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Arguments for Disbelief
Active Atheist Arguments
Problem of Evil
Incoherence of God
Attacks on the meaningfulness or testability of religious language
Counters to Theist Arguments
The Ontological Argument
Cosmological Arguments
Teleological Arguments/Argument from Design
Miracles
Pascal's Wager
Claims of different Religions
The development from countering religious Argument to strong Atheism
Active Atheist Arguments
The first arguments to consider are those that actively claim that the existence of God is impossible, very unlikely, or simply a meaningless claim to make. These arguments seek to attack religion itself without necessarily relying on naturalistic explanations or the placing of the burden of proof on the religious believer.
Problem of Evil
The problem of evil is perhaps the biggest traditional challenge to theism, and remains a significant weapon in the atheist arsenal. It is generally thought to have been first used by Epicurus (341-270BCE) against the idea of benevolent, interventionist gods. A version of it can be found in De Rerum Natura, by his follower Lucretius (ca. 99-55 BCE). Perhaps the best- known version is attributed to Epicurus by its true author, David Hume (1711-1776) in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
"Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
This form of the argument makes clear the basic form, which argues that no person can hold the three premises of God's omnipotence, God's benevolence, and the presence of evil in the world without contradiction. As such, it is clearly only useful against theists who accept all three. The first seems to be rejected by certain theologians (such as process theologians), and various religions would reject the second, putting God outside of good and evil. The last may exist in the optimism of Leibniz (1656-1716), as well as the idea that evil is the privation or perversion of good rather than a positive metaphysical principle, which was first proposed by Augustine (354-430) and has become Catholic doctrine (see, for example www.newadvent.org.)
Modern philosophical debates over the problem of evil have seen many atheist thinkers accept that the issue in question is more complex than Hume portrayed it, and accept that they must show that there is no needless evil. Thinkers such as Richard Swinburne have argued that many natural evils are inextricably involved in higher level goods, and most atheists find it easier to base their counter arguments on the huge quantities of apparently pointless suffering in the world rather than debating whether God's existence is logically incompatible with some very limited amount of suffering. This makes the debate less logically rigorous, but challenges the theist to maintain a position that can seem callous. In his book The God Delusion Dawkins relies on his readers agreeing that it is 'beyond satire' and 'grotesque' to suggest, as Swinburne does, that human suffering is ultimately worthwhile because it contributes to the possibility of sympathy, courage and so on.[1]
Perhaps the most common theist response to the problem of evil is the argument from free will, although it requires further arguments to address suffering caused by natural events. This was another argument first put forward by Augustine. It argues that evils caused by human immorality are unfortunate but unavoidable outcomes of God making man genuinely free. The most common atheist response is to argue that free will could be combined with constant moral goodness. This is sometimes based on arguments that libertarian free will can exist alongside a constantly good will that cannot do evil, but more commonly relies on a denial that such a libertarian free will is itself possible. As such, it relies on adding a premise to the original argument that free will does not exist, which many theists would reject. A similar case occurs when theists argue that natural evil is caused by the Fall or the free actions of the Devil or other evil spirits. As the idea of evil coming from the Fall or the Devil are traditional parts of Judaism and Christianity, these are not ad hoc responses (as J. J. Haldane calls them in Atheism and Theism), but rather natural parts of the religion under attack. This means that the atheist must successfully attack concepts such as free will or the Fall for his arguments to be effective against theists.
Incoherence of God
Another traditional argument claims that there is a logical incoherence involved in certain concepts of God. This can either rely on an internal contradiction in a single attribute, or else in a contradiction in the combination of divine attributes. The first is best known in the question 'can God create a rock so heavy that He can't lift it', and the second includes problems with whether an omniscient God can make free decisions. Although relying on specific definitions of God, these can be quite general, attacking the 'God of the philosophers'. They also have the benefit that, if successful, they provide a strictly logical disproof of God, and are therefore particularly attractive for those who wish to claim certainty that God does not exist. Despite this, they are not a particularly central argument for most atheists. This may be because they seem unsatisfyingly logically abstract. They also face the problem that any theist who applies the rules of logic to God (and would therefore find such arguments convincing) would argue that terms like 'omnipotent' and 'omniscience' must be understood as bound by logical limits. This has led William Lane Craig to argue that such arguments help refine and clarify theism rather than defeating it.[2]
However, some philosophers still debate over this issue. Patrick Grim has argued that God's omnipotence and omniscience are both internally contradictory, as well as facing problems when combined with each other and further attributes. His primary argument relies on the view that certain tasks are 'essential indexicals', where the ability to complete such a task cannot be separated from self-reference.[3] These follow from obvious and popular cases such as the rock mentioned above, and include statements like 'A snowflake falls through no effort of an omnipotent being'. This case is chosen as something that a non-omnipotent being can bring about, but not an omnipotent one. Other arguments include the claim that God cannot know all propositional truths, as there is no set that contains all truth.[4] Counter-arguments have been offered by many recent theist philosophers, such as Plantinga, and a thorough discussion of this issue is given in Swinburne's The Coherence of Theism. Most theists, however, probably regard this in much the same way as many have regarded the ontological argument: too abstract to have a powerful impact on actual belief.
Whether because of its lack of punch, or because of a preference for evidential attacks on religion, this is not given a lot of weight in modern polemical atheist literature. For Dawkins, it is given half a paragraph as a tangent to another argument. He tells the reader that 'it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible', and outlines the basic problem, but pays it no more attention.[5]
Attacks on the meaningfulness or testability of religious language
More recently, philosophers have argued that any discussion of God is outside of human thought, language or empirical tests (see also Non-Marxist Atheisms). This would seem to suggest at least practical atheism. There is a long precedent of thinkers questioning the possibility of knowing anything about, or even the existence of, God. Protagoras (ca. 490-420 BCE) is thought by some to be the first atheist philosopher and wrote 'Concerning the Gods I am unable to discover whether they exist or not, or what they are like in form, for there are many hindrances to knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life'. However, this does not clearly state that religious claims are by definition meaningless or impossible to verify, which is a more modern idea.
Probably the first argument of this kind, emerging in the wake of Kant (1724-1804), and his Critique of Pure Reason, claims that there is no nonempirical knowledge, so any reasoned defences of religious belief are ruled out a priori. This is not strictly speaking an atheistic argument, since it does not argue that there is not a God (that would also count as nonempirical knowledge) but only that human beings could not know whether there is a God or not. However, its basic rejection of all rationally supported religious assertions in general has often been regarded (at least by some) as tantamount to atheism.
In the twentieth century analytic philosophers moved on from this principle, some arguing that religious claims were non-falsifiable; others that they are meaningless. These arguments tend to be addressed against religious positions less open to other criticisms. A person claiming that their God will heal people who are prayed over, or that the apocalypse will come this year, is obviously fairly directly open to falsification. However, words being used in description of God are seen as non-falsifiable or meaningless because the words lose their precision of meaning so far both ontologically and in terms of observation from the normal world. This argument may arise out of theists reacting to apparent problems such as those of evil and the incompatibility of divine attributes by claiming that God is ineffable or that our usual terms are in some other sense empty. It is also a very natural part of a 'scientistic' framework which sees anything unscientific as having no factual content, such as logical positivism. It is worth noting that this attitude is not necessarily atheist. Wittgenstein considered moral and religious language 'nonsense', but nevertheless of utmost importance, and cannot be straightforwardly regarded as an atheist. It also has theological parallels amongst those who emphasize the distance of God from human knowledge (see also Non-Marxist Atheisms).
Counters to Theist Arguments
Many atheists see themselves as having the natural or automatic position, arguing that we do not believe in things until evidence is provided for them, and that God is no exception. Atheists are also often defined largely in reaction to specific religions. It is therefore natural that many atheists have focused upon countering theist arguments in an attempt to show that there is no rational justification for belief in God.
The Ontological Argument
The ontological argument as usually recognised was put forward by Anselm (1033-1109), arguing that God is by definition 'greater than which cannot be conceived', and that this means that he must exist in reality as well as the imagination, as a being that only existed in the imagination would be less great than a real being. This argument was rejected by Aquinas, is often considered to have been clearly refuted by Kant, and has faced much criticism from many quarters. For this reason, many atheists are happy to follow Schopenhauer, (1788- 1860), in calling it a 'charming joke', or to refer to it only to illustrate their low opinion of religious argument. However, the argument has had something of a resurgence in the 20th century, having new versions advocated by thinkers such as Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) and Alvin Plantinga. This has led to renewed, and detailed, criticism. Some of these have continued with detailed arguments that existence cannot be a predicate, while others rely on translating Anselm's argument into the logic of possible worlds, attacking the clarity of what is meant by 'greater than' or appealing to conflicting modal intuitions. In some cases, this has had the effect of making the ontological argument, rather than an absolute proof or complete nonsense, a limited argument that gives some reason to believe in God's existence. The atheist philosopher Gale, when contesting modern ontological arguments, concedes the need to find a more convincing modal intuition that is incompatible with the premise 'There is some possible world, w, in which there exists a being, x, such that x has maximal excellence in w' if atheists are going to get beyond a 'stalemate of intuitions'.[6]
Cosmological Arguments
Philosophical atheists reject the basic intuition of the cosmological argument - that the universe (as a contingent thing) must have a cause, which cannot itself be a contingent but a necessary being (i.e., God) lest causes go back ad infinitum by either admitting the possibility of an infinite series of causes or (more commonly) simply asserting that the world was a mere brute fact which stood in need of no further explanation. This latter view was famously asserted by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) in a radio interview with the Jesuit Copleston. He stated that world was a mere brute fact which stood in need of no further explanation. William Lane Craig's use of the Kalam cosmological argument, which unlike Aquinas' relies on the universe beginning to exist, has meant that this argument has become involved in the complex philosophical debates about the possibility of infinite past time, as well as scientific questions of whether empirical evidence suggests the universe has a limited past. Arguments that the First Cause shown by the cosmological argument need not have the many attributes of God are both philosophically and polemically used.
Perhaps the most common popular response to the Cosmological Argument in its various forms is that the first cause should be subject to this same regress. For example, Dawkins rejects Thomas Aquinas' Cosmological Arguments by stating that they 'make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress'.[7] This is contested by theists on the grounds that the universe needs a cause, because it is contingent, while God is necessary and so does not, but this forces the theist to move from a very clear and intuitively attractive argument to much more abstract and controversial logical categories. Many analytic philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell, reject any idea of necessity beyond the necessary truth of analytic truths such as 'all bachelors are unmarried men'.
Teleological Arguments/Argument from Design
Pre-Darwin rebutted the teleological argument that the presence of highly complex objects in the world such as living organisms is best explained as having been designed by the intentional actions of a supernatural being (God). Instead they drew attention to the disanalogies between human artefacts (which are clearly designed) and objects such as organisms (which are often very imperfectly 'designed', and seem to have useless parts such as the human appendix, or badly functioning parts). They also noted that such imperfectly 'designed' objects do not justify an exclusive inference to the classical all-powerful, all-loving God, but also to a bungling, senile, or even evil God, or perhaps to a merely semi-conscious force. The most developed case of such an argument is probably that of Hume's Philo, in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The philosophical mentor of modern atheism, Daniel Dennett, claims that Hume exposed 'insoluble problems' with the argument from design,[8] but claims that Hume did not deny God's existence because he couldn't think of a better mechanism. Similarly, Dawkins holds that while 'atheism might have been logically tenable before Charles Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist'.[9]
In modern terms the teleological argument is now most often fought over issues in the debates between evolutionists and 'creationist' or 'intelligent design' thinkers, or else over questions of fine tuning asnd the anthropic principle in physics. As such, it has become largely a scientific question, and is addressed in the Atheism and Science section of this website.
Miracles
The argument from miracles to the truth of religion is perhaps not as common now as it once was, as some theists do not believe in miracles, and others see belief in them as following from their religion rather than supporting it. However, appeal to miraculous healing and other such events still exist both in popular (particularly evangelical) Christianity, and in the works of sophisticated philosophers such as Swinburne.
The most common response against claims of miracles is probably still Hume's, which is found in Chapter 10 of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hume argues that we should only believe in a miracle if the testimony is reliable enough to counter-balance the intrinsic unlikelihood of such an event (miracles being treated as necessarily against natural law). The implication is that no amount of testimony can be as reliable as the constant confirmation of our experience that natural law operates. This is problematic as an argument against theists, who may see both regular natural laws and miracles as evidence of divine goodness at work in the world. A theist claiming that a miracle occurs does not wish to deny natural law in a general sense, or see it as in conflict with divine action outside these regular rules. This argument is also vulnerable to the claim that it demonstrates that atheists rely on metaphysical naturalism, which involves the claim that natural laws are regular.
As well as Hume's argument, miracles are often attacked in atheist literature on the basis that they lead to the question of why God doesn't intervene in this manner more often, or simply that many such miracles have been claimed, and shown to be mistakes or frauds. They may also be opposed because many religions claim miracles are performed by their gods, while maintaining separate and incompatible ideas about those gods.
Pascal's Wager
Although rarely used by philosophers, Pascal's Wager (gambit) or equivalents are still used by some religious apologists, and by those attacking atheism, and so is addressed by atheists. The Wager is an idea put forward by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) in his Pensées (‘Thoughts’). He states that it is a better gamble to believe that God exists than not to believe. ‘Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.’ The most common objections are that belief which was adopted with such an intention would hardly be genuine belief and that unless arguments are made for why a certain religion is right, we have no more reason to 'gamble' that it is Christianity than any other real or imagined religion. This is sometimes extended by the sentiment that if God did exist, he might even object to Pascal's Wager. Dawkins asks 'Would you bet on God's valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even genuine belief) over honest scepticism?'[10]
Claims of different Religions
Atheists argue against specific claims that a religion is true based on its scripture, visions, moral precepts, miracles and so on by pointing to the fact that no one religion has a monopoly on these features, and that they disagree amongst each other. The evidence of major contradictions between the major religions was first collected together not by atheists but by deists who aimed to discredit the claims of revealed religions in favour of a simpler, rational religion which only posited a deistic God who did not intervene in special acts of providence in the world. However, atheists were not slow to profit from this evidence and push the argument one stage further, namely, by asserting that the profound disagreement between the various revelations suggested that they were probably all wrong. This is not on its own a particularly compelling argument for atheism - it could be that one of the revelations is true, whereas the others are false - but added to other atheistic arguments it can be regarded as contributing to a cumulative case for atheism. Theists have been divided in their response, some claiming that there simply is better evidence of their religion than of others', and others moving towards some degree of pluralism. It must also be noted that the relatedness of the Abrahamic religions means that Christians can accept some early Jewish miracles, and Muslims some Christian and Jewish ones, as part of their own faith.
The development from countering religious Argument to strong Atheism
A deist could accept all of the arguments above against specific religions, and an agnostic could accept these as well as sympathising with at least some of the criticism of religion as a whole. Many people now and through recent history have agreed that religious arguments are dubious, but have felt that this does not justify disbelief in God, but rather a suspension of judgement. This has often gone alongside a criticism of explicit atheism as being as 'dogmatic' as religion. This position of intellectual equivalence between atheism and theism is strongly rejected by many modern atheists, who feel that it assumes that if we have two options and no knock-down arguments on either side, then the chance is 50-50.
Against such a conclusion, atheists argue that atheism, as a simple lack of the theistic hypothesis is the 'automatic' position in the absence of positive evidence. This has mostly been argued on the popular level - that the theist has taken the atheist position on all other gods, or does so on other unsupported, though not disprovable, claims. The classic presentation of this is by Bertrand Russell, who compared unsupported religious claims to declaring that there was a tiny china teapot in space that there was no evidence for whatsoever. While not disprovable, most would agree that belief in such a thing is irrational, and Russell thought this intuition should be extended to God. In recent times, arguments sometimes appeal to the 'Flying Spaghetti Monster' (FSM), a pastiche of what atheists see as the arbitrary and unbacked nature of religious claims. Though originally introduced as an argument against Creationism being taught, the FSM has become a useful tool for atheists against claims of an undetectable God who can't be disproved. Some now claim to genuinely believe in the FSM, and he is said to manipulate the world with his 'noodly appendage' to cause results which trick people into disbelief.. A less widespread but similar case is the 'Invisible Pink Unicorn', which is also an attack on the 'mystery' of the Trinity (as it ineffably combines being pink and invisible).
The principle behind this sort of satire is the use of a version of Occam's razor: if the evidence doesn't require the existence of God, then postulating such a God is unnecessary and unfounded, and just as ridiculous as any other fantasy that doesn't directly clash with the evidence. This argument is only really suitable against theists who reject the need of evidence for God, but it is sometimes used against all religion, presumably on the assumption that all religion comes down to a reliance on blind faith, if covered by a thin veneer of argument. Richard Dawkins is particularly clear in this identification of faith as 'blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence'.[11]
References
The Blind Watchmaker. Harlow: Longman, 1986.
The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006.
The Selfish Gene. 30th anniversary ed. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea : Evolution and the Meanings of
Life. New York ; London: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
ed. The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Footnotes
[1]↑ Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), 88-89.
[2]↑ Michael Martin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 72.
[3]↑ Ibid., chapter 12 ('Impossibility Arguments').
[4]↑ Ibid., 208.
[5]↑ Dawkins, God Delusion, 101.
[6]↑ Martin, ed., Atheism, 88-89.
[7]↑ Dawkins, God Delusion, 101.
[8]↑ Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea : Evolution and the Meanings of
Life (New York ; London: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 34.
[9]↑ Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Harlow: Longman, 1986).
[10]↑ Dawkins, God Delusion, 131.
[11]↑ Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 198.