ratio of successive terms (1/2). One takes the common ratio and multiplies the whole series and subtracts that series from the original series.
D = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + …
1/2 D = 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + …
Subtracting the two leaves only the first term of the original series, 1/2:
D – 1/2 D = 1/2
or
1/2 D = 1/2
or
D = 1
Thus, the infinite series converges to 1.
This is a logical proof, but Lonergan identifies that we have not really multiplied every term in the infinite series by 1/2 or subtracted the two series. Rather, we have made leaps of unprovable insight that our multiplication and subtractions of every term in the infinite series obeys what our intuition tells us, that the multiplied series contains every term of the original series but the first and the subtraction leaves only the first term of the original series. These are really steps of insight that we have NOT demonstrated as logical truth.
Stunning! Lonergan tells us that we mathematicians depend on our intuition into the nature of numbers and the nature of nature to take even the simplest of logical steps of mathematical proof.
Thus, even a brilliant modern mathematician requires a hint of humility.
Cory states “For the record, given modern cognitive science, to believe in a disembodied mind is highly irrational. Those that so believe are letting their cognitive biases get in the way of an accurate evaluation of the evidence.”
If the simplest mathematical proofs contain intuitive “cognitive biases” then perhaps we can all embrace humility as we move to more difficult discussions about ultimate reality. Let’s have kind, rational, reasonable, and humble discussions.
I classify myself as a friendly theist. AND I hope I have more in common with the friendly atheist (Dalai Lama) than with the angry theist (Westboro Baptists).
Several times on this blog I have recommended Predicate Theology to encourage the good atheist. I do so again:
http://being.publicradio.org/programs/skirball/schulweis-predicatetheology.shtml
While it is unarguable that many seek out faith in gods or transcendent beliefs from entirely virtuous inclinations, many times that faith afterward is proclaimed true and brought to my doorstep but barred from examination, and the friendliness of my atheism ends where the blunt stare of an iron-clad ideologue begins.
“My way or the highway,” and “It’s true because I say it’s true,” are not acceptable centerpieces for a table of friendly conversation, nor are quietly inferred personal attacks on my character. Unquestioning religious people often choose to exterminate skepticism by blanketing the entirety of mankind’s alternate theories in a smog of evil, vanity or devilish cunning (none more effectively than our favorite local regime). To be fair, so do some atheists, with a murky cloud of general accusations of scientific illiteracy (none better than the playfully condescending Richard Dawkins).
For some of those who are religious, it appears not unreasonable to deny all possibility of argument, since the value which divine or eternal righteousness presents should not be risked to the despotic worldly concerns of the other side. The danger to a sheep-like flock presented by Earthly resistance to revelation, whether reasonable or not, is often proselytized as an advertisement of darkness – such as the voice of Satanic or otherwise evil forces. When it’s quietly inferred that I’m one of Satan’s minions, and that my input has no value, and that I may as well tie my feet behind my head and roll myself down an empty elevator shaft as continue trying to speak, I feel no need to remain a “Friendly” atheist, but instead to say, “Goodbye,” shut the door and go back to watching the Simpsons.
To be fair, in the case of some supremely lofty Atheists, any and all religious or transcendent claims are assumed to be automatically irrational and indefensible. However, they state this claim on equally crumbly grounds of “mechanical materialism,” which has its own philosophical faults, as Professor Kleiner is apt to point out. Either way, the logic of our arguments is not as crucial as the quality of our conversation. When someone discards arguments without hearing them, or makes underlying assumptions about their own supreme correctness, the case is closed, the inquiry is over, and the process of thoughtful development is flushed – and we find ourselves in a big stupid argument rather than a friendly conversation.
Whether one is a Mormon, a Buddhist, a Hindu, an Atheist or anything else, to stand entirely convinced of that position is to declare war against change, and so plug the ears, close the doors and lock the windows. Such behavior begs for a sense of bitterness from anyone with the testicular fortitude to risk invalidation of their ideas through research and proper discussion. Frankly, I don’t feel the need to remain friendly when someone refuses to hear my point of view, friendly though it may be. A person who remains utterly convinced without hearing any opposing viewpoints is either blind or lame, and an organization which encourages its adherents to avoid research must be hiding some suffocating untruth.
Those whose ears are closed have nothing to give to the conversation; those who stand up and shout without listening might as well be told (in as friendly a way as possible, of course) to sit down and shut the hell up; and none of the rest of us have any requirement to buy them chocolates and rub their feet.
So when we discuss the problem of public relations in favor of the “Friendly Atheists” who respect opposing ideas while at once maintaining the separate position, we also must consider the value of the “Unfriendly,” on either side who do not for a moment respect the hee-hawing of iron-clad imperialists who assume their ideas to be unquestionable truth, and leave our common goals of understanding in the dust.
Alex,
I agree that arrogant truth claims are irritating. I assume that there is an ‘ultimate truth’ underlying reality but I always experience it existentially (i.e., with a broad use of Kant’s view that we never observe ‘the thing in itself’). I require humility when I discuss ‘truth’ with others. I ‘see through a glass dimly’ (Paul of Tarsus).
However, this is where I agree with you most: “the logic of our arguments is not as crucial as the quality of our conversation.” Hear, hear! My vision of truth has more to do with the quality of my conversation with others than the correctness of my dogma. I won’t diminish my dogma to meaninglessness, but the quality relations is the proof of a dogma’s value. Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” switched on the light bulb of ‘good relation as truth’ for me. I still consider “I-Thou” to be the best response to Nietzsche’s damnation of ‘the will to truth’ and the canonization of ‘the will to power’.
While I identify Right Being as more important than Right Thinking, I don’t dismiss epistemology completely. After all, I am a scientist.