But that is just a quibble. Ultimately, whether this argument can be used to defend global atheism depends on how its first premise is defended. The usual way of defending it is to derive it from some general principle according to which lacking grounds for claims of a certain sort is good reason to reject those claims.
One objection to this principle is that not every sort of thing is such that, if it existed, then we would likely have good reason to believe that it exists.
Consider, for example, intelligent life in distant galaxies cf. Morris Perhaps, however, an even more narrowly restricted principle would do the trick: whenever the assumption that a positive existential claim is true would lead one to expect to have grounds for its truth, the absence of such grounds is a good reason to believe that the claim is false.
It might then be argued that i a God would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of Her existence and so ii the absence of such evidence is a good reason to believe that God does not exist. This transforms the no arguments argument into an argument from divine hiddenness. It also transforms it into at best an argument for local atheism, since even if the God of, say, classical theism would not hide, not all legitimate God-concepts are such that a being instantiating that concept would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of its existence.
The sort of God in whose non-existence philosophers seem most interested is the eternal, non-physical, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent i.
One interesting question, then, is how best to argue for atheism understood locally as the proposition that omni-theism is false. It is often claimed that a good argument for atheism is impossible because, while it is at least possible to prove that something of a certain sort exists, it is impossible to prove that nothing of that sort exists.
One reason to reject this claim is that the descriptions of some kinds of objects are self-contradictory. For example, we can prove that no circular square exists because such an object would have to be both circular and non-circular, which is impossible. Many attempts have been made to construct such arguments. For example, it has been claimed that an omnibenevolent being would be impeccable and so incapable of wrongdoing, while an omnipotent being would be quite capable of doing things that would be wrong to do.
There are, however, sophisticated and plausible replies to arguments like these. Similar problems face attempts to show that omni-theism must be false because it is incompatible with certain known facts about the world. Such arguments typically depend on detailed and contested interpretations of divine attributes like omnibenevolence. A very different approach is based on the idea that disproof need not be demonstrative. The goal of this approach is to show that the existence of an omni-God is so improbable that confident belief in the non-existence of such a God is justified.
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.
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Some great points! He was committed to discovering the simplest and most rational explanations for everything in nature, but he found the phenomenon of consciousness, both human and animal, to be profoundly mysterious:.
Lauren said: Agnosticism. Who cares? Bertrand Russell: As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God.
On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
And a discussion of why a Jehovah-oid deity is a more probable or reasonable subject for further investigation than an Apollo or a Marduk or an Isis? The atheist is open to the belief that there is a god. But to this day, there is not a shred of evidence that a god exists.
It gives me hope for our species. This is precisely why Hawking was so right in saying that philosophy has become irrelevant. A scientific proposition is one that is falsifiable. The assertion that God either does or does not exist is not falsifiable, and hence, it is a proposition that is not within the realm of science, it is within the realm of theology. Agnostic atheists are atheistic because they do not have belief in the existence of any deity, and agnostic because they do not claim to know that a deity does not exist.
People that place agnosticism between atheism and theism are incorrect. Agnostic atheism is the most reasonable and open minded position. This shows the bias and lack of understanding of the author.
The religious always fail at philosophy. Dyz: Insults do not county as argument. How is that quote evidence of bias? What undertanding does it demonstrate a lack of and how does it demonstrate that? Compare: frequency feeling a sense of wonder about the universe by sources of guidance on right and wrong frequency feeling a sense of wonder about the universe by religious group.
Compare: belief in existence of standards for right and wrong by sources of guidance on right and wrong belief in existence of standards for right and wrong by religious group. Compare: frequency of reading scripture by sources of guidance on right and wrong frequency of reading scripture by religious group. Compare: interpretation of scripture by sources of guidance on right and wrong interpretation of scripture by religious group.
Compare: belief in heaven by sources of guidance on right and wrong belief in heaven by religious group. Compare: belief in hell by sources of guidance on right and wrong belief in hell by religious group. Compare: political party by sources of guidance on right and wrong political party by religious group. Compare: political ideology by sources of guidance on right and wrong political ideology by religious group.
Compare: views about size of government by sources of guidance on right and wrong views about size of government by religious group.
Compare: views about government aid to the poor by sources of guidance on right and wrong views about government aid to the poor by religious group. Compare: views about abortion by sources of guidance on right and wrong views about abortion by religious group. Compare: views about homosexuality by sources of guidance on right and wrong views about homosexuality by religious group.
Compare: views about same-sex marriage by sources of guidance on right and wrong views about same-sex marriage by religious group. Compare: views about environmental protection by sources of guidance on right and wrong views about environmental protection by religious group.
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