Each of these arguments employs the same specific strategy, which is to argue that some alternative hypothesis to omni-theism is many times more probable than omni-theism. In the case of the second argument, the alternative hypothesis aesthetic deism is arguably a form of theism, and even in the case of the first argument it is arguable that the alternative hypothesis source physicalism is compatible with some forms of theism in particular ones in which God is an emergent entity.
This is not a problem for either argument, however, precisely because both are arguments for local atheism instead of global atheism.
This is said to follow because theism starts out with a very low probability before taking into account any evidence. Since ambiguous or absent evidence has no effect on that prior or intrinsic probability, the posterior or all-things-considered probability of theism is also very low. If, however, theism is very probably false, then atheism must be very probably true and this implies according to the defender of the argument that atheistic belief is justified.
This last alleged implication is examined in section 7. The low priors argument implicitly addresses this important issue in a much more sophisticated and promising way. Unlike ontological physicalism, source physicalism is a claim about the source of mental entities, not about their nature. Source physicalists, whether they are ontological physicalists or ontological dualists, believe that the physical world existed before the mental world and caused the mental world to come into existence, which implies that all mental entities are causally dependent on physical entities.
Further, even if they are ontological dualists, source physicalists need not claim that mental entities never cause physical entities or other mental entities, but they must claim that there would be no mental entities were it not for the prior existence and causal powers of one or more physical entities. The argument proceeds as follows:. The other steps in the argument all clearly follow from previous steps.
A thorough examination of the arguments for and against premise 1 is obviously impossible here, but it is worth mentioning that a defense of this premise need not claim that the known facts typically thought by natural theologians to favor omni-theism over competing hypotheses like source physicalism have no force.
Instead, it could be claimed that whatever force they have is offset at least to some significant degree by more specific facts favoring source physicalism over omni-theism. More precisely, the point is this. Even when natural theologians successfully identify some general fact about a topic that is more probable given omni-theism than given source physicalism, they ignore other more specific facts about that same topic, facts that, given the general fact , appear to be significantly more probable given source physicalism than given omni-theism.
For example, even if omni-theism is supported by the general fact that the universe is complex, one should not ignore the more specific fact, discovered by scientists, that underlying this complexity at the level at which we experience the universe, is a much simpler early universe from which this complexity arose, and also a much simpler contemporary universe at the micro-level, one consisting of a relatively small number of different kinds of particles all of which exist in one of a relatively small number of different states.
In short, it is important to take into account, not just the general fact that the universe that we directly experience with our senses is extremely complex, but also the more specific fact that two sorts of hidden simplicity within the universe can explain that complexity. Given that a complex universe exists, this more specific fact is exactly what one would expect on source physicalism, because, as the best natural theologians e. There is, however, no reason at all to expect this more specific fact on omni-theism since, if those same natural theologians are correct, then a simple God provides a simple explanation for the observed complexity of the universe whether or not that complexity is also explained by any simpler mediate physical causes.
Another example concerns consciousness. Its existence really does seem to be more likely given omni-theism than given source physicalism and thus to raise the ratio of the probability of omni-theism to the probability of source physicalism. But we know a lot more about consciousness than just that it exists. We also know, thanks in part to the relatively new discipline of neuroscience, that conscious states in general and even the very integrity of our personalities, not to mention the apparent unity of the self, are dependent to a very high degree on physical events occurring in the brain.
Given the general fact that consciousness exists, we have reason on source physicalism that we do not have on theism to expect these more specific facts. Given theism, it would not be surprising at all if our minds were more independent of the brain than they in fact are. Thus, when the available evidence about consciousness is fully stated, it is far from clear that it significantly favors omni-theism. Arguably, given that fine-tuning is required for intelligent life and that an omni-God has reason to create intelligent life, we have more reason to expect fine-tuning on omni-theism than on source physicalism.
Given such fine-tuning, however, it is far more surprising on omni-theism than on source physicalism that our universe is not teeming with intelligent life and that the most impressive intelligent organisms we know to exist are merely human: self-centered and aggressive primates who far too often kill, rape, and torture each other. In fairness to omni-theism, however, most of those humans are moral agents and many have religious experiences apparently of God.
And while religious experiences apparently of God are no doubt more to be expected if an omni-God exists than if human beings are the product of blind physical forces, it is also true that, given that such experiences do occur, various facts about their distribution that should be surprising to theists are exactly what one would expect on source physicalism, such as the fact that many people never have them and the fact that those who do have them almost always have either a prior belief in God or extensive exposure to a theistic religion.
It seems, then, that when it comes to evidence favoring omni-theism over source physicalism, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Further, when combined with the fact that what we know about the level of well-being of sentient beings and the extent of their suffering is arguably vastly more probable on source physicalism than on theism, a very strong though admittedly controversial case for premise 1 can be made.
What about premise 2? Again, a serious case can be made for its truth. Such a case first compares source physicalism, not to omni-theism, but to its opposite, source idealism.
Source idealists believe that the mental world existed before the physical world and caused the physical world to come into existence. This view is consistent with both ontological idealism and ontological dualism, and also with physical entities having both physical and mental effects.
It entails, however, that all physical entities are, ultimately, causally dependent on one or more mental entities, and so is not consistent with ontological physicalism. The symmetry of source physicalism and source idealism is a good pro tanto reason to believe they are equally probable intrinsically. They are equally specific, they have the same ontological commitments, neither can be formulated more elegantly than the other, and each appears to be equally coherent and equally intelligible.
For example, it adds the claim that a single mind created the physical universe and that this mind is not just powerful but specifically omnipotent and not just knowledgeable but specifically omniscient. In addition, it presupposes a number of controversial metaphysical and meta-ethical claims by asserting in addition that this being is both eternal and objectively morally perfect.
If any of these specific claims and presuppositions is false, then omni-theism is false. Thus, omni-theism is a very specific and thus intrinsically very risky form of source idealism, and thus is many times less probable intrinsically than source idealism.
Therefore, if, as argued above, source physicalism and source idealism are equally probable intrinsically, then it follows that premise 2 is true: source physicalism is many times more probable intrinsically than omni-theism.
Notice that the general strategy of the particular version of the low priors argument discussed above is to find an alternative to omni-theism that is much less specific than omni-theism and partly for that reason much more probable intrinsically , while at the same time having enough content of the right sort to fit the totality of the relevant data at least as well as theism does. In other words, the goal is to find a runner like source physicalism that begins the race with a large head start and thus wins by a large margin because it runs the race for supporting evidence and thus for probability at roughly the same speed as omni-theism does.
An alternative strategy is to find a runner that begins the race tied with omni-theism, but runs the race for evidential support much faster than omni-theism does, thus once again winning the race by a margin that is sufficiently large for the rest of the argument to go through. The choice of alternative hypothesis is crucial here just as it was in the low priors argument.
Another would be a more detailed version of source physicalism that, unlike source physicalism in general, makes the relevant data antecedently much more probable than theism does. Thus, it may be stipulated that, like omni-theism, aesthetic deism implies that an eternal, non-physical, omnipotent, and omniscient being created the physical world.
The only difference, then, between the God of omni-theism and the deity of aesthetic deism is what motivates them. An omni-theistic God would be morally perfect and so strongly motivated by considerations of the well-being of sentient creatures. An aesthetic deistic God, on the other hand, would prioritize aesthetic goods over moral ones. While such a being would want a beautiful universe, perhaps the best metaphor here is not that of a cosmic artist, but instead that of a cosmic playwright: an author of nature who wants above all to write an interesting story.
Further, containing such a line is hardly necessary for a story to be good. After all, what makes a good story good is often some intense struggle between good and evil, and all good stories contain some mixture of benefit and harm. This suggests that the observed mixture of good and evil in our world decisively favors aesthetic deism over omni-theism. This makes no difference as far as the inference from step 4 to step 5 is concerned.
That inference, like the inferences from steps 1 — 3 to step 4 and from step 5 to step 6 , is clearly correct. The key question, then, is whether premises 1 , 2 , and 3 are all true. In spite of the nearly complete overlap between omni-theism and aesthetic deism, Richard Swinburne 96— would challenge premise 1 on the grounds that aesthetic deism, unlike omni-theism, must posit a bad desire to account for why the deity does not do what is morally best. Omni-theism need not do this, according to Swinburne, because what is morally best just is what is overall best, and thus an omniscient being will of necessity do what is morally best so long as it has no desires other than the desires it has simply by virtue of knowing what the best thing to do is in any given situation.
This challenge depends, however, on a highly questionable motivational intellectualism: it succeeds only if merely believing that an action is good entails a desire to do it. On most theories of motivation, there is a logical gap between the intellect and desire. If such a gap exists, then it would seem that omni-theism is no more probable intrinsically than aesthetic deism. For example, a deity interested in good narrative would want a world that is complex and yet ordered, that contains beauty, consciousness, intelligence, and moral agency.
Perhaps there is more reason to expect the existence of libertarian free will on omni-theism than on aesthetic deism; but unless one starts from the truth of omni-theism, there seems to be little reason to believe that we have such freedom.
For example, if open theists are right that not even an omniscient being can know with certainty what libertarian free choices will be made in the future, then aesthetic deism could account for libertarian free will and other sorts of indeterminacy by claiming that a story with genuine surprises is better than one that is completely predictable.
Alternatively, what might be important for the story is only that the characters think they have free will, not that they really have it. Finally, there is premise 3 , which asserts that the data of good and evil decisively favors aesthetic deism over theism.
A full discussion of this premise is not possible here, but recognition of its plausibility appears to be as old as the problem of evil itself. Consider, for example, the Book of Job, whose protagonist, a righteous man who suffers horrifically, accuses God of lacking sufficient commitment to the moral value of justice.
Instead, speaking out of the whirlwind, He describes His design of the cosmos and of the animal kingdom in a way clearly intended to emphasize His power and the grandeur of His creation. On this interpretation, the creator that confronts Job is not the God he expected and definitely not the God of omni-theism, but rather a being much more like the deity of aesthetic deism.
Those who claim that a God might allow evil because it is the inevitable result of the universe being governed by laws of nature also lend support, though unintentionally, to the idea that, if there is an author of nature, then that being is more likely motivated by aesthetic concerns than moral ones. For example, it may be that producing a universe governed by a few laws expressible as elegant mathematical equations is an impressive accomplishment, not just because of the wisdom and power required for such a task, but also because of the aesthetic value of such a universe.
Much of the aesthetic value of the animal kingdom may also depend on its being the result of a long evolutionary process driven by mechanisms like natural selection. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Unfortunately, such a process, if it is to produce sentient life, may also entail much suffering and countless early deaths. It is arguably far more plausible that in such a scenario the value of preventing horrendous suffering would, from a moral point of view, far outweigh the value of regularity, sublimity, and narrative.
If so, then a morally perfect God would not trade the former for the latter though a deity motivated primarily by aesthetic reasons no doubt would.
To summarize, nearly everyone agrees that the world contains both goods and evils. Pleasure and pain, love and hate, achievement and failure, flourishing and languishing, and virtue and vice all exist in great abundance.
In spite of that, some see signs of cosmic teleology. Those who defend the version of the decisive evidence argument stated above need not deny the teleology. And so, there is no God. Theologians and philosophers have provided various answers to this argument. They all agree that it gives useful insights into the nature of God, evil, and belief. For most of human history God was the best explanation for the existence and nature of the physical universe.
But during the last few centuries, scientists have developed solutions that are much more logical, more consistent, and better supported by evidence. Atheists say that these explain the world so much better than the existence of God. They also say that far from God being a good explanation for the world, it's God that now requires explaining.
In olden times - and still today in some traditional societies - natural phenomena that people didn't understand, such as the weather, sunrise and sunset, and so on, were seen as the work of gods or spirits. Where we would see the weather as obeying meteorological principles, people in those days saw it as demonstrating God at work. And it was the same with all the other natural phenomena, they just showed God doing things. The Greek philosopher Thales moved things on by suggesting that the gods were actually an essential part of things, rather than external puppeteers pulling strings to make the world work.
But there was more to these ancient explanations than gods doing things in or to the world. People saw the whole universe in a religiously structured way; they had no other way to see it at that time. For the ancients, God provided the power that made the universe work, and God provided the structure within which the universe worked and human beings lived.
Ideas like that survive in modern astrology. Many people believe that their lives are in some way influenced by the movements of heavenly bodies. And the heavenly bodies concerned have names taken from mythology and religion. And you'll find similar ideas in most popular religious thinking.
Many people still believe, or want to believe, in the idea of God as puppeteer. They believe that God is able to do things in the world: he can divide the waters of the Red Sea to save the Israelites from Pharaoh, he can respond to prayer by healing an illness or getting someone through an exam. Nowadays it's a branch of astronomy and physics, but in pre-scientific times it was a religious subject, organising the universe in terms of almost military ranks of beings.
God was at the top, and human beings came pretty much at the bottom. In some cosmologies there was also an inverted hierarchy of evil beings going down from humanity to the source of wickedness, the devil, at the bottom. These religious cosmologies were rigid; each being had its place worked out for it in the structure that God had provided, and that was where it stayed.
Looking at the universe like this provided great support for the hierarchical power structures of earthly nations and tribes: Everyone in a nation or tribe had their place, and the power came from the top.
And if God had decided to organise the universe in such a hierarchy, this provided a strong argument against anyone who wanted to suggest that society could be organised in a fairer and more equal way - God had shown us the perfect way to organise things, and those who were ruling did so by a right given by God.
It was also very good news for whichever religion was followed in a particular nation: since the power all came from God, religion was bound to be given high status. The idea that God steered everything in the universe as he saw fit was demolished by the discovery that there were natural laws obeyed by objects in the universe.
Galileo, for example, discovered that the universe followed laws that could be written down mathematically. This suggested that there was logic and engineering throughout creation. The universe behaved in a consistent manner and was not subject to gods pulling a string here and there, or some unexplained influences from astrological bodies.
This didn't give Galileo any religious problems although it annoyed the church greatly and they eventually made him keep quiet about some of his conclusions because he believed that God had written the scientific rules. And around this time scientists began to come up with new ways of assessing whether certain things were true. Things were expected to happen in a repeatable, testable way, that could be written down in equations.
Although scientific discovery began to explain more and more, it didn't cause large numbers of people to become less religious. Even many - probably most - scientists still had a place for God in the universe. At the very least, he had started the whole thing going, and he had created the rules that his universe was shown to obey.
This half-way house between religion and science still had problems for the faithful, since it didn't seem to leave much room for God to intervene in the universe - and certainly it didn't need God to keep things ticking over. But the half-way house also provided some support for the faithful. They could look at the universe and see how beautifuly made it was, and be reassured that God had demonstrated his existence by creating such a wonderful place.
And since science, until the late 18th, and 19th centuries, hadn't produced any good explanation of how things began, religion still had an important place in explaining how the world was the way it was. God's role as an explanation for the way things are took a serious knock from the sciences of geology and evolution. Geologists discovered that the earth was hundreds of millions of years old, and not just 6, years old as was generally believed at that time.
They showed that the rocks that make up the earth had been laid down in layers at different times; a deeper layer by and large came from an earlier time than a shallow layer. In each layer were fossils that showed that different species of animals had lived in different eras.
Not only were many no longer in existence but some didn't appear until relatively recent times. This was incompatible with the idea that God completely created the world in 6 days and so scientists with a faith came up with another compromise - the 6 days of biblical creation were a poetic way of describing long periods of millions of years during which God worked on the world.
The theory of evolution explains the variety of life forms on earth without any reference to God. It says that from very simple beginnings, processes of genetic variation and selection i. These processes are not directed by any being, they are just the way the world works; God is unnecessary. No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature though Newton's clock-winding god might have set up the machinery at the beginning of time and then let it run.
No vital forces propel evolutionary change. And whatever we think of God, his existence is not manifest in the products of nature. Some philosophers think that religious language doesn't mean anything at all, and therefore that there's no point in asking whether God exists.
They would say that a sentence like "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is neither true or false, it's meaningless; in the same way that "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" is meaningless. Logical Positivists argued that a sentence was meaningless if it wasn't either true or false, and they said that a sentence would only be true or false if it could be tested by an experiment, or if it was true by definition.
Since you couldn't verify the existence of God by any sort of "sense experience", and it wasn't true by definition eg in the way "a triangle has 3 sides" is true , the logical positivists argued that it was pointless asking the question since it could not be answered true or false. These particular philosophers didn't only say that religious talk was meaningless, they thought that much of philosophical discussion, metaphysics for example, was meaningless too.
This philosophical theory is no longer popular, and attention has returned to the issues of what "God" means and whether "God" exists. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject is as being false.
Ayer actually preferred a weaker version of the theory, because since no empirical proof could be totally conclusive, almost every statement about the world would have to be regarded as meaningless. A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established in experience. But it is verifiable, in the weak sense, if it is possible for experience to render it probable.
For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. And in that case it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone.
But in fact this is not possible For to say that "God Exists" is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. They ask whether 'religion' is actually a name given to various psychological drives, rather than a response to the existence of God or gods.
These beliefs are strongly held because they enable human beings to cope with some of their most basic fears. This means atheists often disagree on many issues and ideas. Atheists come in a variety of shapes, colors, beliefs, convictions, and backgrounds. We are as unique as our fingerprints. Atheists exist across the political spectrum.
We are members of every race. There are atheists in urban, suburban, and rural communities and in every state of the nation. We have more than affiliates and local partners nationwide. If you are looking for a community, we strongly recommend reaching out to an affiliate in your area. What is Atheism? Atheism is one thing: A lack of belief in gods. All atheists are different The only common thread that ties all atheists together is a lack of belief in gods.
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