Some thoughts about 'atheism', 'theism' and 'agnosticism'

It is common for people to describe themselves in relation to the question of the existence of God as 'atheist', 'theist' or 'agnostic'. Even before we get into the interminable debate as to whether there really is such a thing as God, I think there are a few things to be clarified in terms of how these labels are used. The following points are criticisms of what I take to be common assumptions concerning the use of the terms 'atheist', 'theist' and 'agnostic'.

'Atheist'

It is popular among self-confessed atheists to define atheism as ‘lack of belief in anything supernatural.’ This is handy for the atheist, since in the famous debate over where the burden of proof lies, it is a common argument to claim that the burden does not lie with the atheist, who has a mere lack of belief in God; rather, the burden is on the theist to give evidence for his / her positive assertion that there is a God. However, ‘lack of belief in God’ is a very bad definition of atheism, since it is true of rocks, camels and Christmas trees, which lack all beliefs, including about God. It would be an abuse of the word ‘atheism’ to refer to a rock as an atheist, so this definition clearly will not suffice. It is also insufficient for distinguishing atheists from agnostics, who also lack belief in God. Though it may suit the atheist in debate to characterize his / her position in terms of lack of belief, rather than a positive belief of the same type as theism, it is very hard to accurately do so. 'A belief that there is no God', which sounds more traditional, also sounds like a more accurate definition of 'atheism'.

'Theist'
There are so many uses of the word ‘God’ that the term is practically ambiguous. Restricting ‘theism’ to ‘Christian monotheism’ as is commonly done is too restrictive, since there exists monotheisms in many other cultures. The scale of religious conviction is a continuum, with very weak theisms positing the existence of a creating and sustaining ‘mother nature’ type force, and very strong theisms positing the existence of a single, powerful divine mind. Perhaps we might define theism as ‘belief in a creator and sustainer of the universe.’ However, this is too loose: belief in a scientific law (common to theists and non-theists alike) might well be held to fall under this definition. Should we then include creative intelligence in the definition of theism? No, since ‘intelligence’ is also ambiguous, and there are many theists who do not think of God as a giant, powerful disembodied mind (quite a crude conception), but something more abstract. 

'Agnostic'

Agnosticism, taken as an ‘I don’t know’ position, is commonly criticized as being too weak, a kind of cowardly middle-man position held by the person who lacks the conviction to commit to either atheism or theism. However, the strength of an intellectual position should not be judged on the content of the belief itself, but on the amount of assessment, deliberation and criticism that has been invested in that position, and the strength to which the belief is held. Therefore, one can be a very strong agnostic if, after deliberating long and hard and weighing up the evidence, one decides that we don’t know / can’t know enough to assent to God’s existence or reject God’s existence. It's clear that agnosticism can be as firm a positive belief about the world as atheism or theism. At the very least, an agnostic must have considered the question of God's existence, if only for a second.

'I don't care'
It is also widely held that ‘atheism’, ‘agnosticism’ and ‘theism’ (or ‘religious belief’ for the purposes of this point) exhaust the possibilities concerning intellectual attitudes about God. The question ‘are you atheist, theist or agnostic?’ implies that one must fit somewhere here, perhaps on a continuum between strong atheist and strong theist. Richard Dawkins, in 'The God Delusion', introduces a similar 7-point scale. However, this is simply false, since the three categories are not exhaustive. This is because, as argued above, agnosticism is a positive belief about the world, the agnostic having actively concluded that, based on the evidence, we simply don’t (or can’t) know if God exists or not, based on at least a shred of consideration of the question. Agnosticism does not, therefore, cover the sizeable group of people who haven’t for a minute considered the question of God at all: ‘I don’t know’ is not the same as ‘I don’t care.’ He / she who has not to any extent considered God’s existence will have no belief about God’s existence, and will have come to no conclusions; therefore, to label such a person ‘agnostic’, as is popular, would be false. This person has not joined the debate; therefore such labeling is not justified. Rather than create a new term for people who have never considered God’s existence (such as ‘I-don’t-care-ists’ or some more catchy name), it is more sensible, I think, to consider such people as located outside the continuum from atheist to theist. Therefore, the three categories ‘atheist’, ‘agnostic’ and ‘theist’ are not exhaustive, and should not be used as if they are: they describe only a sub-set of human beings.

In defence of William Lane Craig

William Lane Craig, or 'Bill' to his mates.

William Lane Craig is a Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. He is best known for his 'Christian apologetics', which has led him into combat with some of the world's most famous atheists and agnostics. However, he has become a much maligned figure in the public eye recently, and I have a few words to say in his defence.

Craig is often mischaracterized, usually by his ideological opponents, so it is necessary to take a few lines to detail what he has actually acheived in philosophy, and what sort of reputation he enjoys. Craig is an important figure in the philosophy of time (check back for more posts on this fascinating subject), where he has made notable contributions to defending ‘presentism’, a theory of time which holds that there is an objective present moment, and that past and future events do not exist. In fact, he has been important in the resurrection of this intuitive but philosophically problematic position, which appeared to have died a death around about about the 1960s. The problems associated with presentism do nothing to discredit Craig’s contribution to the theory, nor his detailed and wide-ranging critical studies of the two major theories of time, the A- and B-theories. (Presentism is a variant on the former).

As far as I am concerned, the above considerations do more than enough to anchor Craig’s position as a prominent figure in academic philosophy. However, when we move to religion, things get a little more hazy. Craig’s early approach to the philosophy of religion was a strictly academic one, and his book ‘The Kalam Cosmological Argument’ is still regarded as a leading work on that particular argument for God’s existence; so far, so good. On paper, Craig is also theologically credible, having studied under two of the most important theologians of the last 100 years - John Hick and Wolfhart Pannenberg. However, more recently, Craig has turned his attention to Christian apologetics, the defense of faith, and as such has come under fire. His ‘pastoral’ mission includes touring the Middle East with followers, writing self-help style books aimed at everyday Christians looking to defend their personal belief, and pursuing an obsessive debating schedule with just about every famous atheist and agnostic academic in existence. In aid of these aims, his promotional machine is a powerful force, pushing such debates in a manner that might be described as a little aggressive. Dawkins et al have taken pains to discredit Craig on these grounds, dismissing him as ‘a theologian’ (a term of abuse in Dawkins’ language), and ‘a professional debater.’

It’s sad that such criticisms conveniently seek to ignore Craig’s well-earned academic credentials, and the startling length of his list of publications (though quantity of work does not, alas, entail quality). Also frequently maligned is Craig’s debating style, which is sharp, sometimes rhetorical and verbally forceful; amusingly, he appears to have learned his lines well, since the content of his opening speech on anything God-related has remained identical for over 30 years (see the vast list of Craig’s videos on youtube). His opponents unfairly level the charge that Craig’s arguments take the form of logical trickery, designed to confuse and obscure to his popular but not intellectual advantage. But this is an easy criticism, and not a very clever one. The arguments Craig presents are just the standard theistic arguments for God’s existence; and the philosophical debates they raise are too lengthy and complex to properly assess here, or indeed in any public-debate environment. This is half the problem with any debate about God’s existence. We should therefore be careful not to confuse style with substance; Craig’s opponents confuse the idea that Craig is deliberately muddying the intellectual waters with obscurantism with the depth of the subject matter Craig introduces in support of his case. Granted, Craig is perhaps ill-advised to rehash one-sided arguments for God as ‘proofs’ for his case in public debates, but the problem is in this style of presentation, not the substance of the arguments themselves, about which there are often lively philosophical arguments to be had. The problem is that the chance of giving proper treatment to such debates in a public forum is slim; but the debates do exist nonetheless, and Craig has a right to raise them in his defence. In light of this, the claim of Andrew Copson, of the British Humanist Association, that Craig's arguments are 'easily refuted' outside public debate is particularly laughable. Copson needs to read some Plantinga.

I think, then, that I would generally defend WLC from his critics. He certainly has some crazy ideas, most often religious, which I could never accept, nor defend - his admission of faith over reason is worrying, as is his bold but unacceptable defense of certain biblical events. But these are propounded in the domain of Christian apologetics, which calls for crazy ideas to defend its often crazy claims! By contrast, in the domain of philosophy proper, Craig deserves respect, and this should also be shown in response to the philosophical arguments he calls upon in debate. Respect for an argument entails fairly engaging in the debate surrounding it, and not writing it off as nonsense before even properly considering it. Far from being a ‘professional debater’ or ‘crackpot theologian’, Craig is a distinguished academic philosopher, and this should not be forgotten in spite of his many unpalatable religious views, or his forthright debating style. Certainly, his philosophy is much more highly regarded by the philosophical community in general than the 'philosophy' of his most famous counterpart, Richard Dawkins; I'd probably echo the letter to Dawkins by philosopher of religion Daniel Came concerning the proposed debate between the two.

The Ontological Argument for God's existence

Nobody's claiming the argument proves THIS...

Ontological arguments seek to prove the existence of God simply by armchair reasoning - by thinking through concepts logically rather than venturing out into the world to find material evidence. Ontological arguments usually start from a definition, from which the existence of the entity logically follows. Here is one example:

1. By definition, God is a supremely great existent being
2. Therefore, God exists.

The argument is valid (see previous post). However, is it convincing? No. This is because only somebody who is independently prepared to admit the conclusion (2) will accept the premise (1). Therefore, we would say that the argument is ‘circular’, since the acceptability of the premise depends on whether we already believe the conclusion. Or rather, the argument assumes its own conclusion. Though valid, the argument doesn’t prove anything (though this guy might disagree).

Consider a more sophisticated version, attributed to St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033 - 1109):

1. God is the greatest conceivable being
2. If something is the greatest conceivable being, it possesses all great-making properties
3. A great-making property is a property that, if had, makes a being greater
4. Existence is a great-making property
5. Therefore, the greatest conceivable being possesses the property of existence
6. Therefore, God possesses the property of existence
7. Therefore, God exists

This new argument is valid. But is it sound, and therefore convincing to any degree? Though it is thought fashionable these days (mostly to people who haven’t studied any philosophy) to simply declare this argument absurd and walk away, this isn’t a rationally acceptable thing to do - reasons must be given for why an argument is unsound before we reject it.

The problem is that this argument cannot so obviously be declared false as the first one, since it is not so obviously circular. It’s all very well to assert ‘you can never define something into existence’, but this isn’t really pointing out a specific flaw in the argument, which is a harder task than many think. Whether this version of the Ontological Argument is good or not, it poses an interesting logical problem nonetheless, and has premises to which even the atheist can agree. Unfortunately, accepting the conclusion renders atheism incoherent.

I love ontological arguments - if you give them a chance (which you should), they are endlessly fascinating. More to come on this topic.

What philosophers think

A philosophical variant of Michaelangelo's 'The Creation of Adam.'

Philpapers.org conducted a survey a few years ago into the views of contemporary academic philosophers on a range of issues. The survey can be found here: http://philpapers.org/surveys/. In amongst the jargon, there are interesting findings to be had.

The survey shows that 72.8% of philosophers (faculty members, sample of nearly 1000) ‘accept or lean towards’ atheism, whilst only 14.6% ‘accept or lean towards‘ theism, the view that there exists a creator and sustainer of the universe. 12.5% were undecided.

What I find most interesting about the study is the correlative data - that is, taking views on a particular area and seeing how they correlate with views on a different area. You might expect, since ‘materialism’ these days is often used (misleadingly) as a synonym for ‘atheism’, that the vast majority of atheist philosophers are physicalists/materialists (see post - The Explanatory Gap). The survey shows this to be false. 67.9% of atheist philosophers call themselves physicalists, which leaves almost 20% who describe themselves as ‘non-physicalists.‘ (12% remained undecided on the issue, or refused to commit to either category).

Perhaps even more interestingly, 22.3% of theists call themselves physicalists, and thus commit themselves to the view that all that exists is physical matter. However, this is less contradictory than we might at first think - physicalism, construed as a view about human minds and the universe we inhabit, doesn’t rule out a God existing outside the universe, or a God not ‘existing' in the ordinary spatial sense. Nevertheless, the fact that 59.7% of theists are non-physicalists does indicate a predictable sympathy between the two views. Once you admit that there is mental stuff, I suppose you are less likely to find the notion of a non-physical being such as God suspicious for reductive reasons. (To say nothing of the role of the 'soul' in Christian religious thought).

Presenting ‘majority arguments’ as conclusively supporting a particular view (i.e ‘this view is true because the majority of people think it’) is a big mistake. We cannot conclude from the fact that 72.8% of philosophers are atheists that atheism is true - majorities can be seriously wrong in their views, as history has shown. Statistics should in any case be treated with caution. Nevertheless, the fact that a vast majority of philosophers are atheists is at least suggestive. Whether we draw any further conclusions here depends on how we view philosophers in general - are they skilled investigators into the fabric of reality, or just bearded men with weird views? Sadly, and most often unfairly, they are regularly seen by the public eye as falling into the latter category.

The firing squad

Imagine the following scenario. You are put before a firing squad as punishment for a serious crime. Ten expert marksmen are lined up, each with his rifle cocked and loaded, and pointing at your head. You grit your teeth, close your eyes, and prepare as best you can to face your seemingly inevitable demise. The roar of the ten rifles explodes in your ears...

... but you’re still alive. Gingerly, you open your eyes to discover, to your amazement, that all ten expert marksmen have missed the target completely. Similarly astonished, the leader of the squad decides, in a fit of sympathy, to let you walk free.

Given time to reflect on what has happened, two options present themselves. The first would be to, quite rightly I think, demand an explanation for why the extremely unlikely scenario you just endured happened in the first place. The second would be to shrug your shoulders, think nothing more of it, and then return to your life, putting the event down to mere coincidence.

Having decided, as any rational person would, to rule out blind chance and seek to explain the scenario, we are presented with only two possibilities. One is that a million different firings all took place on the same day as yours. If the chances of ten expert marksmen all independently missing the target are one in a million, then given a million firings, we would expect one to fail. It seems that yours was the one which failed; and though you are lucky, this isn’t so surprising, since we would expect one firing to fail anyway.

The second explanation, given that yours was the only firing taking place that day, is that something suspicious is going on. Either the marksmen were all told to miss, or they were equipped with blank ammunition, or something similar. There was intention/design behind the occurrence which explains why it happened.

The firing squad story presents a direct analogy with the existence of the universe. We know from science that the physical constants needed to produce a developed universe at all are ‘fine-tuned’ - that they had to fall within an infinitesimally small range of values (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe). The very existence of a stable, developed universe such as ours is inherently unlikely. Given this widely accepted view, and since it is not rational, given the odds, to put things down to chance here (as the firing squad analogy clearly suggests), we have two main options. A million universes? Or intention/design. The first of these is the ‘multiverse’, the hypothesis that our universe is one of many universes existing in parallel. The second option is...well...suggestive of something else; something quite different.

The Explanatory Gap

Does contemplation of the Explanatory Gap suggest a God-given soul?

What is a mind? Are minds physical, or are they made out of a separate mental substance, a ‘soul’? Perhaps the way we live and the way we use language assumes the second option - that we have souls inside our heads, and that somehow, ‘I’ is a special subject, distinct from ‘my brain.’ In fact the mere phrase ‘my brain’ seems to imply that there are two things here - a brain and an owner, the person ‘within’ the brain. Thinking like this seems to fit well with everyday experience, and how we take ourselves to interact with the world. At least on the every-day level, we are dualists. 

The idea, however, that souls (perhaps God-given, if we are religious) reside within our bodies seems a little archaic on reflection. Science has taught us that a mind, at least in the context of our world, must be ‘physically realized‘ - it must arise out of physical matter. The question then arises as to how this could possibly happen. The physicalist has a quick answer - a mind just is the physical state of a brain. On this view, there is nothing else to conscious experience other than particular combinations of physical brain states.  

Physicalism is popular, and has been thrust towards the spotlight particularly recently outside philosophy, in the work of Richard Dawkins, who seems to assume that physicalism is so obviously true that we needn’t even bother debate about it. But this is too hasty - there are real questions to be raised about the nature of minds that physicalism cannot seem to account for. How can a subject possibly be in some way identical to physical matter? No matter how complex we make a physical organism, a strong intuition remains that we will never reach subjectivity - that rich ‘first person-ness‘ of human experience that perhaps is unique only to humans.

The religious are able to exploit this intuition and use it as a basis for positing that there are God-given souls that reside within our bodies, and which explain our conscious, intellectual, moral and spiritual abilities. However, we don’t need to be religious to acknowledge that the so-called mind-body problem cannot be easily shelved just by asserting physicalism. Science seems to be a fundamentally objective, third-person pursuit, and perhaps third-person facts are all that it will ever be able to explain. If this is the case, then consciousness, that mysterious first-person entity with which we as persons are identical, remains unexplained. There is an 'explanatory gap' between mind and matter.

(see further - the so-called ‘Explanatory Gap.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap)