I'm an atheist, but this argument is pretty unconvincing even to me, and I believe any logical argument against the existence of a god is pointless. Here's my argument against the existence of a...
I'm an atheist, but this argument is pretty unconvincing even to me, and I believe any logical argument against the existence of a god is pointless. Here's my argument against the existence of a useful argument against god's existence:
All persons who believe in a god hold their own unique beliefs, and many of those beliefs contradict each other. No logical argument can simultaneously address contradictory statements, and any argument which "disproves" one person's belief may bolster another's. For example, this Divine Hiddenness argument might be validating for someone that doesn't believe in a loving god, or doesn't believe that their god loves all people equally.
All religious and spiritual beliefs that I am aware of fundamentally rely on faith, which by definition means strong belief without proof. If you had proof then it wouldn't be faith, it would just be knowledge. Faith is a different mode of thinking than logic, so logical arguments against faith-based claims are inherently useless. This doesn't mean that religious people can't be logical, just that their specific religious beliefs at some point derive from faith. For example, they may make logical deductions from statements in a religious text, but their reliance on the truth of those statements is itself based on faith.
Many people define a god that is inherently unknowable and incomprehensible. I believe the technical term is "apophatic theology". For example: "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being." This is not a logical statement and is impossible to argue against.
This feels kind of YHWH centric. Early Hindu/Jain/Bhuddist doctrine was barely a religion from what I gather and was more a philosophy on how to live (yoga school = stretching body and mind good)...
This feels kind of YHWH centric. Early Hindu/Jain/Bhuddist doctrine was barely a religion from what I gather and was more a philosophy on how to live (yoga school = stretching body and mind good)
I think the thing atheists (myself included) miss a lot is the purpose of religion over its 1000s of years of rule. You hint at it in your first bullet.
We all hold different beliefs in our head. The further I go from my community, the more different the beliefs are. The world and strange things especially are dangerous and risky the further back in time we go. How then do humans trust each other enough to trade goods or culture or blood, etc? A supernatural thing based on faith and not in reality would be a great tool to do that with! Now we can all have something in common and have less a chance to freak out and run from or kill each other.
I think the time for this as a necessity to enable trust is gone, pretty obviously, but to remove it from the equation feels like asking why they didn't just use hardened steel in the bronze age.
This comment has been made multiple times, and I think the argument is doing something far more modest than disproving every possible formulation of theism. I'll quote a reply I made to a similar...
All persons who believe in a god hold their own unique beliefs, and many of those beliefs contradict each other. No logical argument can simultaneously address contradictory statements, and any argument which "disproves" one person's belief may bolster another's. For example, this Divine Hiddenness argument might be validating for someone that doesn't believe in a loving god, or doesn't believe that their god loves all people equally.
This comment has been made multiple times, and I think the argument is doing something far more modest than disproving every possible formulation of theism. I'll quote a reply I made to a similar comment:
RNG: There are lots of modifications we can make to God's attributes to evade hiddenness arguments. God may be unknowable, or numerically identical with nature, or may lack certain powers, or may even be indifferent or malevolent, but these would be very interesting places for a theist to go when presented with an argument from divine hiddenness.
And I think I shared a similar sentiment in another reply I made:
RNG: The problem with this is that Christianity contains many different types of Gods, and a single argument couldn't possibly apply to all of them. For instance, LDS theology holds that there is an infinite regress of Gods. Various gnostic traditions hold that the God who created the material world is either incompetent or malevolent. Then there are forms of Christianity that resemble pantheism.
All religious and spiritual beliefs that I am aware of fundamentally rely on faith, which by definition means strong belief without proof. If you had proof then it wouldn't be faith, it would just be knowledge. Faith is a different mode of thinking than logic, so logical arguments against faith-based claims are inherently useless.
I think many if not most Christian traditions, not the least of which being Catholicism, think we can arrive at "Natural Knowledge of God", that reason alone can at least bring us to know that God exists and to know specific attributes of God.
As an agnostic (I think there's good evidence both for and against theism), I'm continuously interested in apologetics and arguments for atheism, and have recently started reading J. L....
As an agnostic (I think there's good evidence both for and against theism), I'm continuously interested in apologetics and arguments for atheism, and have recently started reading J. L. Schellenberg's book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason because of my interest in his divine hiddenness argument that centers on non-resistant non-belief.
If you are new to this argument, it is commonly argued:
P1: If an all loving God exists, non-resistant non-belief would not occur.
P2: Non-resistant non-belief does occur.
C: An all loving God does not exist.
The general thrust of the argument is to ask why is God so hidden from many of us? I personally resonate with this argument as an agnostic who has diligently sought out God (and continue to do so) and still have not found him. Between prayer, going to church, and studying apologetics I would think God would've at some point made his presence known to me. The strongest form of Schellenberg's argument, from the SEP entry:
Necessarily, if God exists, then God perfectly loves such finite persons as there may be.
Necessarily, if God perfectly loves such finite persons as there may be, then, for any capable finite person S and time t, God is at t open to being in a positively meaningful and reciprocal conscious relationship with S at t.
Necessarily, if for any capable finite person S and time t, God is at t open to being in a positively meaningful and reciprocal conscious relationship with S at t, then, for any capable finite person S and time t, it is not the case that S is at t nonresistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.
There is at least one capable finite person S and time t such that S is or was at t nonresistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.
I'm an agnostic myself (and an ex-evanglical, so I'm familiar with some apologetics) and I'd say this step is where Schellenberg's argument falls apart for me: I fail to see why one must accept...
I'm an agnostic myself (and an ex-evanglical, so I'm familiar with some apologetics) and I'd say this step is where Schellenberg's argument falls apart for me:
Necessarily, if God perfectly loves such finite persons as there may be, then, for any capable finite person S and time t, God is at t open to being in a positively meaningful and reciprocal conscious relationship with S at t.
I fail to see why one must accept the premise that in order to perfectly love a given person, God must be open to being in a positively meaningful and reciprocal conscious relationship with them at every given time. Perhaps Schellenberg elaborates on this premise in one of the places you link to, but it seems to me that this whole line of argument is extremely weakened by this very narrow definition of "love", to an extent that I'm not even sure it works well as an argument against the evangelical Christian conception of God that this argument seems to take for granted.
For instance, what if there exists a time t in which this God knew person S would not benefit from a reciprocal conscious relationship with God at time t? Why would God necessarily have to be willing to have such a relationship at time t in order for it to be true that God loves person S? Why is it taken for granted that a positively meaningful reciprocal conscious relationship between God and S is possible at every time t?
And the above is only really arguing against this within the framework of a huge number of assumptions about God that are based in modern evangelical Christianity. This definition of "love" falls apart even further when some of those assumptions are discarded (e.g., that this relationship must be conscious and reciprocal).
Yeah, I think this formulation is to preempt objections that non-resistant non-belief is permitted by God to happen for a time before God later enters into a relationship with them. Hopefully when...
Yeah, I think this formulation is to preempt objections that non-resistant non-belief is permitted by God to happen for a time before God later enters into a relationship with them. Hopefully when I finish the book and spend more time wrestling with Schellenberg's work I'll have a greater grasp on this formulation of the argument, but I'm better acquainted with the simpler informal argument (P1: If an all loving God exists, non-resistant non-belief would not occur. P2: Non-resistant non-belief does occur. C: An all loving God does not exist.)
And the above is only really arguing against this within the framework of a huge number of assumptions about God that are based in modern evangelical Christianity.
This argument is against a specific form of the God of orthodox Christianity. For instance God could be malevolent or indifferent to humans (gnosticism) or God may not be all powerful, and incapable of making his presence known. Perhaps belief in God isn't necessary for salvation. There are a number of ways to avoid hiddenness arguments, but they all seem to be rather unorthodox.
When it comes to the informal argument, I simply don't think P1 is sufficiently obvious as to pass without more thorough explanation. This is why I focused on the Schellenberg argument you...
When it comes to the informal argument, I simply don't think P1 is sufficiently obvious as to pass without more thorough explanation. This is why I focused on the Schellenberg argument you included, since it seems to go into more detail as to the formal basis for accepting P1. The problem is that I don't think that this argument is particularly good even against the specific form of God of orthodox Christianity (and I find logical arguments against the existence of God that ignore any traditions outside orthodox Christianity to be weak and annoying more generally). I agree, the formulation scoping over time is clearly an attempt to preempt objections that non-resistant non-belief is permitted by God to happen for a time before God later enters into a relationship with them, but just adding "at every time t" to your definition of "all-loving" with nothing more than "necessarily" to back it up utterly fails to actually argue against that objection. It feels like trying to argue away the existence of an all-loving God solely through creating a very specific definition for "all-loving" rather than actually building arguments based of any common-sense definition thereof.
Yeah there's a lot of hidden assumptions in P1, but the informal argument allows us to move into that conversation if you deny P1. The problem with this is that Christianity contains many...
When it comes to the informal argument, I simply don't think P1 is sufficiently obvious as to pass without more thorough explanation.
Yeah there's a lot of hidden assumptions in P1, but the informal argument allows us to move into that conversation if you deny P1.
I find logical arguments against the existence of God that ignore any traditions outside orthodox Christianity to be weak and annoying more generally
The problem with this is that Christianity contains many different types of Gods, and a single argument couldn't possibly apply to all of them. For instance, LDS theology holds that there is an infinite regress of Gods. Various gnostic traditions hold that the God who created the material world is either incompetent or malevolent. Then there are forms of Christianity that resemble pantheism.
In general I think making logical arguments against God as described in orthodox Christianity as your arguments against God's existence wholesale is a trait I often see from "Christian atheists",...
In general I think making logical arguments against God as described in orthodox Christianity as your arguments against God's existence wholesale is a trait I often see from "Christian atheists", who tend to be ignorant of religions other than orthodox Christianity. Such people do often try to treat arguments that really only fit orthodox Christianity as though they apply to all theism out of this ignorance, and they often do so in ways that are pretty hostile to religious non-Christians. So I'm wary of arguments that are centered around logically disproving specifically the orthodox Christian God.
Respectfully, I think this fundamentally misunderstands what the argument aims to do. Now, perhaps there's a valid critique of Western philosophy related to this that may hold, which is that...
Such people do often try to treat arguments that really only fit orthodox Christianity as though they apply to all theism out of this ignorance, and they often do so in ways that are pretty hostile to religious non-Christians.
Respectfully, I think this fundamentally misunderstands what the argument aims to do.
Now, perhaps there's a valid critique of Western philosophy related to this that may hold, which is that arguments for/against the existence of God have centered on the "omni-God," but this isn't new to Shellenberg, this tradition stretches back essentially for the entirety of Western philosophy ~2300+ years. I guess some of these philosophical defenses of this omni-God aren't Christian like Aristotle's unmoved mover, Avicenna's contingency argument for the Muslim God, or Plotinus' response to the problem of evil in the context of Neoplatonism. Pretty much every big name in most Western philosophy touches on the existence of this kind of God.
It'd be breaking from this two millenia long philosophical tradition to argue for some sort of other God, which should be interesting (looking at you Spinoza), but there's definitely a "default" in the Western philosophical tradition.
Then to go further to disprove some other type of God, say, Thor would be... interesting. In absence of a body of philosophy seeking to establish the existence of Thor it'd seem quite silly to me.
My issue is less with the formal philosophy itself and more with how certain atheists attempt to use it as a "gotcha" against people of religions for whom the set of very limited Protestant...
My issue is less with the formal philosophy itself and more with how certain atheists attempt to use it as a "gotcha" against people of religions for whom the set of very limited Protestant Christian assumptions used in the philosophy, as here, do not hold. You've already had someone else describe experiencing this in this very thread.
I'm honestly not that interested in logical arguments for or against God more generally, but I am particularly frustrated when these arguments are as constrained to mainstream Protestant theology as this is, because they rarely engage with the Christian theological tradition on the topics they address (does this even touch on Christian theological explanations for non-resistent non-belief, for example?) and they're inevitably used by annoying reddit atheists in conversations that include other sects and religions to which those assumptions don't apply at all.
Yeah, okay I get now what you are driving at. I'd probably drop the Protestant qualifier since the majority of the body of work in philosophy of religion has been Catholic (maybe monotheism would...
Yeah, okay I get now what you are driving at.
I'd probably drop the Protestant qualifier since the majority of the body of work in philosophy of religion has been Catholic (maybe monotheism would be a better catch all term), but I agree with the thrust of your concern. Some New Atheist wielding arguments they don't understand against, say, a Hindu or a pagan would be weird and upsetting.
Then again outside of polite philosophical discussions and personal interest, I just don't see a place for these arguments. I don't go around trying to deconvert people anymore than I go around forcing debates on free will upon people. The whole idea seems misguided and cringe.
Monotheism is much too broad -- this "Divine Hiddenness" argument would be absolutely inapplicable to Judaism, for instance. And yeah I don't think you personally are trying to do any sort of...
Monotheism is much too broad -- this "Divine Hiddenness" argument would be absolutely inapplicable to Judaism, for instance.
And yeah I don't think you personally are trying to do any sort of anti-religion apologetics here, it's just that these types of philosophical arguments inevitably get used in them by assholes.
A lot of these are contingent on restricting yourself to a very lay-Christian model of what God is and its role in the universe. If you unburden yourself from that the dilemmas sort of resolve...
A lot of these are contingent on restricting yourself to a very lay-Christian model of what God is and its role in the universe. If you unburden yourself from that the dilemmas sort of resolve themselves. And it’s not even a truly Christian model, because Christian mystics could take them apart too. And this is a general frustration I have with “atheism” discourse in general. They say “theism” but the only “theos” they seem to care about is a specific, modern Protestant conception of God and scripture and how people (individually and collectively) are meant to engage with divinity.
For example:
P1: If an all loving God exists, non-resistant non-belief would not occur.
What does “love” even mean in the context of an infinite supernatural being? And why would a loving being require belief? If you assume hell then sure, but why assume that? What is even the benefit of belief for a person? If you posit divine grace as something requiring belief then sure, but again that’s a Christian thing.
And furthermore, why even assume that God is “loving?” And why would God being loving be required for God to exist at all? Would it not make much more sense, resolve the dilemmas, and be more plausible to simply determine that God is indifferent?
Neoplatonists would have argued that there isn’t just a God, but many forms and expressions of divinity. There is “The One” (called Hen) which is a completely abstracted and inaccessible form of divinity that’s generally that ultimate cause and encompassing of everything. It exists before being and is not really intelligible because it’s outside the realms of logic and causation as we can understand it. We Hindus would refer to this as Brahman.
This is generally what later Christians would interpret as God. But the original Neoplatonists were pagans, so Proclus goes further and posits the existence of what he calls Henads, which are multiple expressions of The One in various different forms. So you’ll have Zeus, who is a Henad who encompasses all things “Zeusish” and Dionysus encompassing all things Dionysian and so on. There are an infinite number of Henads with infinitely variegated natures and they all exist separately and share in each other’s natures.
Functionally this ends up working as a rich vocabulary for talking about divinity and spiritualism, using the language of metaphor and analogy to be able to grasp at things that operate at the edges of the limits of whatever our evolutionarily composed meat-computers can conceptualize. Some of them can be indifferent, some of them can be loving, some of them can be actively hateful. But between all of them they encompass all the things we experience as part of existence. And we can choose to engage or disengage with whatever parts of it we can’t deal with right now until we’re able to integrate all of it. Since The One is actually too abstracted for anyone (except maybe the most spiritually developed mystics )to really grok, a whole structure of tradition and ritual and practice and metaphor is created to help people form relationships with the aspects of it that can be rendered intelligible.
Well said. I must admit I’m tired of the assumption that seems to underlay so much of, at the very least, the English language discussion of “religion”. Which is that certain strains of very...
Well said. I must admit I’m tired of the assumption that seems to underlay so much of, at the very least, the English language discussion of “religion”. Which is that certain strains of very modern Protestant thought are some kind of ur-religion and the only ideas worth paying attention to. This seems especially true in so much of the modern “atheist” movement. Which really just seems to be obsessed with this one particular conception of god and religion and seems to treat it as the end all be all. At the absolute best arguments in this space are picking at low hanging fruit at the worst it’s just boring. Not to mention incredibly ignorant of what is the vast majority of human experience and thought on this topic.
Yeah. The thing I find particularly bothersome is the extent to which it’s absorbed even the religious expressions of non-western traditions like Islam and Hinduism. The assumption is that...
Yeah. The thing I find particularly bothersome is the extent to which it’s absorbed even the religious expressions of non-western traditions like Islam and Hinduism.
The assumption is that whatever form of religious practice adheres to the oldest scriptures of that religion are the “authentic” versions of the religion and everything else is an illegitimate modern interpolation that’s less valid. When interfaith dialogue happens, they will always default to the religious practitioners who are handling scripturalists to have the discussions. When academic papers are written to determine questions like “what does Hinduism say about abortion?” the assumption is that the answer lies in finding a corpus of scripture, pressing ctrl+f, and typing in “abortion” will give you the best answer. It does not.
No one radicalizes because they love something. They do it because they're hurt. A subtractive movement[1] must conform to the trauma that caused it. That can be troublesome for groups that negate...
No one radicalizes because they love something. They do it because they're hurt. A subtractive movement[1] must conform to the trauma that caused it. That can be troublesome for groups that negate the importance of emotion in public discourse. They may convince themselves that their stance is purely mechanical. But the anger is always there. Unaddressed.
[1] A movement that seeks to remove something from society, as opposed to groups that seek to add something. Or groups that view themselves as such regardless of their actual impact.
I also find that they are almost never even actually arguments against what any religion/denomination actually teaches and more just at a generic "I was forced to go to church but I never...
I also find that they are almost never even actually arguments against what any religion/denomination actually teaches and more just at a generic "I was forced to go to church but I never listened" level at best. It's very frustrating having people pile on with these very basic, easily dismissed arguments who shout you down when you point out basic flaws in their assumptions. And then they act like everyone who is religious is an idiot because science without actually understanding that science can't disprove philosophy--and, indeed, is itself just another philosophy!
Yeah, there are a lot of responses to this argument. One goal I suppose of presenting these sorts of syllogisms in the context of the philosophy of religion is to force the other side to deny a...
And furthermore, why even assume that God is “loving?” And why would God being loving be required for God to exist at all? Would it not make much more sense, resolve the dilemmas, and be more plausible to simply determine that God is indifferent?
Yeah, there are a lot of responses to this argument. One goal I suppose of presenting these sorts of syllogisms in the context of the philosophy of religion is to force the other side to deny a premise where denying the premise raises or lowers one's credence in the overall worldview. This is also true the other way around with syllogisms for God's existence: if a theist can get atheists to concede that things can come from nothing or that objective moral values don't exist, then the arguments did serve the function of potentially decreasing one's credence in atheism.
There are lots of modifications we can make to God's attributes to evade hiddenness arguments. God may be unknowable, or numerically identical with nature, or may lack certain powers, or may even be indifferent or malevolent, but these would be very interesting places for a theist to go when presented with an argument from divine hiddenness.
I think that’s my issue with most of them. They’re formulated from a default Christian worldview but I often see them deployed as “gotchas” which, as a Hindu, I usually just shrug because I don’t...
I think that’s my issue with most of them. They’re formulated from a default Christian worldview but I often see them deployed as “gotchas” which, as a Hindu, I usually just shrug because I don’t accept the premises and nothing about my spiritual experiences have ever required me to.
For what it’s worth, many Hindus do accept the premises and posit a more personal and loving God. I just personally subscribe to a more cosmicist view on things. I think our Hindu sages did too but distilled things down to a personal level to help people be able to relate to the aspects of it that can help them find peace in their day to day if reconciling the cosmic scale of existence is too much for them. Cosmic horror and cosmic wonder are mostly just a matter of your mental state and it’s understandable that many people simply can’t get from the first to the second.
This is why I think polytheistic/polycentric approaches are good. They allow for the existence of a multiplicity of expressions and experiences of the sacred without needing to constrain it to a specific doctrine, moral code, or set of expectations. There can be a great many such things all based on people’s direct experiences with sacred things. Our Hindu rituals and practices aren’t really based on making sure you believe the right things, they’re more focused on cultivating healthy cognitive habits that are conducive to feeling more spiritually fulfilled. The practice is what does it, not the intellectual framework of philosophy we put the practice in.
There have been about half a dozen comments to this effect. Shellenberg's argument is far more modest than disproving all possible formulations of theism and only applies to one specific type....
There have been about half a dozen comments to this effect. Shellenberg's argument is far more modest than disproving all possible formulations of theism and only applies to one specific type.
Disclaimer: I'm approaching this as a believer, albeit a believer who is very open to being wrong and pretty comfortable with doubt. One thing I don't love about this argument (and most arguments...
Disclaimer: I'm approaching this as a believer, albeit a believer who is very open to being wrong and pretty comfortable with doubt.
One thing I don't love about this argument (and most arguments for and against the existence of God) is that it is extremely reductive, in that it assumes that our knowledge of what/who God is or must be is complete and so we have all of the facts needed to reason about Him.
It hinges on the assumptions that,
a. God is capable of directly being in reciprocal and conscious relationship with all/most people.
b. Most people are capable of being directly in relationship with God.
I don't think these are givens. The Christian tradition (at least the parts before/other than modern evangelicalism) has a healthy amount of skepticism about humankind's capability of being in direct relationship with God. The common belief is that He provides a number of proxies through which a relationship can happen, the greatest of which are the person of Jesus, who was in some way both divine and human, and the indwelling of the Spirit. Both of these (either personally or corporately depending on what branch of Christianity you're talking about) provide a means for humans to have some level of limited communion with God.
I realize that might be unsatisfying or seem like an evasion of the problem, but I think it's at least worth considering that there is some limitation, either on the part of humans or God, that prevents a more direct relationship from occurring for most people, most of the time.
If this is false then god is either not omnipotent or not omnipresent. Both are critical attributes of the Abrahamic god. The use of "love" here flags that we're talking about that concept of god....
God is capable of directly being in reciprocal and conscious relationship with all/most people.
If this is false then god is either not omnipotent or not omnipresent. Both are critical attributes of the Abrahamic god. The use of "love" here flags that we're talking about that concept of god. It seems to me that a counter example to the argument doesn't fit with the modern (western) concept of god. Are theists willing to accept a constrained being as god?
As some one who grew up devoutly religious and now somewhere between agnostic and atheist depending on the day I am open to the existence of more advanced beings in the universe. But without omnipotent and omnipresent I wouldn't be able to name those beings gods. Heck, if existence of an omnipresent and omnipotent being could be proven I don't see any reason that god must love humans. I build and create a lot of things I don't love.
God as ultimately being “the creator” is itself an Abrahamic position. In most Indo-European religions the force(s) responsible for creating the universe either recuse themselves or are actually...
God as ultimately being “the creator” is itself an Abrahamic position. In most Indo-European religions the force(s) responsible for creating the universe either recuse themselves or are actually killed by the Gods they create at some point before they go on to shape the world itself.
In Hinduism, for example, Brahma is the creative force in the trinity but he is explicitly not worshipped because his role in things is considered to be over. In fact, the “creator” continuing to be involved in the created world is characterized as an extremely inappropriate violation. In the oldest hymns, it is characterized as a form of forcible incest and the Gods strike the creator deity down for attempting it.
It’s not just Hindu either. Ymir is one of the primeval forces of creation and the Aesir must first kill him to form the sky and and the Earth for us to live in. Zeus must kill Cronos and the Titans before the world can be made safe for people. Even the Gnostics believed that the Yahweh being worshipped is actually an “evil” sort of “Demiurge” holding people in a sort of illusory prison and not the real God.
Interestingly, this is not a coincidence. All three of these religions can be traced back to a single Proto-Indo-European mythology. It's a real shame that we don't have more information about...
It’s not just Hindu either. Ymir is one of the primeval forces of creation and the Aesir must first kill him to form the sky and and the Earth for us to live in. Zeus must kill Cronos and the Titans before the world can be made safe for people.
Interestingly, this is not a coincidence. All three of these religions can be traced back to a single Proto-Indo-European mythology.
It's a real shame that we don't have more information about prehistoric conceptions of the world. I guess that's just the nature of studying prehistoric peoples — if they wrote things down, they wouldn't be prehistoric!
Eh, I think you're overstating your case that a particular way of thinking about omnipotence is critical to Judeo-Christian theology. There are different ways of defining omnipotence in theology,...
Eh, I think you're overstating your case that a particular way of thinking about omnipotence is critical to Judeo-Christian theology. There are different ways of defining omnipotence in theology, even among those who accept that as a necessary attribute of divinity (and there are a few, although not many, who don't). There's omnipotence in the sense of god being capable of doing literally anything, even if it's non-causal, paradoxical, or against his nature. There's the more common definition of omnipotence as capable of anything that is not intrinsically impossible/self contradictory. Then, there's omnipotence in the sense of a diety being capable of anything that is within his nature - e.g. a god that is described as perfectly truthful may be seen as not capable of lying. Or, for example, in some Calvinist thought, where god is seen as being perfectly just and is therefor incapable of mingling with that which is unjust, i.e. imperfect humanity, unless some step is taken to atone for that imperfection.
There's something funny to me about the evolution of Christian theology, particularly if you look back at its foundations in the pre-Christian era of Hebrew mythology. The conception of Yahweh...
There's something funny to me about the evolution of Christian theology, particularly if you look back at its foundations in the pre-Christian era of Hebrew mythology. The conception of Yahweh changes enormously over time. From being one God among many to being the only God; and from a God that, like many, inflicts great "evil" upon humanity to one that is "perfectly good." This is mirrored in how God cannot merely be powerful, he must be all-powerful. He cannot be wise, he must be perfectly wise. And so forth.
I think there are two different motivations for this trend. The first is a desire to avoid offending God by implying that he has any sort of limitations. The second is all too human desire to simplify complex problems. Instead of having to wonder what the limits of God's love, power, and vision are, it's easier if you just say he doesn't have any limits — he is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. Granted, this raises other issues (like the problem of evil), but makes things simpler for a lot of believers.
At the most basic level, I don't think there is anything about the Abrahamic understanding of a divine creator that necessitates such properties. It could very well be that God is capable of creating the universe but can't see all of it at all times and cannot read the thoughts of human beings within this creation. It could very well be that God could create the universe but not have unlimited power to change any and all aspects of it. And it could very well be that God has some sort of affection for humanity but not what could be described as "perfect love" for humanity. Or perhaps God cares about humanity but not every individual person enough to intervene in their lives.
One of these days I'm going to get around to studying the psychology of religion, particularly across different cultures. But it's a hard enough thing to study that I'm not sure if there is any good research on it.
Awesome, thank you for providing the higher resolution. I'll admit this "Divine Hiddenness" argument isn't very compelling to me. Precisely for this reason, it seems overfit to a certain...
Awesome, thank you for providing the higher resolution. I'll admit this "Divine Hiddenness" argument isn't very compelling to me. Precisely for this reason, it seems overfit to a certain conception of god.
I would say that setting our own constraints on a deity based on our own understanding of what love is would be pointless. If God can't do something, we would never know because we don't know the...
I would say that setting our own constraints on a deity based on our own understanding of what love is would be pointless. If God can't do something, we would never know because we don't know the difference between inability and a choice to not do something. Every human has a unique set of values, why can't a supreme deity have his own set?
This is true, and I think Schellenberg would agree there are a lot of ways to dodge this argument by redefining God's attributes (though likely in unorthodox ways.) For instance the malevolent...
It hinges on the assumptions that,
a. God is capable of directly being in reciprocal and conscious relationship with all/most people.
b. Most people are capable of being directly in relationship with God.
This is true, and I think Schellenberg would agree there are a lot of ways to dodge this argument by redefining God's attributes (though likely in unorthodox ways.) For instance the malevolent creator of gnosticism would not be subject to this argument, neither would a God that lacks certain powers to make themself known or lacks the ability to enter into relationships with humans.
The common belief is that He provides a number of proxies through which a relationship can happen, the greatest of which are the person of Jesus, who was in some way both divine and human, and the indwelling of the Spirit.
This is a good point, though I wonder if you are committed to saying that non-resistant non-belief still does not occur, but that allegedly non-resistant non-believers actually have a relationship through some proxy? I haven't spent too much time thinking about this argument (yet), but I'd imagine belief in God is a necessary condition of a relationship with God for most Christian traditions.
Partly this depends on who you ask and when, but it is far from universally true. Much like with gravity, belief is hardly required for relationship. But without amy consciousness of gravity, it...
but I'd imagine belief in God is a necessary condition of a relationship with God for most Christian traditions
Partly this depends on who you ask and when, but it is far from universally true. Much like with gravity, belief is hardly required for relationship. But without amy consciousness of gravity, it is baffling why rocks fall and birds fly. But conscious effort to understand leads to an ability to travel to the moon.
So it could also be with god. God does as god will. What that means, and how it can work with/for us, largely depends on our own willingness to be faithful.
I'm not totally sure I have a good answer for this, which is something I've had to make peace with in the last few years. I do think that there are some ideas that address these concerns, like...
I'm not totally sure I have a good answer for this, which is something I've had to make peace with in the last few years. I do think that there are some ideas that address these concerns, like forms of universalism that I've encountered since leaving evangelical churches, but I certainly don't know all the answers.
I'm unmoved by the 'nonbelief' aspect of this argument. Instead why not talk about evidence? It's a small distinction but it sidesteps a lot of avenues the conversation otherwise takes. It seems...
P1: If an all loving God exists, non-resistant non-belief would not occur.
P2: Non-resistant non-belief does occur.
C: An all loving God does not exist.
I'm unmoved by the 'nonbelief' aspect of this argument. Instead why not talk about evidence? It's a small distinction but it sidesteps a lot of avenues the conversation otherwise takes.
It seems to me that a God who has particular ideas about how people should behave (which is all of the concepts of God that I'm aware of) would want to provide evidence of their existence in order to encourage more people to follow the commandments (or whatever).
And indeed, earlier in the bible there is evidence provided, angels, burning bushes and so on. Then nothing for 1000's of years.
Which brings us to modern times, with no evidence outside of an ancient text written by people. That seems like a big ask on God's part:
"Look ya'll are flawed, we all know it, but you're going to need to rely on therefore necessarily flawed information from a text so old that it was written in now dead languages, the translation of which is debated and contentious.
A text so self contradictory and convoluted that you'll need to rely on the interpretation of still more people to make sense of what it's trying to tell you."
People are unreliable sources of information, if you want to recreate a reasonably accurate picture of an event you need to average the recollection of a lot of observers to have any hope of getting it right. So how is it fair or reasonable to expect a single collection of texts to be enough for the modern audience?
Alternatively God could periodically provide evidence, which they could of course do at scale. Based on the bible, this is something they are not against doing. That's the key bit to me, if we can't say that God isn't providing evidence because it isn't their style, what argument do we have for its lack?
All of that being said I do understand the 'nonbelief' angle if instead we posit that God prefers personal relationships with their followers and so appears in a different way to each person. That does then beg the question "why is that relationship missing for so many people?". The text certainly makes it seem as though when God shows up you know it.
If instead we say that part of God's game is that it isn't supposed to be obvious, under the premise that your faith is how you earn God's love (or whatever you're meant to want from God). In that case God is kind of a dick.
Yeah, I find it rather amusing that, under modern interpretations of Christianity, God used to make big, obvious gestures that made his power and existence apparent, but mysteriously stopped doing...
Yeah, I find it rather amusing that, under modern interpretations of Christianity, God used to make big, obvious gestures that made his power and existence apparent, but mysteriously stopped doing that around 2,000 years ago. Around the same time that belief suddenly became a very important virtue for him, in fact. It's entirely too easy to imagine the selective pressure on a religion like early Christianity. If belief without evidence is important, it reinforces the (evidence-less) religion while competing interpretations that don't espouse the importance of blind faith for orthodoxy die out.
In light of all of that, if we are to take the claims of mainstream Christianity seriously, God is apparently an asshole. He stacks the cards against people with critical thinking skills by making the One True Faith look virtually indistinguishable from all other forms of religious belief and then gets mad when people find the lack of evidence for it damning. To the point of torturing for eternity anyone who has the audacity of being rational and requiring evidence for belief, as we might in any other context. It's almost comical to then pair that with the mainstream Christian belief that God is "all-loving." That behavior sounds sadistic and/or like a deliberate ploy to cultivate only a very specific type of person in paradise.
When I was struggling with my faith as a Catholic young adult over 20 years ago, I rather liked this quote from Galileo: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect intended us to forgo their use." It became basically my motto as I delved into apologetics. But over time, it became harder and harder to maintain belief in the face of what "sense, reason, and intellect" made so obvious (i.e., to quote Carl Sagan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," something Christianity both lacks and is actively antagonistic towards).
Often, Christians attacking this argument often misunderstand this argument to be about evidence when in fact it's about belief, which may or may not result from evidence. There are a number of...
I'm unmoved by the 'nonbelief' aspect of this argument. Instead why not talk about evidence? It's a small distinction but it sidesteps a lot of avenues the conversation otherwise takes.
Often, Christians attacking this argument often misunderstand this argument to be about evidence when in fact it's about belief, which may or may not result from evidence.
There are a number of theodicies that can be slightly tweaked to respond to this evidence argument. Also, maybe people are blind to certain evidence non-resistently. Maybe people make cognitive errors and fail to apprehend evidence even if there's enough for belief.
We can sidestep that entire conversation and move straight to what the evidence is supposed to give us: belief. Scripture makes it clear we have sufficient evidence for theism. This makes non-resistent non-belief that much stronger of an argument.
There's a lot, but what's most personally convincing would be the argument from consciousness, followed by argument(s) from motion/causation, followed by moral arguments, followed by design...
There's a lot, but what's most personally convincing would be the argument from consciousness, followed by argument(s) from motion/causation, followed by moral arguments, followed by design arguments. In short, philosophical arguments. I unfortunately have no personal experience of the divine, nor am I convinced there's scientific reasons to believe.
"We don't understand the nature of consciousness" does nothing to prove God is real Another false conflation of a lack of understanding with proof of the divine Morality is subjective Evolution?
argument from consciousness
"We don't understand the nature of consciousness" does nothing to prove God is real
argument(s) from motion/causation
Another false conflation of a lack of understanding with proof of the divine
It'd be a bit ambitious to defend these four arguments at once, considering one could do a PhD in any one of these. As a former New Atheist, maybe I can shed some light on why I find these so...
It'd be a bit ambitious to defend these four arguments at once, considering one could do a PhD in any one of these. As a former New Atheist, maybe I can shed some light on why I find these so compelling.
"We don't understand the nature of consciousness" does nothing to prove God is real
Arguments from Consciousness didn't really hit for me until I properly understood the hard problem of consciousness. It's important that "The Hard Problem" was first articulated by David Chalmers, a self-described naturalist. I'd try to lay it out here, but it's famously difficult to articulate.
Another false conflation of a lack of understanding with proof of the divine
Specifically, the argument from motion merely shows that a consequence of Aristotelian metaphysics (that change is the actualization of potential) is that it entails that there is some ground of pure actuality at the base of reality. Edward Faser has done some work on a particularly strong version of this argument, but again we could spend an entire day working out linear vs hierarchical change or the details of the metaphysics.
Morality is subjective
Yeah I think if you are a naturalist, you are committed to this view. Actually, I think something like moral antirealism is most expected under naturalism.
Evolution?
Specifically fine tuning arguments related to the fundamental constants of the universe. We have no reason to think they must be as they are, yet if they were off by incomprehensibly small amounts life, planets, anything couldn't form.
If there is a particular argument you are interested in learning more about (and why a one-time atheist would have ever put stock in it) I'd love to hear it. Also my pm is an option depending on the context.
I ask this out of genuine ignorance and curiosity: do we have any particular reason to believe that the fundamental constants of the universe even can vary? That is, do we have any reason to...
Specifically fine tuning arguments related to the fundamental constants of the universe. We have no reason to think they must be as they are, yet if they were off by incomprehensibly small amounts life, planets, anything couldn't form.
I ask this out of genuine ignorance and curiosity: do we have any particular reason to believe that the fundamental constants of the universe even can vary? That is, do we have any reason to believe that they could have been different? Because if that's not the case, then it seems to me like it doesn't even make sense to talk about the fundamental constants just happening to have the right values: maybe they could never have done otherwise.
Alternatively, if the fundamental constants of the universe vary and we live in some kind of, say, inflationary multiverse, then the fact that we happen to life in a universe suited for life is just a consequence of the anthropic principle.
I have heard multiple forms of this and don't think they hold water philosophically, I think it begs the question. Metaphysically, they could have been otherwise, and we have no reason...
maybe they could never have done otherwise.
I have heard multiple forms of this and don't think they hold water philosophically, I think it begs the question. Metaphysically, they could have been otherwise, and we have no reason philosophically or from physics to state that they must be these exact values. All of that to say, in the absence of compelling reasons to assume something must be necessary, we should assume that it is not.
if the fundamental constants of the universe vary and we live in some kind of, say, inflationary multiverse
Some of the best arguments for naturalism over theism are that naturalism provides a simpler, more parsimonious explanation of the evidence in some area. Think something like Occam's Razor. I am not sure one can be rationally justified in believing in an inflationary multiverse if there are simpler views with equivalent explanatory power due to the inherent infinite complexity of the view.
the fact that we happen to life in a universe suited for life is just a consequence of the anthropic principle.
Yeah, I think this is the only argument the atheist can reasonably make as far as I can tell. It doesn't feel very satisfying to me for some reason. I suppose it works to say why I was born on Earth, rather than Venus, but doesn't help me with the fundamental constants. Perhaps that's just a difference of intuitions though.
There is always the free will argument. The moment God shows himself up, it becomes the classic interference in the mundane course of action which makes the whole spontaneous free willed action...
There is always the free will argument. The moment God shows himself up, it becomes the classic interference in the mundane course of action which makes the whole spontaneous free willed action pointless, isn't it?
BTW I think agnosticism is the wisest and smartest position to be in right now.
Calvinists have debated this exact point. They don't generally believe the concept of free will is compatible with God's divine Providence. One possible solution by Catholics is Molinism, where...
There is always the free will argument. The moment God shows himself up, it becomes the classic interference in the mundane course of action which makes the whole spontaneous free willed action pointless, isn't it?
Calvinists have debated this exact point. They don't generally believe the concept of free will is compatible with God's divine Providence. One possible solution by Catholics is Molinism, where God knows before creation how free beings would act in any given possible world, and creates the one that has the most goods. This is often called God's "Middle Knowledge", but I may be misrepresenting it, if a Catholic would like to clear this up.
The free will argument is a later invention that I would argue is incompatible with any version of Christianity that asserts that the Bible is at all an accurate recounting of God's actions. God...
The free will argument is a later invention that I would argue is incompatible with any version of Christianity that asserts that the Bible is at all an accurate recounting of God's actions. God was perfectly willing to interfere with the universe early on, often in grandiose ways. Why did he suddenly stop? Why did noninterference suddenly become very important to him? Particularly when (blind) faith appeared as a virtue?
If you need a simple proof to break the YHWH stuff, may I suggest: God is all good God made man in his image Why does so much suffering and evil exist in the world? Another interesting one is...
If you need a simple proof to break the YHWH stuff, may I suggest:
God is all good
God made man in his image
Why does so much suffering and evil exist in the world?
Another interesting one is Christianity being polytheistic in a couple of ways.
The holy Trinity doesn't really seem like 1 God at all
ESPECIALLY with how mean and spiteful OT god is. Remember God is eternal.
My favorite story about that is Arians who saw this logic gap and decided OT God and NT God must be different since they're eternal and so fundamentally different. They were swiftly excommunicated of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianism
There's almost 2000 years worth of responses to this problem in the philosophical world from Neoplatonists, Christians, and Muslims. On balance it still seems to be the best argument for atheism...
If you need a simple proof to break the YHWH stuff, may I suggest:
God is all good
God made man in his image
Why does so much suffering and evil exist in the world?
There's almost 2000 years worth of responses to this problem in the philosophical world from Neoplatonists, Christians, and Muslims. On balance it still seems to be the best argument for atheism though. I actually consider the argument from divine hiddenness to be a subset of the problem of evil.
Another interesting one is Christianity being polytheistic in a couple of ways.
The holy Trinity doesn't really seem like 1 God at all
ESPECIALLY with how mean and spiteful OT god is. Remember God is eternal.
Yeah, there was definitely Greek influence on Trinitarian theology. I'm not especially well-read on this kinda thing, but gnostics, for instance, believed in The One who emanated other divine beings. Ultimately they are of one substance, and will return to The One from which they emanated. One "God", many persons. Similar lines of thought exist in Neoplatonism which was also contemporaneous with early Christianity. I'd still argue all of this is considered to be monotheistic but with caveats.
My favorite story about that is Arians who saw this logic gap and decided OT God and NT God must be different since they're eternal and so fundamentally different. They were swiftly excommunicated of course
Are you confusing them with Marcionism? Interestingly, this line of thinking was prevalent in Christianity for the few centuries that the gnostics were around (the OT God is thought to be a malevolent demiurge.)
I haven't read either but the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is generally considered more accessible. Article here. Both are around 9300 words if you discount the references and extraneous...
I haven't read either but the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is generally considered more accessible. Article here. Both are around 9300 words if you discount the references and extraneous text elements. There is also a 3500-word Wikipedia article.
I agree, I should've linked the IEP instead. Idk if that can be changed by a moderator or someone? The only parts of the SEP entry I linked that I specifically cared about were the portions...
I agree, I should've linked the IEP instead. Idk if that can be changed by a moderator or someone? The only parts of the SEP entry I linked that I specifically cared about were the portions detailing Schellenberg's argument from non-resistant non-belief.
Ants don’t know about nuclear bombs or believe in them but they still exist and have unfathomable power that can shape the world they live in. If there are celestial beings out there, I wouldn’t...
Ants don’t know about nuclear bombs or believe in them but they still exist and have unfathomable power that can shape the world they live in. If there are celestial beings out there, I wouldn’t think that a lesser species such as humans can comprehend what they are doing or even recognize the things they see are divine in nature. Our whole understanding of physics and science could be based on something a god is doing like an experiment and we would never know.
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. What are the odds that an ant operating on no evidence whatsoever would be able to accurately surmise the existence...
Exemplary
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. What are the odds that an ant operating on no evidence whatsoever would be able to accurately surmise the existence and nature of nuclear weapons? Pretty low, I would think. So it seems no coincidence that as our knowledge advances, old theories and ideas about how the universe works are rendered obsolete by new, better theories that conform to the growing body of available evidence.
This is why the burden of proof starts with he who is making the initial claim. Otherwise, I can go around telling everyone that there is a jar of pickles in orbit around Jupiter and argue that it's true because nobody is able to disprove it.
On top of that, creationist theories are architected in a way that precludes them from making testable predictions, making them fundamentally unscientific. If a theory is not built on real world evidence and is incapable of making accurate predictions, what value does it actually have?
While this is important, I feel like its importance is overstated a lot. People take "dismissal" as "proof to the contrary" and don't see the irony. Yes, it can be dismissed, but it doesn't have...
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. What are the odds that an ant operating on no evidence whatsoever would be able to accurately surmise the existence and nature of nuclear weapons?...
This is why the burden of proof starts with he who is making the initial claim. Otherwise, I can go around telling everyone that there is a jar of pickles in orbit around Jupiter and argue that it's true because nobody is able to disprove it.
While this is important, I feel like its importance is overstated a lot. People take "dismissal" as "proof to the contrary" and don't see the irony. Yes, it can be dismissed, but it doesn't have to be dismissed and it doesn't mean we should stop being curious.
On top of that, creationist theories are architected in a way that precludes them from making testable predictions, making them fundamentally unscientific. If an theory is not built on real world evidence and is incapable of making accurate predictions, what value does it actually have?
What a dull world it would be if everything had to make testable predictions! Science is not everything. It is just its own extensible system of philosophy. It tells us how to think about what we can observe and nothing more. It can't tell us if love is real or how the Sun feels on your skin on the first nice day of the year or if people are lying during the studies you tried to run in order to scientifically determine how the Sun feels on your skin on the first nice day of the year.
I never said science is everything, but when people come to me and say science is wrong about X because they believe Y, then they have made it a scientific issue and I will use scientific thinking...
I never said science is everything, but when people come to me and say science is wrong about X because they believe Y, then they have made it a scientific issue and I will use scientific thinking to discredit it.
It's fine for people to believe whatever they want, I take issue when they start trying to mix that in with real science. See: the rash of state legislatures that tried shoehorning creationism and divine intervention into science classrooms in the '00s.
I grew up going to church where my Sunday school teachers and priesthood leaders would make "scientific" claims about how the theory of evolution is wrong and the earth is 6,000 years old. They were incapable of reconciling their personal beliefs with the world around them in a rational manner. I don't think believing the Earth is 6,000 years old would make my life less dull. If anything, exploring our constantly evolving understanding of the history of the Earth and the universe consistently provides me with a kind of joy that I don't think is possible under a completely static belief system.
Yeah I see what you are getting at. This argument doesn't really establish that theism in general is false, but that one very specific kind of theism is.
Yeah I see what you are getting at. This argument doesn't really establish that theism in general is false, but that one very specific kind of theism is.
I have to agree with burkaman here in that I think this argument is too weak to be of any use. I have spoken with many believers and debated some of them. Ultimately, faith is the cornerstone of...
I have to agree with burkaman here in that I think this argument is too weak to be of any use.
I have spoken with many believers and debated some of them. Ultimately, faith is the cornerstone of their beliefs. It doesn't matter how many arguments you throw at them: faith is inherently tied to their ideology.
In that sense, I feel like they would answer such an argument with something like this: God chooses not to show Himself, in order for him to test our faith. Non-belief occurs because people choose not to have faith.
I have cornered some believers in the past, but you cannot win over someone who believes faith (which in a sense could be defined as believing without proof) or lack of faith dictates one's identity. In some eyes, faith is access to God, it's access to paradise. His hiddeness is just a test of faith.
For many if not most believers, reason and faith are inseparable. The Catholic Church teaches this explicitly. Christian intellectuals nearly universally think we can use reason to establish the...
Ultimately, faith is the cornerstone of their beliefs.
For many if not most believers, reason and faith are inseparable. The Catholic Church teaches this explicitly. Christian intellectuals nearly universally think we can use reason to establish the existence of God.
I have cornered some believers in the past, but you cannot win over someone who believes faith
It's a small point, but I've never had a thought-provoking or mind-changing conversation that involved either party "cornering" or "winning". If someone is caught off-guard, they probably aren't going to give the most thought-out responses.
Just to your failure to find god, what are your criteria for recognition? I’m sure you’ve heard the joke about the man who drowned waiting for god to save him from the flood. At 2’ flooding, his...
Just to your failure to find god, what are your criteria for recognition?
I’m sure you’ve heard the joke about the man who drowned waiting for god to save him from the flood.
At 2’ flooding, his friends came by in a monster truck to get him. “No,” he said. “God will save me.”
At 8’, a boat came by to get him. “No,” he said. “God will save me.”
At 30’, the water was neck high as he stood on the rooof. A helicopter from the national guard came to get him. “No,” he said. “God will save me.”
Of course he drowned. At the pearly gates, he asked st peter, i was a man of faith, why didn’t god save me?” St peter’s reply, “We sent you a truck, a boat, even gorram helicopter! What more did you want?!”
Probably not a satisfying answer, but I'm not sure why I haven't "found" God. If "criteria of recognition" means something like what it would take to convince me that God exists, the strict answer...
Just to your failure to find god, what are your criteria for recognition?
Probably not a satisfying answer, but I'm not sure why I haven't "found" God. If "criteria of recognition" means something like what it would take to convince me that God exists, the strict answer is that I'm not sure.
One option could be some syllogism I haven't heard before. I've spent over a decade a hardcore materialist, and had my mind changed relatively quickly (and very recently) by various syllogistic arguments related to the hard problem of consciousness.
Another option may be some personal religious experience. If God spoke to me, or otherwise made his presence apparent to me, I think I'd find that totally convincing. Lot's of believers have had these sorts of experiences and base their faith on it, probably far more than have been convinced by some syllogism.
However ultimately I can't know what would change my mind. It's a total mystery to me why I was convinced by the Knowledge Argument against physicalism (materialism). It seems to be something about my psychological constitution that some arguments land with me and others don't.
I'm sure you're aware of the proposition that we don't recognize some exorbitant percentage of the experiences we encounter, and of that percentage, some exorbitant percentage we don't even...
I'm sure you're aware of the proposition that we don't recognize some exorbitant percentage of the experiences we encounter, and of that percentage, some exorbitant percentage we don't even register as existing. The remaining percentage, we often wrongly identify it as something we do recognize. This is an ongoing issue with eyewitness testimony, "unidentified aerial phenomena," "unidentified non-aerial phenonomena," etc.
I challenge you that it will be impossible for you to have any direct connection to god if you have not put in considerable effort to train your consciousness to experience the unrecognizable. It's kind of like those magic eye puzzles. The images are not hidden or obfuscated in any way, we merely have to relax our eye's typical convergence to see. Another example is the wind on the ocean. To me, it's random and chaotic. But a sailor (the actual sailboat kind) looks across the ocean and can see the windspeed and direction for the next 5 minutes. I don't know whether there is any god, but I cannot say there is not until I can say I have made every attempt to see.
You can't "prove" love any more than you can prove, or disprove, faith or God (any God, whatever he/she/it might be named by the "followers"). Some atheists and agnostics are just as obnoxious and...
You can't "prove" love any more than you can prove, or disprove, faith or God (any God, whatever he/she/it might be named by the "followers").
Some atheists and agnostics are just as obnoxious and problematic as some of the faithful. They get it in their heads that they must convert people to their way of thinking? Why? Because people crave validation. For many, it's not enough that they've come up with a belief or decision that works for them. They have to see and know and live others agreeing with them. That validation allows them to feel even more secure and confident in their belief, lets them feel more right.
So really all the non-faith positions are basically faith in a different form. It's just a matter of what you put your faith in.
Actions are what's problematic. If someone wakes up every morning and prays, or meditates, or does yoga, or sits writing a daily affirmation, or goes for a walk while contemplating the beauty of the universe, or paces around enjoying imagining what horrors they'd inflict upon their enemies should they have the chance ... that's between them and themselves.
It's not enough for so many people that others might be acting in agreeable ways. No, they have to take it too far and try to shape minds. Shape people as people. They want you to think as they think, believe as they believe. They won't leave you be so long as you're just a quiet person living a life, they have to change you because they're right and they're going to prove it to you.
That's an action, and that's problematic. You're (attempting to/ hoping to) force someone else to do as you desire.
Someone who conducts themselves agreeably, within the boundaries of their society, is a normal person. Non-problematic. When they take it upon themselves to change others, they're venturing into areas where they can find themselves over the line.
Worse, many of the problems of modern society source from this very thing. People today have powerful far reaching tools to utilize when they decide they're not going to let others just be. That they can't countenance someone else who hasn't toed the line the busybody has decided they should.
These days, you can craft a website or video or tweet or post, tag names and pictures to it, and go about trying to build a crusade all from the comfort of your living room. "These people don't believe as I believe. As I believe they should believe. They're wrong. They must change. I must make them change."
Do or do not. Doing doesn't require publicity. Validation does though. You stand up and speak because you want agreement. If you just wanted action, you'd be busy doing. But if you speak, you're looking to convince and sway and coerce. Worse, you're looking for that dopamine rush from others reaching out to you to say "yeah, I agree" and "you're right" and "wow, finally someone said it."
At its core, Faith is just another form of societal power. Same as government. Which is why, if you read back through history, faith/religion comes up so often. Not because historians decided faith is cool or something. No, because faith is A Major Thing that shapes Large Groups Of People. Which faith, how strong, were there opposing faiths, did people disagree, what happened when they did, what were the faith's tenants, who controlled the faith ... for society, for a nation or nation state or large societal grouping of people, faith is just one of the ways people decide to knit themselves together with.
Everyone has cliques. Skateboarding, gardening, movies, whatever. Fandom. And Faith (including lack of Faith). They love something, and not in a very dismissive casual way. They love it enough to spend time on it. They'll think about it, consider and ponder it, they'll often study it, and even seek to discuss it and what they've come up with about it with others who are into it too.
Faith is the same thing. So is atheism or agnosticism. It's a belief system (choosing not to believe is a belief system). And it's something that people can bond over. When they do that, they're validating one another, and that makes them feel closer to each other. Those kinds of bonds allow nations and movements to rise and fall all across history.
And most of the time, the rising and falling is driven, instigated, by people who disagree on what they believe. They might believe in a certain tax policy, they might believe in classism, they might believe in God, they might believe in Santa Claus, they might believe the people of the forests are more worthy and just than the people of the rivers. Whatever. It's always something.
But People hate when others disagree with them. They can't just let and let live; they have to be right. So, sometimes, often, the validating group will validate itself up to the point of starting to lash out.
Sometimes that lashing comes physically, violently. Sometimes it'll come via harsh words and strong language, as they seek to convince "unbelievers" to right their wicked ways and believe as the believers do.
Doing that in the name of God is no different than doing it in the name of "There is No God." It's no different than doing it in the name of "Labor builds the country so we're going to be in charge now" or "the rich are wealthy for a reason so we should listen to them when they give direction."
Whatever it is, it's still a belief, and it's still someone somewhere who decided they needed to feel validated by speaking up to convince others they're right. That their way is The Way, and that everyone else should change to The Way.
It's always stupid and problematic. Most of humanity's problems start with humanity. We're always our own worst enemy. We can't just leave each other alone. No, we have to be right, and we have to force others to be right in the right way.
Why do you see, so often, the lament that "if only aliens would appear, humanity could unite." Because, even unconsciously, most people know that validation drives unity at the cost of divisiveness. Right now, humanity has only its own differences to fixate on and fight over. But give us Martians, and suddenly some feel many of us would be eager to self-validate over "we're humans, they're not" and it would act as a way to remove so many common obstacles we throw up in our own path.
Except we'd fight over that too. Humanity might very well ease up on the internal validation strife, but it could just be replaced with disagreement over the Martians. Do we follow them, ignore them, worship them, fight them, talk nice to them, talk stern to them, what? So really, if Martians land, the validation problem wouldn't go away, it'd just shift to being validation conflict over The Martian Issue instead of Christian vs Muslim vs Jew vs Atheists vs LeaveUsAloners vs whoever the fuck.
Basically, everyone needs to leave everyone else alone. Which they're not gonna do, of course, because that would be admitting they're wrong. They've been validation seeking for so long, you see; to just stop would be to admit they wasted all that time. That it was over something which shouldn't, doesn't, matter. Can't have that. That's the opposite of validation; that doesn't make me feel nice, it makes me feel horrible. Lash out, rabble rabble rabble, crusade!
People would usually rather be angry, than wrong. Setting out to shit all over someone's (non-problematic) believes is setting out to prove them wrong. It shouldn't be a surprise when they get angry. Are they being problematic when they believe flower gardens and morning meditation is The Way? No? No violence or whatever?
Maybe they should be left alone to believe as they like then?
Oh, now you're angry though. Because you believe your belief in non-belief is The Way. Great. Guess that's one more war. Always starts because people get angry.
[...] [...] [...] [...] [...] I appreciate the comment. I did read the entirety of this lengthy diatribe, and if I understand it, I think it may be self-defeating. If seeking to change others'...
Some atheists and agnostics are just as obnoxious and problematic as some of the faithful. They get it in their heads that they must convert people to their way of thinking?
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They want you to think as they think, believe as they believe. They won't leave you be so long as you're just a quiet person living a life, they have to change you because they're right and they're going to prove it to you.
[...]
But People hate when others disagree with them. They can't just let and let live; they have to be right.
[...]
We can't just leave each other alone. No, we have to be right, and we have to force others to be right in the right way.
[...]
Basically, everyone needs to leave everyone else alone. Which they're not gonna do, of course, because that would be admitting they're wrong. They've been validation seeking for so long, you see; to just stop would be to admit they wasted all that time.
[...]
People would usually rather be angry, than wrong. Setting out to shit all over someone's (non-problematic) believes is setting out to prove them wrong. It shouldn't be a surprise when they get angry. Are they being problematic when they believe flower gardens and morning meditation is The Way? No? No violence or whatever?
I appreciate the comment. I did read the entirety of this lengthy diatribe, and if I understand it, I think it may be self-defeating. If seeking to change others' minds is so problematic and divisive, what exactly is this comment seeking to do? /s
All joking aside, I think I shared a sentiment that's somewhat in the same vein. I said this recently in a comment:
outside of polite philosophical discussions and personal interest, I just don't see a place for these [philosophical atheistic] arguments. I don't go around trying to deconvert people anymore than I go around forcing debates on free will upon people. The whole idea seems misguided and cringe.
This article is discussing this subject from the standpoint of academic philosophy, which I know many here are interested in. I've also shared philosophical arguments for theism here. I'm not seeking to "deconvert" anyone; if anything I spend more time here defending arguments for Christian theism from New Atheists who don't understand them. The arguments themselves are what interest me and many others here, not motivated reasoning for a specific worldview or to go on a crusade for theism or atheism.
I'm an atheist, but this argument is pretty unconvincing even to me, and I believe any logical argument against the existence of a god is pointless. Here's my argument against the existence of a useful argument against god's existence:
This feels kind of YHWH centric. Early Hindu/Jain/Bhuddist doctrine was barely a religion from what I gather and was more a philosophy on how to live (yoga school = stretching body and mind good)
I think the thing atheists (myself included) miss a lot is the purpose of religion over its 1000s of years of rule. You hint at it in your first bullet.
We all hold different beliefs in our head. The further I go from my community, the more different the beliefs are. The world and strange things especially are dangerous and risky the further back in time we go. How then do humans trust each other enough to trade goods or culture or blood, etc? A supernatural thing based on faith and not in reality would be a great tool to do that with! Now we can all have something in common and have less a chance to freak out and run from or kill each other.
I think the time for this as a necessity to enable trust is gone, pretty obviously, but to remove it from the equation feels like asking why they didn't just use hardened steel in the bronze age.
This comment has been made multiple times, and I think the argument is doing something far more modest than disproving every possible formulation of theism. I'll quote a reply I made to a similar comment:
And I think I shared a similar sentiment in another reply I made:
I think many if not most Christian traditions, not the least of which being Catholicism, think we can arrive at "Natural Knowledge of God", that reason alone can at least bring us to know that God exists and to know specific attributes of God.
As an agnostic (I think there's good evidence both for and against theism), I'm continuously interested in apologetics and arguments for atheism, and have recently started reading J. L. Schellenberg's book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason because of my interest in his divine hiddenness argument that centers on non-resistant non-belief.
If you are new to this argument, it is commonly argued:
The general thrust of the argument is to ask why is God so hidden from many of us? I personally resonate with this argument as an agnostic who has diligently sought out God (and continue to do so) and still have not found him. Between prayer, going to church, and studying apologetics I would think God would've at some point made his presence known to me. The strongest form of Schellenberg's argument, from the SEP entry:
EDIT: If you are video person, Schellenberg explains this simply and quickly here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hBpZ-ystOg
I'm an agnostic myself (and an ex-evanglical, so I'm familiar with some apologetics) and I'd say this step is where Schellenberg's argument falls apart for me:
I fail to see why one must accept the premise that in order to perfectly love a given person, God must be open to being in a positively meaningful and reciprocal conscious relationship with them at every given time. Perhaps Schellenberg elaborates on this premise in one of the places you link to, but it seems to me that this whole line of argument is extremely weakened by this very narrow definition of "love", to an extent that I'm not even sure it works well as an argument against the evangelical Christian conception of God that this argument seems to take for granted.
For instance, what if there exists a time t in which this God knew person S would not benefit from a reciprocal conscious relationship with God at time t? Why would God necessarily have to be willing to have such a relationship at time t in order for it to be true that God loves person S? Why is it taken for granted that a positively meaningful reciprocal conscious relationship between God and S is possible at every time t?
And the above is only really arguing against this within the framework of a huge number of assumptions about God that are based in modern evangelical Christianity. This definition of "love" falls apart even further when some of those assumptions are discarded (e.g., that this relationship must be conscious and reciprocal).
Yeah, I think this formulation is to preempt objections that non-resistant non-belief is permitted by God to happen for a time before God later enters into a relationship with them. Hopefully when I finish the book and spend more time wrestling with Schellenberg's work I'll have a greater grasp on this formulation of the argument, but I'm better acquainted with the simpler informal argument (P1: If an all loving God exists, non-resistant non-belief would not occur. P2: Non-resistant non-belief does occur. C: An all loving God does not exist.)
This argument is against a specific form of the God of orthodox Christianity. For instance God could be malevolent or indifferent to humans (gnosticism) or God may not be all powerful, and incapable of making his presence known. Perhaps belief in God isn't necessary for salvation. There are a number of ways to avoid hiddenness arguments, but they all seem to be rather unorthodox.
When it comes to the informal argument, I simply don't think P1 is sufficiently obvious as to pass without more thorough explanation. This is why I focused on the Schellenberg argument you included, since it seems to go into more detail as to the formal basis for accepting P1. The problem is that I don't think that this argument is particularly good even against the specific form of God of orthodox Christianity (and I find logical arguments against the existence of God that ignore any traditions outside orthodox Christianity to be weak and annoying more generally). I agree, the formulation scoping over time is clearly an attempt to preempt objections that non-resistant non-belief is permitted by God to happen for a time before God later enters into a relationship with them, but just adding "at every time t" to your definition of "all-loving" with nothing more than "necessarily" to back it up utterly fails to actually argue against that objection. It feels like trying to argue away the existence of an all-loving God solely through creating a very specific definition for "all-loving" rather than actually building arguments based of any common-sense definition thereof.
Yeah there's a lot of hidden assumptions in P1, but the informal argument allows us to move into that conversation if you deny P1.
The problem with this is that Christianity contains many different types of Gods, and a single argument couldn't possibly apply to all of them. For instance, LDS theology holds that there is an infinite regress of Gods. Various gnostic traditions hold that the God who created the material world is either incompetent or malevolent. Then there are forms of Christianity that resemble pantheism.
In general I think making logical arguments against God as described in orthodox Christianity as your arguments against God's existence wholesale is a trait I often see from "Christian atheists", who tend to be ignorant of religions other than orthodox Christianity. Such people do often try to treat arguments that really only fit orthodox Christianity as though they apply to all theism out of this ignorance, and they often do so in ways that are pretty hostile to religious non-Christians. So I'm wary of arguments that are centered around logically disproving specifically the orthodox Christian God.
Respectfully, I think this fundamentally misunderstands what the argument aims to do.
Now, perhaps there's a valid critique of Western philosophy related to this that may hold, which is that arguments for/against the existence of God have centered on the "omni-God," but this isn't new to Shellenberg, this tradition stretches back essentially for the entirety of Western philosophy ~2300+ years. I guess some of these philosophical defenses of this omni-God aren't Christian like Aristotle's unmoved mover, Avicenna's contingency argument for the Muslim God, or Plotinus' response to the problem of evil in the context of Neoplatonism. Pretty much every big name in most Western philosophy touches on the existence of this kind of God.
It'd be breaking from this two millenia long philosophical tradition to argue for some sort of other God, which should be interesting (looking at you Spinoza), but there's definitely a "default" in the Western philosophical tradition.
Then to go further to disprove some other type of God, say, Thor would be... interesting. In absence of a body of philosophy seeking to establish the existence of Thor it'd seem quite silly to me.
My issue is less with the formal philosophy itself and more with how certain atheists attempt to use it as a "gotcha" against people of religions for whom the set of very limited Protestant Christian assumptions used in the philosophy, as here, do not hold. You've already had someone else describe experiencing this in this very thread.
I'm honestly not that interested in logical arguments for or against God more generally, but I am particularly frustrated when these arguments are as constrained to mainstream Protestant theology as this is, because they rarely engage with the Christian theological tradition on the topics they address (does this even touch on Christian theological explanations for non-resistent non-belief, for example?) and they're inevitably used by annoying reddit atheists in conversations that include other sects and religions to which those assumptions don't apply at all.
Yeah, okay I get now what you are driving at.
I'd probably drop the Protestant qualifier since the majority of the body of work in philosophy of religion has been Catholic (maybe monotheism would be a better catch all term), but I agree with the thrust of your concern. Some New Atheist wielding arguments they don't understand against, say, a Hindu or a pagan would be weird and upsetting.
Then again outside of polite philosophical discussions and personal interest, I just don't see a place for these arguments. I don't go around trying to deconvert people anymore than I go around forcing debates on free will upon people. The whole idea seems misguided and cringe.
Monotheism is much too broad -- this "Divine Hiddenness" argument would be absolutely inapplicable to Judaism, for instance.
And yeah I don't think you personally are trying to do any sort of anti-religion apologetics here, it's just that these types of philosophical arguments inevitably get used in them by assholes.
A lot of these are contingent on restricting yourself to a very lay-Christian model of what God is and its role in the universe. If you unburden yourself from that the dilemmas sort of resolve themselves. And it’s not even a truly Christian model, because Christian mystics could take them apart too. And this is a general frustration I have with “atheism” discourse in general. They say “theism” but the only “theos” they seem to care about is a specific, modern Protestant conception of God and scripture and how people (individually and collectively) are meant to engage with divinity.
For example:
What does “love” even mean in the context of an infinite supernatural being? And why would a loving being require belief? If you assume hell then sure, but why assume that? What is even the benefit of belief for a person? If you posit divine grace as something requiring belief then sure, but again that’s a Christian thing.
And furthermore, why even assume that God is “loving?” And why would God being loving be required for God to exist at all? Would it not make much more sense, resolve the dilemmas, and be more plausible to simply determine that God is indifferent?
Neoplatonists would have argued that there isn’t just a God, but many forms and expressions of divinity. There is “The One” (called Hen) which is a completely abstracted and inaccessible form of divinity that’s generally that ultimate cause and encompassing of everything. It exists before being and is not really intelligible because it’s outside the realms of logic and causation as we can understand it. We Hindus would refer to this as Brahman.
This is generally what later Christians would interpret as God. But the original Neoplatonists were pagans, so Proclus goes further and posits the existence of what he calls Henads, which are multiple expressions of The One in various different forms. So you’ll have Zeus, who is a Henad who encompasses all things “Zeusish” and Dionysus encompassing all things Dionysian and so on. There are an infinite number of Henads with infinitely variegated natures and they all exist separately and share in each other’s natures.
Functionally this ends up working as a rich vocabulary for talking about divinity and spiritualism, using the language of metaphor and analogy to be able to grasp at things that operate at the edges of the limits of whatever our evolutionarily composed meat-computers can conceptualize. Some of them can be indifferent, some of them can be loving, some of them can be actively hateful. But between all of them they encompass all the things we experience as part of existence. And we can choose to engage or disengage with whatever parts of it we can’t deal with right now until we’re able to integrate all of it. Since The One is actually too abstracted for anyone (except maybe the most spiritually developed mystics )to really grok, a whole structure of tradition and ritual and practice and metaphor is created to help people form relationships with the aspects of it that can be rendered intelligible.
Well said. I must admit I’m tired of the assumption that seems to underlay so much of, at the very least, the English language discussion of “religion”. Which is that certain strains of very modern Protestant thought are some kind of ur-religion and the only ideas worth paying attention to. This seems especially true in so much of the modern “atheist” movement. Which really just seems to be obsessed with this one particular conception of god and religion and seems to treat it as the end all be all. At the absolute best arguments in this space are picking at low hanging fruit at the worst it’s just boring. Not to mention incredibly ignorant of what is the vast majority of human experience and thought on this topic.
Yeah. The thing I find particularly bothersome is the extent to which it’s absorbed even the religious expressions of non-western traditions like Islam and Hinduism.
The assumption is that whatever form of religious practice adheres to the oldest scriptures of that religion are the “authentic” versions of the religion and everything else is an illegitimate modern interpolation that’s less valid. When interfaith dialogue happens, they will always default to the religious practitioners who are handling scripturalists to have the discussions. When academic papers are written to determine questions like “what does Hinduism say about abortion?” the assumption is that the answer lies in finding a corpus of scripture, pressing ctrl+f, and typing in “abortion” will give you the best answer. It does not.
No one radicalizes because they love something. They do it because they're hurt. A subtractive movement[1] must conform to the trauma that caused it. That can be troublesome for groups that negate the importance of emotion in public discourse. They may convince themselves that their stance is purely mechanical. But the anger is always there. Unaddressed.
[1] A movement that seeks to remove something from society, as opposed to groups that seek to add something. Or groups that view themselves as such regardless of their actual impact.
I also find that they are almost never even actually arguments against what any religion/denomination actually teaches and more just at a generic "I was forced to go to church but I never listened" level at best. It's very frustrating having people pile on with these very basic, easily dismissed arguments who shout you down when you point out basic flaws in their assumptions. And then they act like everyone who is religious is an idiot because science without actually understanding that science can't disprove philosophy--and, indeed, is itself just another philosophy!
Yeah, there are a lot of responses to this argument. One goal I suppose of presenting these sorts of syllogisms in the context of the philosophy of religion is to force the other side to deny a premise where denying the premise raises or lowers one's credence in the overall worldview. This is also true the other way around with syllogisms for God's existence: if a theist can get atheists to concede that things can come from nothing or that objective moral values don't exist, then the arguments did serve the function of potentially decreasing one's credence in atheism.
There are lots of modifications we can make to God's attributes to evade hiddenness arguments. God may be unknowable, or numerically identical with nature, or may lack certain powers, or may even be indifferent or malevolent, but these would be very interesting places for a theist to go when presented with an argument from divine hiddenness.
I think that’s my issue with most of them. They’re formulated from a default Christian worldview but I often see them deployed as “gotchas” which, as a Hindu, I usually just shrug because I don’t accept the premises and nothing about my spiritual experiences have ever required me to.
For what it’s worth, many Hindus do accept the premises and posit a more personal and loving God. I just personally subscribe to a more cosmicist view on things. I think our Hindu sages did too but distilled things down to a personal level to help people be able to relate to the aspects of it that can help them find peace in their day to day if reconciling the cosmic scale of existence is too much for them. Cosmic horror and cosmic wonder are mostly just a matter of your mental state and it’s understandable that many people simply can’t get from the first to the second.
This is why I think polytheistic/polycentric approaches are good. They allow for the existence of a multiplicity of expressions and experiences of the sacred without needing to constrain it to a specific doctrine, moral code, or set of expectations. There can be a great many such things all based on people’s direct experiences with sacred things. Our Hindu rituals and practices aren’t really based on making sure you believe the right things, they’re more focused on cultivating healthy cognitive habits that are conducive to feeling more spiritually fulfilled. The practice is what does it, not the intellectual framework of philosophy we put the practice in.
There have been about half a dozen comments to this effect. Shellenberg's argument is far more modest than disproving all possible formulations of theism and only applies to one specific type.
Full thought here: https://tildes.net/~humanities/1gr8/divine_hiddenness_argument_against_gods_existence#comment-cwjq
Disclaimer: I'm approaching this as a believer, albeit a believer who is very open to being wrong and pretty comfortable with doubt.
One thing I don't love about this argument (and most arguments for and against the existence of God) is that it is extremely reductive, in that it assumes that our knowledge of what/who God is or must be is complete and so we have all of the facts needed to reason about Him.
It hinges on the assumptions that,
a. God is capable of directly being in reciprocal and conscious relationship with all/most people.
b. Most people are capable of being directly in relationship with God.
I don't think these are givens. The Christian tradition (at least the parts before/other than modern evangelicalism) has a healthy amount of skepticism about humankind's capability of being in direct relationship with God. The common belief is that He provides a number of proxies through which a relationship can happen, the greatest of which are the person of Jesus, who was in some way both divine and human, and the indwelling of the Spirit. Both of these (either personally or corporately depending on what branch of Christianity you're talking about) provide a means for humans to have some level of limited communion with God.
I realize that might be unsatisfying or seem like an evasion of the problem, but I think it's at least worth considering that there is some limitation, either on the part of humans or God, that prevents a more direct relationship from occurring for most people, most of the time.
If this is false then god is either not omnipotent or not omnipresent. Both are critical attributes of the Abrahamic god. The use of "love" here flags that we're talking about that concept of god. It seems to me that a counter example to the argument doesn't fit with the modern (western) concept of god. Are theists willing to accept a constrained being as god?
As some one who grew up devoutly religious and now somewhere between agnostic and atheist depending on the day I am open to the existence of more advanced beings in the universe. But without omnipotent and omnipresent I wouldn't be able to name those beings gods. Heck, if existence of an omnipresent and omnipotent being could be proven I don't see any reason that god must love humans. I build and create a lot of things I don't love.
God as ultimately being “the creator” is itself an Abrahamic position. In most Indo-European religions the force(s) responsible for creating the universe either recuse themselves or are actually killed by the Gods they create at some point before they go on to shape the world itself.
In Hinduism, for example, Brahma is the creative force in the trinity but he is explicitly not worshipped because his role in things is considered to be over. In fact, the “creator” continuing to be involved in the created world is characterized as an extremely inappropriate violation. In the oldest hymns, it is characterized as a form of forcible incest and the Gods strike the creator deity down for attempting it.
It’s not just Hindu either. Ymir is one of the primeval forces of creation and the Aesir must first kill him to form the sky and and the Earth for us to live in. Zeus must kill Cronos and the Titans before the world can be made safe for people. Even the Gnostics believed that the Yahweh being worshipped is actually an “evil” sort of “Demiurge” holding people in a sort of illusory prison and not the real God.
Interestingly, this is not a coincidence. All three of these religions can be traced back to a single Proto-Indo-European mythology.
It's a real shame that we don't have more information about prehistoric conceptions of the world. I guess that's just the nature of studying prehistoric peoples — if they wrote things down, they wouldn't be prehistoric!
Eh, I think you're overstating your case that a particular way of thinking about omnipotence is critical to Judeo-Christian theology. There are different ways of defining omnipotence in theology, even among those who accept that as a necessary attribute of divinity (and there are a few, although not many, who don't). There's omnipotence in the sense of god being capable of doing literally anything, even if it's non-causal, paradoxical, or against his nature. There's the more common definition of omnipotence as capable of anything that is not intrinsically impossible/self contradictory. Then, there's omnipotence in the sense of a diety being capable of anything that is within his nature - e.g. a god that is described as perfectly truthful may be seen as not capable of lying. Or, for example, in some Calvinist thought, where god is seen as being perfectly just and is therefor incapable of mingling with that which is unjust, i.e. imperfect humanity, unless some step is taken to atone for that imperfection.
There's something funny to me about the evolution of Christian theology, particularly if you look back at its foundations in the pre-Christian era of Hebrew mythology. The conception of Yahweh changes enormously over time. From being one God among many to being the only God; and from a God that, like many, inflicts great "evil" upon humanity to one that is "perfectly good." This is mirrored in how God cannot merely be powerful, he must be all-powerful. He cannot be wise, he must be perfectly wise. And so forth.
I think there are two different motivations for this trend. The first is a desire to avoid offending God by implying that he has any sort of limitations. The second is all too human desire to simplify complex problems. Instead of having to wonder what the limits of God's love, power, and vision are, it's easier if you just say he doesn't have any limits — he is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. Granted, this raises other issues (like the problem of evil), but makes things simpler for a lot of believers.
At the most basic level, I don't think there is anything about the Abrahamic understanding of a divine creator that necessitates such properties. It could very well be that God is capable of creating the universe but can't see all of it at all times and cannot read the thoughts of human beings within this creation. It could very well be that God could create the universe but not have unlimited power to change any and all aspects of it. And it could very well be that God has some sort of affection for humanity but not what could be described as "perfect love" for humanity. Or perhaps God cares about humanity but not every individual person enough to intervene in their lives.
One of these days I'm going to get around to studying the psychology of religion, particularly across different cultures. But it's a hard enough thing to study that I'm not sure if there is any good research on it.
Awesome, thank you for providing the higher resolution. I'll admit this "Divine Hiddenness" argument isn't very compelling to me. Precisely for this reason, it seems overfit to a certain conception of god.
I would say that setting our own constraints on a deity based on our own understanding of what love is would be pointless. If God can't do something, we would never know because we don't know the difference between inability and a choice to not do something. Every human has a unique set of values, why can't a supreme deity have his own set?
This is true, and I think Schellenberg would agree there are a lot of ways to dodge this argument by redefining God's attributes (though likely in unorthodox ways.) For instance the malevolent creator of gnosticism would not be subject to this argument, neither would a God that lacks certain powers to make themself known or lacks the ability to enter into relationships with humans.
This is a good point, though I wonder if you are committed to saying that non-resistant non-belief still does not occur, but that allegedly non-resistant non-believers actually have a relationship through some proxy? I haven't spent too much time thinking about this argument (yet), but I'd imagine belief in God is a necessary condition of a relationship with God for most Christian traditions.
Partly this depends on who you ask and when, but it is far from universally true. Much like with gravity, belief is hardly required for relationship. But without amy consciousness of gravity, it is baffling why rocks fall and birds fly. But conscious effort to understand leads to an ability to travel to the moon.
So it could also be with god. God does as god will. What that means, and how it can work with/for us, largely depends on our own willingness to be faithful.
I'm not totally sure I have a good answer for this, which is something I've had to make peace with in the last few years. I do think that there are some ideas that address these concerns, like forms of universalism that I've encountered since leaving evangelical churches, but I certainly don't know all the answers.
I'm unmoved by the 'nonbelief' aspect of this argument. Instead why not talk about evidence? It's a small distinction but it sidesteps a lot of avenues the conversation otherwise takes.
It seems to me that a God who has particular ideas about how people should behave (which is all of the concepts of God that I'm aware of) would want to provide evidence of their existence in order to encourage more people to follow the commandments (or whatever).
And indeed, earlier in the bible there is evidence provided, angels, burning bushes and so on. Then nothing for 1000's of years.
Which brings us to modern times, with no evidence outside of an ancient text written by people. That seems like a big ask on God's part:
"Look ya'll are flawed, we all know it, but you're going to need to rely on therefore necessarily flawed information from a text so old that it was written in now dead languages, the translation of which is debated and contentious.
A text so self contradictory and convoluted that you'll need to rely on the interpretation of still more people to make sense of what it's trying to tell you."
People are unreliable sources of information, if you want to recreate a reasonably accurate picture of an event you need to average the recollection of a lot of observers to have any hope of getting it right. So how is it fair or reasonable to expect a single collection of texts to be enough for the modern audience?
Alternatively God could periodically provide evidence, which they could of course do at scale. Based on the bible, this is something they are not against doing. That's the key bit to me, if we can't say that God isn't providing evidence because it isn't their style, what argument do we have for its lack?
All of that being said I do understand the 'nonbelief' angle if instead we posit that God prefers personal relationships with their followers and so appears in a different way to each person. That does then beg the question "why is that relationship missing for so many people?". The text certainly makes it seem as though when God shows up you know it.
If instead we say that part of God's game is that it isn't supposed to be obvious, under the premise that your faith is how you earn God's love (or whatever you're meant to want from God). In that case God is kind of a dick.
Yeah, I find it rather amusing that, under modern interpretations of Christianity, God used to make big, obvious gestures that made his power and existence apparent, but mysteriously stopped doing that around 2,000 years ago. Around the same time that belief suddenly became a very important virtue for him, in fact. It's entirely too easy to imagine the selective pressure on a religion like early Christianity. If belief without evidence is important, it reinforces the (evidence-less) religion while competing interpretations that don't espouse the importance of blind faith for orthodoxy die out.
In light of all of that, if we are to take the claims of mainstream Christianity seriously, God is apparently an asshole. He stacks the cards against people with critical thinking skills by making the One True Faith look virtually indistinguishable from all other forms of religious belief and then gets mad when people find the lack of evidence for it damning. To the point of torturing for eternity anyone who has the audacity of being rational and requiring evidence for belief, as we might in any other context. It's almost comical to then pair that with the mainstream Christian belief that God is "all-loving." That behavior sounds sadistic and/or like a deliberate ploy to cultivate only a very specific type of person in paradise.
When I was struggling with my faith as a Catholic young adult over 20 years ago, I rather liked this quote from Galileo: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect intended us to forgo their use." It became basically my motto as I delved into apologetics. But over time, it became harder and harder to maintain belief in the face of what "sense, reason, and intellect" made so obvious (i.e., to quote Carl Sagan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," something Christianity both lacks and is actively antagonistic towards).
Often, Christians attacking this argument often misunderstand this argument to be about evidence when in fact it's about belief, which may or may not result from evidence.
There are a number of theodicies that can be slightly tweaked to respond to this evidence argument. Also, maybe people are blind to certain evidence non-resistently. Maybe people make cognitive errors and fail to apprehend evidence even if there's enough for belief.
We can sidestep that entire conversation and move straight to what the evidence is supposed to give us: belief. Scripture makes it clear we have sufficient evidence for theism. This makes non-resistent non-belief that much stronger of an argument.
What kind of evidence do you see for theism?
There's a lot, but what's most personally convincing would be the argument from consciousness, followed by argument(s) from motion/causation, followed by moral arguments, followed by design arguments. In short, philosophical arguments. I unfortunately have no personal experience of the divine, nor am I convinced there's scientific reasons to believe.
"We don't understand the nature of consciousness" does nothing to prove God is real
Another false conflation of a lack of understanding with proof of the divine
Morality is subjective
Evolution?
It’s also a case of “turtles, all the way down.” There’s no justification for the unmoved mover.
It'd be a bit ambitious to defend these four arguments at once, considering one could do a PhD in any one of these. As a former New Atheist, maybe I can shed some light on why I find these so compelling.
Arguments from Consciousness didn't really hit for me until I properly understood the hard problem of consciousness. It's important that "The Hard Problem" was first articulated by David Chalmers, a self-described naturalist. I'd try to lay it out here, but it's famously difficult to articulate.
Specifically, the argument from motion merely shows that a consequence of Aristotelian metaphysics (that change is the actualization of potential) is that it entails that there is some ground of pure actuality at the base of reality. Edward Faser has done some work on a particularly strong version of this argument, but again we could spend an entire day working out linear vs hierarchical change or the details of the metaphysics.
Yeah I think if you are a naturalist, you are committed to this view. Actually, I think something like moral antirealism is most expected under naturalism.
Specifically fine tuning arguments related to the fundamental constants of the universe. We have no reason to think they must be as they are, yet if they were off by incomprehensibly small amounts life, planets, anything couldn't form.
If there is a particular argument you are interested in learning more about (and why a one-time atheist would have ever put stock in it) I'd love to hear it. Also my pm is an option depending on the context.
I ask this out of genuine ignorance and curiosity: do we have any particular reason to believe that the fundamental constants of the universe even can vary? That is, do we have any reason to believe that they could have been different? Because if that's not the case, then it seems to me like it doesn't even make sense to talk about the fundamental constants just happening to have the right values: maybe they could never have done otherwise.
Alternatively, if the fundamental constants of the universe vary and we live in some kind of, say, inflationary multiverse, then the fact that we happen to life in a universe suited for life is just a consequence of the anthropic principle.
I have heard multiple forms of this and don't think they hold water philosophically, I think it begs the question. Metaphysically, they could have been otherwise, and we have no reason philosophically or from physics to state that they must be these exact values. All of that to say, in the absence of compelling reasons to assume something must be necessary, we should assume that it is not.
Some of the best arguments for naturalism over theism are that naturalism provides a simpler, more parsimonious explanation of the evidence in some area. Think something like Occam's Razor. I am not sure one can be rationally justified in believing in an inflationary multiverse if there are simpler views with equivalent explanatory power due to the inherent infinite complexity of the view.
Yeah, I think this is the only argument the atheist can reasonably make as far as I can tell. It doesn't feel very satisfying to me for some reason. I suppose it works to say why I was born on Earth, rather than Venus, but doesn't help me with the fundamental constants. Perhaps that's just a difference of intuitions though.
There is always the free will argument. The moment God shows himself up, it becomes the classic interference in the mundane course of action which makes the whole spontaneous free willed action pointless, isn't it?
BTW I think agnosticism is the wisest and smartest position to be in right now.
Calvinists have debated this exact point. They don't generally believe the concept of free will is compatible with God's divine Providence. One possible solution by Catholics is Molinism, where God knows before creation how free beings would act in any given possible world, and creates the one that has the most goods. This is often called God's "Middle Knowledge", but I may be misrepresenting it, if a Catholic would like to clear this up.
The free will argument is a later invention that I would argue is incompatible with any version of Christianity that asserts that the Bible is at all an accurate recounting of God's actions. God was perfectly willing to interfere with the universe early on, often in grandiose ways. Why did he suddenly stop? Why did noninterference suddenly become very important to him? Particularly when (blind) faith appeared as a virtue?
If you need a simple proof to break the YHWH stuff, may I suggest:
Another interesting one is Christianity being polytheistic in a couple of ways.
My favorite story about that is Arians who saw this logic gap and decided OT God and NT God must be different since they're eternal and so fundamentally different. They were swiftly excommunicated of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianism
There's almost 2000 years worth of responses to this problem in the philosophical world from Neoplatonists, Christians, and Muslims. On balance it still seems to be the best argument for atheism though. I actually consider the argument from divine hiddenness to be a subset of the problem of evil.
Yeah, there was definitely Greek influence on Trinitarian theology. I'm not especially well-read on this kinda thing, but gnostics, for instance, believed in The One who emanated other divine beings. Ultimately they are of one substance, and will return to The One from which they emanated. One "God", many persons. Similar lines of thought exist in Neoplatonism which was also contemporaneous with early Christianity. I'd still argue all of this is considered to be monotheistic but with caveats.
Are you confusing them with Marcionism? Interestingly, this line of thinking was prevalent in Christianity for the few centuries that the gnostics were around (the OT God is thought to be a malevolent demiurge.)
Yes! The Marcions -- Thank you. I always mix up my early Christian sects for some reason
I haven't read either but the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is generally considered more accessible. Article here. Both are around 9300 words if you discount the references and extraneous text elements. There is also a 3500-word Wikipedia article.
I agree, I should've linked the IEP instead. Idk if that can be changed by a moderator or someone? The only parts of the SEP entry I linked that I specifically cared about were the portions detailing Schellenberg's argument from non-resistant non-belief.
Switched them for you.
Thank you!
Ants don’t know about nuclear bombs or believe in them but they still exist and have unfathomable power that can shape the world they live in. If there are celestial beings out there, I wouldn’t think that a lesser species such as humans can comprehend what they are doing or even recognize the things they see are divine in nature. Our whole understanding of physics and science could be based on something a god is doing like an experiment and we would never know.
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. What are the odds that an ant operating on no evidence whatsoever would be able to accurately surmise the existence and nature of nuclear weapons? Pretty low, I would think. So it seems no coincidence that as our knowledge advances, old theories and ideas about how the universe works are rendered obsolete by new, better theories that conform to the growing body of available evidence.
This is why the burden of proof starts with he who is making the initial claim. Otherwise, I can go around telling everyone that there is a jar of pickles in orbit around Jupiter and argue that it's true because nobody is able to disprove it.
On top of that, creationist theories are architected in a way that precludes them from making testable predictions, making them fundamentally unscientific. If a theory is not built on real world evidence and is incapable of making accurate predictions, what value does it actually have?
While this is important, I feel like its importance is overstated a lot. People take "dismissal" as "proof to the contrary" and don't see the irony. Yes, it can be dismissed, but it doesn't have to be dismissed and it doesn't mean we should stop being curious.
What a dull world it would be if everything had to make testable predictions! Science is not everything. It is just its own extensible system of philosophy. It tells us how to think about what we can observe and nothing more. It can't tell us if love is real or how the Sun feels on your skin on the first nice day of the year or if people are lying during the studies you tried to run in order to scientifically determine how the Sun feels on your skin on the first nice day of the year.
I never said science is everything, but when people come to me and say science is wrong about X because they believe Y, then they have made it a scientific issue and I will use scientific thinking to discredit it.
It's fine for people to believe whatever they want, I take issue when they start trying to mix that in with real science. See: the rash of state legislatures that tried shoehorning creationism and divine intervention into science classrooms in the '00s.
I grew up going to church where my Sunday school teachers and priesthood leaders would make "scientific" claims about how the theory of evolution is wrong and the earth is 6,000 years old. They were incapable of reconciling their personal beliefs with the world around them in a rational manner. I don't think believing the Earth is 6,000 years old would make my life less dull. If anything, exploring our constantly evolving understanding of the history of the Earth and the universe consistently provides me with a kind of joy that I don't think is possible under a completely static belief system.
Yeah I see what you are getting at. This argument doesn't really establish that theism in general is false, but that one very specific kind of theism is.
I have to agree with burkaman here in that I think this argument is too weak to be of any use.
I have spoken with many believers and debated some of them. Ultimately, faith is the cornerstone of their beliefs. It doesn't matter how many arguments you throw at them: faith is inherently tied to their ideology.
In that sense, I feel like they would answer such an argument with something like this: God chooses not to show Himself, in order for him to test our faith. Non-belief occurs because people choose not to have faith.
I have cornered some believers in the past, but you cannot win over someone who believes faith (which in a sense could be defined as believing without proof) or lack of faith dictates one's identity. In some eyes, faith is access to God, it's access to paradise. His hiddeness is just a test of faith.
For many if not most believers, reason and faith are inseparable. The Catholic Church teaches this explicitly. Christian intellectuals nearly universally think we can use reason to establish the existence of God.
It's a small point, but I've never had a thought-provoking or mind-changing conversation that involved either party "cornering" or "winning". If someone is caught off-guard, they probably aren't going to give the most thought-out responses.
Just to your failure to find god, what are your criteria for recognition?
I’m sure you’ve heard the joke about the man who drowned waiting for god to save him from the flood.
At 2’ flooding, his friends came by in a monster truck to get him. “No,” he said. “God will save me.”
At 8’, a boat came by to get him. “No,” he said. “God will save me.”
At 30’, the water was neck high as he stood on the rooof. A helicopter from the national guard came to get him. “No,” he said. “God will save me.”
Of course he drowned. At the pearly gates, he asked st peter, i was a man of faith, why didn’t god save me?” St peter’s reply, “We sent you a truck, a boat, even gorram helicopter! What more did you want?!”
Probably not a satisfying answer, but I'm not sure why I haven't "found" God. If "criteria of recognition" means something like what it would take to convince me that God exists, the strict answer is that I'm not sure.
One option could be some syllogism I haven't heard before. I've spent over a decade a hardcore materialist, and had my mind changed relatively quickly (and very recently) by various syllogistic arguments related to the hard problem of consciousness.
Another option may be some personal religious experience. If God spoke to me, or otherwise made his presence apparent to me, I think I'd find that totally convincing. Lot's of believers have had these sorts of experiences and base their faith on it, probably far more than have been convinced by some syllogism.
However ultimately I can't know what would change my mind. It's a total mystery to me why I was convinced by the Knowledge Argument against physicalism (materialism). It seems to be something about my psychological constitution that some arguments land with me and others don't.
I'm sure you're aware of the proposition that we don't recognize some exorbitant percentage of the experiences we encounter, and of that percentage, some exorbitant percentage we don't even register as existing. The remaining percentage, we often wrongly identify it as something we do recognize. This is an ongoing issue with eyewitness testimony, "unidentified aerial phenomena," "unidentified non-aerial phenonomena," etc.
I challenge you that it will be impossible for you to have any direct connection to god if you have not put in considerable effort to train your consciousness to experience the unrecognizable. It's kind of like those magic eye puzzles. The images are not hidden or obfuscated in any way, we merely have to relax our eye's typical convergence to see. Another example is the wind on the ocean. To me, it's random and chaotic. But a sailor (the actual sailboat kind) looks across the ocean and can see the windspeed and direction for the next 5 minutes. I don't know whether there is any god, but I cannot say there is not until I can say I have made every attempt to see.
My favorite part about this story is that it leads us to assume that St. Peter has been watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica.
You can't "prove" love any more than you can prove, or disprove, faith or God (any God, whatever he/she/it might be named by the "followers").
Some atheists and agnostics are just as obnoxious and problematic as some of the faithful. They get it in their heads that they must convert people to their way of thinking? Why? Because people crave validation. For many, it's not enough that they've come up with a belief or decision that works for them. They have to see and know and live others agreeing with them. That validation allows them to feel even more secure and confident in their belief, lets them feel more right.
So really all the non-faith positions are basically faith in a different form. It's just a matter of what you put your faith in.
Actions are what's problematic. If someone wakes up every morning and prays, or meditates, or does yoga, or sits writing a daily affirmation, or goes for a walk while contemplating the beauty of the universe, or paces around enjoying imagining what horrors they'd inflict upon their enemies should they have the chance ... that's between them and themselves.
It's not enough for so many people that others might be acting in agreeable ways. No, they have to take it too far and try to shape minds. Shape people as people. They want you to think as they think, believe as they believe. They won't leave you be so long as you're just a quiet person living a life, they have to change you because they're right and they're going to prove it to you.
That's an action, and that's problematic. You're (attempting to/ hoping to) force someone else to do as you desire.
Someone who conducts themselves agreeably, within the boundaries of their society, is a normal person. Non-problematic. When they take it upon themselves to change others, they're venturing into areas where they can find themselves over the line.
Worse, many of the problems of modern society source from this very thing. People today have powerful far reaching tools to utilize when they decide they're not going to let others just be. That they can't countenance someone else who hasn't toed the line the busybody has decided they should.
These days, you can craft a website or video or tweet or post, tag names and pictures to it, and go about trying to build a crusade all from the comfort of your living room. "These people don't believe as I believe. As I believe they should believe. They're wrong. They must change. I must make them change."
Do or do not. Doing doesn't require publicity. Validation does though. You stand up and speak because you want agreement. If you just wanted action, you'd be busy doing. But if you speak, you're looking to convince and sway and coerce. Worse, you're looking for that dopamine rush from others reaching out to you to say "yeah, I agree" and "you're right" and "wow, finally someone said it."
At its core, Faith is just another form of societal power. Same as government. Which is why, if you read back through history, faith/religion comes up so often. Not because historians decided faith is cool or something. No, because faith is A Major Thing that shapes Large Groups Of People. Which faith, how strong, were there opposing faiths, did people disagree, what happened when they did, what were the faith's tenants, who controlled the faith ... for society, for a nation or nation state or large societal grouping of people, faith is just one of the ways people decide to knit themselves together with.
Everyone has cliques. Skateboarding, gardening, movies, whatever. Fandom. And Faith (including lack of Faith). They love something, and not in a very dismissive casual way. They love it enough to spend time on it. They'll think about it, consider and ponder it, they'll often study it, and even seek to discuss it and what they've come up with about it with others who are into it too.
Faith is the same thing. So is atheism or agnosticism. It's a belief system (choosing not to believe is a belief system). And it's something that people can bond over. When they do that, they're validating one another, and that makes them feel closer to each other. Those kinds of bonds allow nations and movements to rise and fall all across history.
And most of the time, the rising and falling is driven, instigated, by people who disagree on what they believe. They might believe in a certain tax policy, they might believe in classism, they might believe in God, they might believe in Santa Claus, they might believe the people of the forests are more worthy and just than the people of the rivers. Whatever. It's always something.
But People hate when others disagree with them. They can't just let and let live; they have to be right. So, sometimes, often, the validating group will validate itself up to the point of starting to lash out.
Sometimes that lashing comes physically, violently. Sometimes it'll come via harsh words and strong language, as they seek to convince "unbelievers" to right their wicked ways and believe as the believers do.
Doing that in the name of God is no different than doing it in the name of "There is No God." It's no different than doing it in the name of "Labor builds the country so we're going to be in charge now" or "the rich are wealthy for a reason so we should listen to them when they give direction."
Whatever it is, it's still a belief, and it's still someone somewhere who decided they needed to feel validated by speaking up to convince others they're right. That their way is The Way, and that everyone else should change to The Way.
It's always stupid and problematic. Most of humanity's problems start with humanity. We're always our own worst enemy. We can't just leave each other alone. No, we have to be right, and we have to force others to be right in the right way.
Why do you see, so often, the lament that "if only aliens would appear, humanity could unite." Because, even unconsciously, most people know that validation drives unity at the cost of divisiveness. Right now, humanity has only its own differences to fixate on and fight over. But give us Martians, and suddenly some feel many of us would be eager to self-validate over "we're humans, they're not" and it would act as a way to remove so many common obstacles we throw up in our own path.
Except we'd fight over that too. Humanity might very well ease up on the internal validation strife, but it could just be replaced with disagreement over the Martians. Do we follow them, ignore them, worship them, fight them, talk nice to them, talk stern to them, what? So really, if Martians land, the validation problem wouldn't go away, it'd just shift to being validation conflict over The Martian Issue instead of Christian vs Muslim vs Jew vs Atheists vs LeaveUsAloners vs whoever the fuck.
Basically, everyone needs to leave everyone else alone. Which they're not gonna do, of course, because that would be admitting they're wrong. They've been validation seeking for so long, you see; to just stop would be to admit they wasted all that time. That it was over something which shouldn't, doesn't, matter. Can't have that. That's the opposite of validation; that doesn't make me feel nice, it makes me feel horrible. Lash out, rabble rabble rabble, crusade!
People would usually rather be angry, than wrong. Setting out to shit all over someone's (non-problematic) believes is setting out to prove them wrong. It shouldn't be a surprise when they get angry. Are they being problematic when they believe flower gardens and morning meditation is The Way? No? No violence or whatever?
Maybe they should be left alone to believe as they like then?
Oh, now you're angry though. Because you believe your belief in non-belief is The Way. Great. Guess that's one more war. Always starts because people get angry.
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I appreciate the comment. I did read the entirety of this lengthy diatribe, and if I understand it, I think it may be self-defeating. If seeking to change others' minds is so problematic and divisive, what exactly is this comment seeking to do? /s
All joking aside, I think I shared a sentiment that's somewhat in the same vein. I said this recently in a comment:
This article is discussing this subject from the standpoint of academic philosophy, which I know many here are interested in. I've also shared philosophical arguments for theism here. I'm not seeking to "deconvert" anyone; if anything I spend more time here defending arguments for Christian theism from New Atheists who don't understand them. The arguments themselves are what interest me and many others here, not motivated reasoning for a specific worldview or to go on a crusade for theism or atheism.