[extropy-chat] Atheists launch inquisition...

[Gennady Ra]

At 11:00 AM 11/27/04 -0600, Kevin Freels wrote:

>A search of the word turns up many definitions. Webster's calls atheism

>I tried the Oxford Dictinary, but they want a $295 subscription for a year 
>which I thought to be a bit much for the purposes of this conversation.:-)

>From The OED on CD-ROM (the complete text of the 20-volume Second Edition) 
presented by a friend from FIU, sans formatting, alas:

atheism  Also 6 athisme. 
[a. F. atheisme (16th c. in Littre), f. Gr. .....: see atheal and -ism. Cf. 
It. atheismo and the earlier atheonism.] 
Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God. Also, Disregard of duty 
to God, godlessness (practical atheism). 
1587 Golding De Mornay xx. 310 Athisme, that is to say, vtter godlesnes. 
1605 Bacon Adv. Learn. i. i. §3 A little or superficial knowledge of 
philosophy may incline the mind of man to atheism. 
1711 Addison Spect. No. 119 35 Hypocrisy in one Age is generally succeeded 
by Atheism in another. 
1859 Kingsley Lett. (1878) II. 75 Whatever doubt or doctrinal Atheism you 
and your friends may have, don’t fall into moral Atheism.

and

atheist  n. (and a.) Also 6 atheyst, 6­7 athist(e. 
[a. F. atheiste (16th c. in Littre), or It. atheista: see prec. and -ist.] 
A. n. 
1. One who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God. 
[a1568 Coverdale Hope of Faithf. Pref. Wks. II. 139 Eat we and drink we 
lustily; to-morrow we shall die: which all the epicures protest openly, and 
the Italian atheoi.] 
1571 Golding Calvin on Ps. Ep. Ded. 3 The Atheistes which say..there is no 
God. 
1604 Rowlands Looke to it 23 Thou damned Athist..That doest deny his power 
which did create thee. 
1709 Shaftesbury Charac. i. i. §2 (1737) II. 11 To believe nothing of a 
designing Principle or Mind, nor any Cause, Measure, or Rule of Things, but 
Chance..is to be a perfect Atheist. 
1876 Gladstone in Contemp. Rev. June 22 By the Atheist I understand the man 
who not only holds off, like the sceptic, from the affirmative, but who 
drives himself, or is driven, to the negative assertion in regard to the 
whole Unseen, or to the existence of God. 
2. One who practically denies the existence of a God by disregard of moral 
obligation to Him; a godless man. 
1577 Hanmer Anc. Eccl. Hist. 63 The opinion which they conceaue of you, to 
be Atheists, or godlesse men. 
1660 Stanley Hist. Philos. 323/2 An Atheist is taken two ways, for him who 
is an enemy to the Gods, and for him who believeth there are no Gods. 
1667 Milton P.L. i. 495 When the Priest Turns Atheist, as did Ely’s Sons. 
1827 Hare Guesses Ser. i. (1873) 27 Practically every man is an atheist, who 
lives without God in the world. 
B. attrib. as adj. Atheistic, impious. 
1667 Milton P.L. vi. 370 The Atheist crew. 
1821 Lockhart Valerino II. xi. 316 Borne from its wounded breast an atheist 
cry Hath pierced the upper and the nether sky. 

And from Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary on CD, V2.2, 1999:

a·the·ism n.
1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God.
2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.

This suspiciously echoed by another American lexical authority, American 
Heritage Dictionary:

1.a. Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods. 
   b. The doctrine that there is no God or gods

And finally, The Britannica's, Ultimate 2003 Reference Suit CD-ROM, article (LONG!!!): 

atheism

  Introduction

in general, the critique and denial of metaphysical beliefs in God or 
spiritual beings. As such, it is usually distinguished from theism, which 
affirms the reality of the divine and often seeks to demonstrate its 
existence. Atheism is also distinguished from agnosticism, which leaves open 
the question whether there is a god or not, professing to find the questions 
unanswered or unanswerable. 

The dialectic of the argument between forms of belief and unbelief raises 
questions concerning the most perspicuous delineation, or characterization, 
of atheism, agnosticism, and theism. It is necessary not only to probe the 
warrant for atheism but also carefully to consider what is the most adequate 
definition of atheism. This article will start with what have been some 
widely accepted, but still in various ways mistaken or misleading, 
definitions of atheism and move to more adequate formulations that better 
capture the full range of atheist thought and more clearly separate unbelief 
from belief and atheism from agnosticism. In the course of this delineation 
the section also will consider key arguments for and against atheism.
   
     Atheism as rejection of religious beliefs

A central, common core of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the 
affirmation of the reality of one, and only one, God. Adherents of these 
faiths believe that there is a God who created the universe out of nothing 
and who has absolute sovereignty over all his creation; this includes, of 
course, human beings-who are not only utterly dependent on this creative 
power but also sinful and who, or so the faithful must believe, can only 
make adequate sense of their lives by accepting, without question, God's 
ordinances for them. The varieties of atheism are numerous, but all atheists 
reject such a set of beliefs.

Atheism, however, casts a wider net and rejects all belief in "spiritual 
beings," and to the extent that belief in spiritual beings is definitive of 
what it means for a system to be religious, atheism rejects religion. So 
atheism is not only a rejection of the central conceptions of 
Judeo-Christianity and Islam, it is, as well, a rejection of the religious 
beliefs of such African religions as that of the Dinka and the Nuer, of the 
anthropomorphic gods of classical Greece and Rome, and of the transcendental 
conceptions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Generally atheism is a denial of God 
or of the gods, and if religion is defined in terms of belief in spiritual 
beings, then atheism is the rejection of all religious belief.

It is necessary, however, if a tolerably adequate understanding of atheism 
is to be achieved, to give a reading to "rejection of religious belief" and 
to come to realize how the characterization of atheism as the denial of God 
or the gods is inadequate.

Atheism and theism

To say that atheism is the denial of God or the gods and that it is the 
opposite of theism, a system of belief that affirms the reality of God and 
seeks to demonstrate his existence, is inadequate in a number of ways. 
First, not all theologians who regard themselves as defenders of the 
Christian faith or of Judaism or Islam regard themselves as defenders of 
theism. The influential 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, for 
example, regards the God of theism as an idol and refuses to construe God as 
a being, even a supreme being, among beings or as an infinite being above 
finite beings. God, for him, is "being-itself," the ground of being and 
meaning. The particulars of Tillich's view are in certain ways 
idiosyncratic, as well as being obscure and problematic, but they have been 
influential; and his rejection of theism, while retaining a belief in God, 
is not eccentric in contemporary theology, though it may very well affront 
the plain believer.

Second, and more important, it is not the case that all theists seek to 
demonstrate or even in any way rationally to establish the existence of God. 
Many theists regard such a demonstration as impossible, and fideistic 
believers (e.g., Johann Hamann and Seren Kierkegaard) regard such a 
demonstration, even if it were possible, as undesirable, for in their view 
it would undermine faith. If it could be proved, or known for certain, that 
God exists, people would not be in a position to accept him as their 
sovereign Lord humbly on faith with all the risks that entails. There are 
theologians who have argued that for genuine faith to be possible God must 
necessarily be a hidden God, the mysterious ultimate reality, whose 
existence and authority must be accepted simply on faith. This fideistic 
view has not, of course, gone without challenge from inside the major 
faiths, but it is of sufficient importance to make the above 
characterization of atheism inadequate.

Finally, and most important, not all denials of God are denials of his 
existence. Believers sometimes deny God while not being at all in a state of 
doubt that God exists. They either willfully reject what they take to be his 
authority by not acting in accordance with what they take to be his will, or 
else they simply live their lives as if God did not exist. In this important 
way they deny him. Such deniers are not atheists (unless we wish, 
misleadingly, to call them "practical atheists"). They are not even 
agnostics. They do not question that God exists; they deny him in other 
ways. An atheist denies the existence of God. As it is frequently said, 
atheists believe that it is false that God exists, or that God's existence 
is a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

Yet it remains the case that such a characterization of atheism is 
inadequate in other ways. For one it is too narrow. There are atheists who 
believe that the very concept of God, at least in developed and less 
anthropomorphic forms of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, is so incoherent that 
certain central religious claims, such as "God is my creator to whom 
everything is owed," are not genuine truth-claims; i.e., the claims could 
not be either true or false. Believers hold that such religious propositions 
are true, some atheists believe that they are false, and there are agnostics 
who cannot make up their minds whether to believe that they are true or 
false. (Agnostics think that the propositions are one or the other but 
believe that it is not possible to determine which.) But all three are 
mistaken, some atheists argue, for such putative truth-claims are not 
sufficiently intelligible to be genuine truth-claims that are either true or 
false. In reality there is nothing in them to be believed or disbelieved, 
though there is for the believer the powerful and humanly comforting 
illusion that there is. Such an atheism, it should be added, rooted for some 
conceptions of God in considerations about intelligibility and what it makes 
sense to say, has been strongly resisted by some pragmatists and logical 
empiricists.

While the above considerations about atheism and intelligibility show the 
second characterization of atheism to be too narrow, it is also the case 
that this characterizationis in a way too broad. For there are fideistic 
believers, who quite unequivocally believe that when looked at objectively 
the proposition that God exists has a very low probability weight. They 
believe in God not because it is probable that he exists-they think it more 
probable that he does not-but because belief is thought by them to be 
necessary to make sense of human life. The second characterization of 
atheism does not distinguish a fideistic believer (a Blaise Pascal or a 
Kierkegaard) or an agnostic (a T. H. Huxley or a Leslie Stephen) from an 
atheist such as Baron d'Holbach or Thomas Paine. All believe that "There is 
a God" and "God protects humankind," however emotionally important they may 
be, are speculative hypotheses of an extremely low order of probability. But 
this, since it does not distinguish believers from nonbelievers and does not 
distinguish agnostics from atheists, cannot be an adequate characterization 
of atheism.

It may be retorted that to avoid apriorism and dogmatic atheism the 
existence of God should be regarded as a hypothesis. There are no 
ontological (purely a priori) proofs or disproofs of God's existence. It is 
not reasonable to rule in advance that it makes no sense to say that God 
exists. What the atheist can reasonably claim is that there is no evidence 
that there is a God, and against that background he may very well be 
justified in asserting that there is no God. It has been argued, however, 
that it is simply dogmatic for an atheist to assert that no possible 
evidence could ever give one grounds for believing in God. Instead, atheists 
should justify their unbelief by showing (if they can) how the assertion is 
well-taken that there is no evidence that would warrant a belief in God. If 
atheism is justified, the atheist will have shown that in fact there is no 
adequate evidence for the belief that God exists, but it should not be part 
of his task to try to show that there could not be any evidence for the 
existence of God. If the atheist could somehow survive the death of his 
present body (assuming that such talk makes sense) and come, much to his 
surprise, to stand in the presence of God, his answer should be, "Oh! Lord, 
you didn't give me enough evidence!" He would have been mistaken, and 
realize that he had been mistaken, in his judgment that God did not exist. 
Still, he would not have been unjustified, in the light of the evidence 
available to him during his earthly life, in believing as he did. Not having 
any such postmortem experiences of the presence of God (assuming that he 
could have them), what he should say, as things stand and in the face of the 
evidence he actually has and is likely to be able to get, is that it is 
false that God exists. (Every time one legitimately asserts that a 
proposition is false one need not be certain that it is false. "Knowing with 
certainty" is not a pleonasm.) The claim is that this tentative posture is 
the reasonable position for the atheist to take.

An atheist who argues in this manner may also make a distinctive 
burden-of-proof argument. Given that God (if there is one) is by definition 
a very recherche reality-a reality that must be (for there to be such a 
reality) transcendent to the world-the burden of proof is not on the atheist 
to give grounds for believing that there is no reality of that order. 
Rather, the burden of proof is on the believer to give some evidence for 
God's existence; i.e., that there is such a reality. Given what God must be, 
if there is a God, the theist needs to present the evidence, for such a very 
strange reality. He needs to show that there is more in the world than is 
disclosed by common experience. The empirical method, and the empirical 
method alone, such an atheist asserts, affords a reliable method for 
establishing what is in fact the case. To the claim of the theist that there 
are in addition to varieties of empirical facts "spiritual facts" or 
"transcendent facts," such as it being the case that there is a 
supernatural, self-existent, eternal power, the atheist can assert that such 
"facts" have not been shown.

It will, however, be argued by such atheists, against what they take to be 
dogmatic aprioristic atheists, that the atheist should be a fallibilist and 
remain open-minded about what the future may bring. There may, after all, be 
such transcendent facts, such metaphysical realities. It is not that such a 
fallibilistic atheist is really an agnostic who believes that he is not 
justified in either asserting that God exists or denying that he exists and 
that what he must reasonably do is suspend belief. On the contrary, such an 
atheist believes that he has very good grounds indeed, as things stand, for 
denying the existence of God. But he will, on the second conceptualization 
of what it is to be an atheist, not deny that things could be otherwise and 
that, if they were, he would be justified in believing in God or at least 
would no longer be justified in asserting that it is false that there is a 
God. Using reliable empirical techniques, proven methods for establishing 
matters of fact, the fallibilistic atheist has found nothing in the universe 
to make a belief that God exists justifiable or even, everything considered, 
the most rational option of the various options. He therefore draws the 
atheistical conclusion (also keeping in mind his burden-of-proof argument) 
that God does not exist. But he does not dogmatically in a priori fashion 
deny the existence of God. He remains a thorough and consistent fallibilist.

Atheism and metaphysical beliefs

Such a form of atheism (the atheism of those pragmatists who are also 
naturalistic humanists), though less inadequate than the first formation of 
atheism, is still inadequate. God in developed forms of Judaism, 
Christianity, and Islam is not, like Zeus or Wotan, construed in a 
relatively plain anthropomorphic way. Nothing that could count as "God" in 
such religions could possibly be observed, literally encountered, or 
detected in the universe. God, in such a conception, is utterly transcendent 
to the world; he is conceived of as "pure spirit," an infinite individual 
who created the universe out of nothing and who is distinct from the 
universe. Such a reality-a reality that is taken to be an ultimate 
mystery-could not be identified as objects or processes in the universe can 
be identified. There can be no pointing at or to God, no ostensive teaching 
of "God," to show what is meant. The word God can only be taught 
intralinguistically. "God" is taught to someone who does not understand what 
the word means by the use of descriptions such as "the maker of the 
universe," "the eternal, utterly independent being upon whom all other 
beings depend," "the first cause," "the sole ultimate reality," or "a 
self-caused being." For someone who does not understand such descriptions, 
there can be no understanding of the concept of God. But the key terms of 
such descriptions are themselves no more capable of ostensive definition (of 
having their referents pointed out) than is "God," where that term is not, 
like "Zeus," construed anthropomorphically. (That does not mean that anyone 
has actually pointed to Zeus or observed Zeus but that one knows what it 
would be like to do so.)

In coming to understand what is meant by "God" in such discourses, it must 
be understood that God, whatever else he is, is a being that could not 
possibly be seen or be in any way else observed. He could not be anything 
material or empirical, and he is said by believers to be an intractable 
mystery. A nonmysterious God would not be the God of Judaism, Christianity, 
and Isl(m.

This, in effect, makes it a mistake to claim that the existence of God can 
rightly be treated as a hypothesis and makes it a mistake to claim that, by 
the use of the experimental method or some other determinate empirical 
method, the existence of God can be confirmed or disconfirmed as can the 
existence of an empirical reality. The retort made by some atheists, who 
also like pragmatists remain thoroughgoing fallibilists, is that such a 
proposed way of coming to know, or failing to come to know, God makes no 
sense for anyone who understands what kind of reality God is supposed to be. 
Anything whose existence could be so verified would not be the God of 
Judeo-Christianity. God could not be a reality whose presence is even 
faintly adumbrated in experience, for anything that could even count as the 
God of Judeo-Christianity must be transcendent to the world. Anything that 
could actually be encountered or experienced could not be God.

At the very heart of a religion such as Christianity there stands a 
metaphysical belief in a reality that is alleged to transcend the empirical 
world. It is the metaphysical belief that there is an eternal, ever-present 
creative source and sustainer of the universe. The problem is how it is 
possible to know or reasonably believe that such a reality exists or even to 
understand what such talk is about.

It is not that God is like a theoretical entity in physics such as a proton 
or a neutrino. They are, where they are construed as realities rather than 
as heuristically useful conceptual fictions, thought to be part of the 
actual furniture of the universe. They are not said to be transcendent to 
the universe, but rather are invisible entities in the universe logically on 
a par with specks of dust and grains of sand, only much, much smaller. They 
are on the same continuum; they are not a different kind of reality. It is 
only the case that they, as a matter of fact, cannot be seen. Indeed no one 
has an understanding of what it would be like to see a proton or a 
neutrino-in that way they are like God-and no provision is made in physical 
theory for seeing them. Still, there is no logical ban on seeing them as 
there is on seeing God. They are among the things in the universe, and thus, 
though they are invisible, they can be postulated as causes of things that 
are seen. Since this is so it becomes at least logically possible indirectly 
to verify by empirical methods the existence of such realities. It is also 
the case that there is no logical ban on establishing what is necessary to 
establish a causal connection, namely a constant conjunction of two discrete 
empirical realities. But no such constant conjunction can be established or 
even intelligibly asserted between God and the universe, and thus the 
existence of God is not even indirectly verifiable. God is not a discrete 
empirical thing or being, and the universe is not a gigantic thing or 
process over and above the things and processes in the universe of which it 
makes sense to say that the universe has or had a cause. But then there is 
no way, directly or indirectly, that even the probability that there is a 
God could be empirically established.

Atheism and intuitive knowledge

The gnostic may reply that there is a nonempirical way of establishing or 
making it probable that God exists. The claim is that there are truths about 
the nature of the cosmos neither capable of verification nor standing in 
need of verification. There is, gnostics claim against empiricists, 
knowledge of the world that transcends experience and comprehends the sorry 
scheme of things entire.

Since the thorough probings of such epistemological foundations by David 
Hume and Immanuel Kant, scepticism about how, and indeed even that, such 
knowledge is possible is very strong indeed. With respect to knowledge of 
God in particular, both Hume and Kant provide powerful critiques of the 
traditional attempts to prove the existence of God (notwithstanding the fact 
that Kant remained a Christian). While some of the details of their 
arguments have been rejected and refinements rooted in their argumentative 
procedure have been developed, there is a considerable consensus among 
philosophers and theologians that arguments of the general type as those 
developed by Hume and Kant show that no proof of God's existence is 
possible. Alternatively, to speak of "intuitive knowledge" (an intuitive 
grasp of being or of an intuition of the reality of the divine being) is to 
make an appeal to something that is not sufficiently clear to be of any 
value in establishing anything.

Prior to the rise of anthropology and the scientific study of religion, an 
appeal to revelation and authority as a substitute for knowledge or 
warranted belief might have been thought to have considerable force. But 
with a knowledge of other religions and their associated appeals to revealed 
truth, such arguments are without probative force. Claimed, or alleged, 
revelations are many, diverse, and not infrequently conflicting; without 
going in a small and vicious circle, it cannot be claimed, simply by 
appealing to a given putative revelation, that the revelation is the "true 
revelation" or the "genuine revelation" and that others are mistaken or, 
where nonconflicting, mere approximations to the truth. Similar things need 
to be said for religious authority. Moreover, it is at best problematic 
whether faith could sanction speaking of testing the genuineness of 
revelation or of the acceptability of religious authority. Indeed, if 
something is a "genuine revelation," there is no using reason to assess it. 
But the predicament is that plainly, as a matter of anthropological fact, 
there is a diverse and sometimes conflicting field of alleged revelations 
with no way of deciding or even having a reasonable hunch which, if any, of 
the candidate revelations is the genuine article. But even if the necessity 
for tests for the genuineness of revelation is allowed, there still is a 
claim that clearly will not do, for such a procedure would make an appeal to 
revelation and authority supererogatory. It is, where such tests are 
allowed, not revelation or authority that can warrant the most fundamental 
religious truths on which the rest depend. It is something else-that which 
establishes the genuineness of the revelation or authority-that guarantees 
these religious truths (if such there be), including the proposition that 
God exists. But the question returns, like the repressed, what that 
fundamental guarantee is or could be. Perhaps such a belief is nothing more 
than a cultural myth. There is, as has been shown, neither empirical nor a 
priori knowledge of God, and talk of intuitive knowledge is without logical 
force.

If these considerations are near to the mark, it is unclear what it means to 
say, as some agnostics and even atheists have, that they are sceptical 
God-seekers who simply have not found, after a careful examination, enough 
evidence to make belief in God a warranted or even a reasonable belief. It 
is unclear what it would be like to have, or for that matter fail to have, 
evidence for the existence of God. It is not that the God-seeker has to be 
able to give the evidence, for if that were so no search would be necessary, 
but that he, or at least somebody, must be able to conceive what would count 
as evidence if he had it so that he (and others) have some idea of what to 
look for. But it appears to be just that which cannot be done.

Perhaps there is room for the retort that it is enough for the God-seeker 
not to accept any logical ban on the possibility of there being evidence. He 
need not understand what it would be like to have evidence in this domain. 
But, in turn, when one considers what kind of transcendent reality God is 
said to be, there seems to be an implicit logical ban on there being 
empirical evidence (a pleonasm) for his existence. It would seen plausible 
to assert that there is such a ban, though any such assertion should, of 
course, be made in a tentative way.

Someone trying to give empirical anchorage to talk of God might give the 
following hypothetical case. (It is, however, important in considering the 
case to keep in mind that things even remotely like what is described do not 
happen.) If thousands of people were standing out under the starry skies and 
all saw-the thing went on before their very eyes-a set of stars rearrange 
themselves to spell out "God," they would indeed rightly be utterly 
astonished and think that they had gone mad. Even if they could somehow 
assure themselves that this was not in some way a form of mass 
hallucination-how they could do this is not evident-such an experience would 
not constitute evidence for the existence of God, for they still would be 
without a clue as to what could be meant by speaking of an infinite 
individual transcendent to the world. Such an observation (the stars so 
rearranging themselves), no matter how well confirmed, would not ostensively 
fix the reference range of "God." Talk of such an infinite individual is 
utterly incomprehensible and has every appearance of being incoherent. No 
one knows what he is talking about in speaking of such a transcendent 
reality. All they would know is that something very strange indeed had 
happened. The doubt arises whether believers, or indeed anyone else in terms 
acceptable to believers, can give an intelligible account of the concept of 
God or of what belief in God comes to once God is de-anthropomorphized.

Comprehensive definition of atheism

Reflection on this should lead to a more adequate statement of what atheism 
is and indeed as well to what an agnostic or religious response to atheism 
should be. Instead of saying that an atheist is someone who believes that it 
is false or probably false that there is a God, a more adequate 
characterization of atheism consists in the more complex claim that to be an 
atheist is to be someone who rejects belief in God for the following reasons 
(which reason is stressed depends on how God is being conceived): for an 
anthropomorphic God, the atheist rejects belief in God because it is false 
or probably false that there is a God; for a nonanthropomorphic God (the God 
of Luther and Calvin, Aquinas, and Maimonides), he rejects belief in God 
because the concept of such a God is either meaningless, unintelligible, 
contradictory, incomprehensible, or incoherent; for the God portrayed by 
some modern or contemporary theologians or philosophers, he rejects belief 
in God because the concept of God in question is such that it merely masks 
an atheistic substance-e.g., "God" is just another name for love, or "God" 
is simply a symbolic term for moral ideals.

This atheism is a much more complex notion, as are its various reflective 
rejections. It is clear from what has been said about the concept of God in 
developed forms of Judeo-Christianity that the more crucial form of atheist 
rejection is not the assertion that it is false that there is a God but 
instead the rejection of belief in God because the concept of God is said 
not to make sense-to be in some important way incoherent or unintelligible.

Such a broader conception of atheism, of course, includes everyone who is an 
atheist in the narrower sense, but the converse does not obtain. Moreover, 
this conception of atheism does not have to say that religious claims are 
meaningless. The more typical and less paradoxical and tendentious claim is 
that utterances such as "There is an infinite, eternal creator of the 
universe" are incoherent and that the conception of God reflected in such a 
claim is unintelligible, and in that important sense the claim is 
inconceivable and incredible-incapable of being a rational object of belief 
for a philosophically and scientifically sophisticated person touched by 
modernity. It is this that is a central belief of many contemporary 
atheists. There are good empirical grounds for believing that there are no 
Zeus-like spiritual beings, and as this last, more ramified form of atheism 
avers, if there are sound grounds for believing that the nonanthropomorphic 
or at least radically less anthropomorphic conceptions of God are incoherent 
or unintelligible, the atheist has the strongest grounds for rejecting 
belief in God.

Atheism is a critique and a denial of the central metaphysical beliefs of 
systems of salvation involving a belief in God or spiritual beings, but a 
sophisticated atheist does not simply claim that all such cosmological 
claims are false but takes it that some are so problematic that, while 
purporting to be factual, they actually do not succeed in making a coherent 
factual claim. The claims, in an important sense, do not make sense, and, 
while believers are under the illusion that there is something intelligible 
to be believed in, in reality there is not. These seemingly grand 
cosmological claims are in reality best understood as myths or ideological 
claims reflecting a confused understanding of their utterers' situation.

It is not a well-taken rejoinder to atheistic critiques to say, as have some 
contemporary Protestant theologians, that belief in God is the worst form of 
atheism and idolatry, since the language of Jewish and Christian belief, 
including such sentences as "God exists" and "God created the world," is not 
to be taken literally but symbolically and metaphorically. Christianity, as 
Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian who defends such views, once put it, is "true 
myth." The claims of religion are not, on such account, to be understood as 
metaphysical claims trying to convey extraordinary facts but as metaphorical 
and analogical claims that are not understandable in any other terms. Butif 
something is a metaphor it must at least in principle be possible to say 
what it is a metaphor of. Thus metaphors cannot be understandable only in 
metaphorical terms. There can be no unparaphrasable metaphors or symbolic 
expressions though, what is something else again, a user of such expressions 
may not be capable on demand of supplying that paraphrase. Moreover, if the 
language of religion becomes simply the language of myth and religious 
beliefs are viewed simply as powerful and often humanly compelling myths, 
then they are conceptions that in reality have only an atheistic substance. 
The believer is making no cosmological claim that the atheist is not; it is 
just that his talk, including his unelucidated talk of "true myths," is 
language that for many people has a more powerful emotive force.

Agnosticism has a parallel development to that of atheism. An agnostic, like 
an atheist, asserts either that he does not know that God exists-or, more 
typically, that he cannot know or have sound reasons for believing that God 
exists-but unlike the atheist he does not think that he is justified in 
saying that God does not exist or, stronger still, that God cannot exist. 
Similarly, while some contemporary atheists say that the concept of God in 
developed theism does not make sense and thus that Jewish, Christian, and 
Islamic beliefs must be rejected, many contemporary agnostics believe that 
the concept of God is radically problematic. They maintain that they are not 
in a position to be able to decide whether, on the one hand, the terms and 
concepts of such religions are so problematic that such religious beliefs do 
not make sense or whether, on the other, though the talk is indeed radically 
paradoxical and in many ways incomprehensible, such talk has sufficient 
coherence to make reasonable a belief in an ultimate mystery. Such an 
agnostic recognizes that the puzzles about God cut deeper than perplexities 
concerning whether it is possible to attain adequate evidence for God's 
existence. Rather, he sees the need to exhibit an adequate 
nonanthropomorphic, extralinguistic referent for "God." (This need not 
commit him to the belief that there are any observations independent of 
theory.) Believers think that, though God is a mystery, such a referent has 
been secured, though what it is remains a mystery. Atheists, by contrast, 
believe that it has not been, and indeed some of them believe that it cannot 
be, secured. To talk about mystery, they maintain, is just an evasive way of 
talking about what is not understood. Contemporary agnostics (those 
agnostics who parallel the atheists characterized above) remain in doubt and 
are convinced that there is no rational way of resolving the doubt about 
whether talk in a halting fashion of God just barely secures such reference 
or whether it, after all, fails and that nothing religiously acceptable is 
referred to by "God."

Intense religious commitment, as the history of fideism makes evident, has 
sometimes gone hand in hand with deep scepticism concerning man's capacity 
to know God. It is agreed by all parties to the dispute between belief and 
unbelief that religious claims are paradoxical. Furthermore, criteria for 
what is meaningless and what is not or for what is intelligible and what is 
not are deeply contested. It is perhaps fair enough to say that there are no 
generally accepted criteria.

Keeping these diverse considerations in mind in the arguments between 
belief, agnosticism, and atheism, it is crucial to ask whether there is any 
good reason at all to believe that there is a personal creative reality that 
is beyond the bounds of space and time and transcendent to the world. Is 
there even a sufficient understanding of such talk so that such a reality 
can be the object of religious commitment? (One cannot have faith in or take 
on faith what one does not at all understand. People must at least in some 
way understand what it is that they are to have faith in to be able to have 
faith in it. If a person is asked to trust Irglig, he cannot do so no matter 
how strongly he wants to take something simply on trust.)

It appears to be a brute fact that there just is that indefinitely immense 
collection of finite and contingent masses or conglomerations of things and 
processes the phrase "the universe" refers to. People can come to feel 
wonder, awe, and puzzlement that there is a universe at all. But that fact, 
or the very fact that there is a world at all, does not license the claim 
that there is a noncontingent reality on which the world (the sorry 
collection of things entire) depends. It is not even clear that such a sense 
of contingency gives an understanding of what such a noncontingent thing 
could be. Some atheists think that the reference range of "God" is so 
indeterminate and the concept of God so problematic that it is impossible 
for someone fully aware of that reasonably to believe in God; believers, by 
contrast, think that, though the reference range of "God" is indeterminate, 
it is not so indeterminate and the concept of God so problematic as to make 
belief irrational or incoherent. It is known, they claim, that talk of God 
is problematic, but it is not known, and cannot be known, whether it is so 
problematic as to be without a religiously appropriate sense. Agnostics, in 
turn, say that there is no reasonable decision procedure. It is not known 
and cannot be ascertained whether or not "God" secures a religiously 
adequate referent. What needs to be kept in mind, in reflecting on this 
issue, is whether a "contingent thing" is a pleonasm and "infinite reality" 
is without sense and whether, when people go beyond anthropomorphism (or try 
to go beyond it),it is possible to have a sufficient understanding of what 
is referred to by "God" to make faith a coherent possibility.

Finally, it will not do to take a Pascalian or Dostoyevskian turn and claim 
that, intellectual absurdity or not, religious belief is necessary, since 
without belief in God morality does not make sense and life is meaningless. 
That claim is false, for even if there is no purpose to life there are 
purposes in life-things people care about and want to do-that can remain 
perfectly intact even in a godless world. God or no God, immortality or no 
immortality, it is vile to torture people just for the fun of it, and 
friendship, solidarity, love, and the attainment of self-respect are human 
goods even in an utterly godless world. There are intellectual puzzles about 
how people know that these things are good, but that is doubly true for the 
distinctive claims of a religious ethic. The point is that these things 
remain desirable and that life can have a point even in the absence of God.

Kai E. Nielsen 
========== 

Best!

Gennady
Simferopol Crimea Ukraine