WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST
by Yahya Sulaiman, a.k.a. Ziggy Zag
INTRODUCTION
For many years I have had to endure hearing the same ten or twenty odd arguments from atheists ad infinitum. I do not hold this limited and repetitive repertoire itself against the atheists who use it since they think that these staples work and therefore they should stick to them, and I have no doubt that they view the equally narrow range of common theistic argumentation in much the same way. But I grow weary of repeating myself and thought it useful to lay out all my thoughts at once so that, from now on, all I have to do is just refer people to one article instead of just repeating myself for a thousandth time. I have endeavored to do that with this essay. I don’t expect it to cause anyone to change their mind about anything but it does say a lot of things that desperately need to be said, and which I hope I won’t have to say again. If I end up sounding too caustic or opinionated then I apologize and assure you that it is the mere byproduct of the weariness out of which this article has been written—that same weariness that I’m trying to lay to rest.
I should warn you now that before I can actually get to the clichés of atheism itself there are a number of other clichés related to the subject which must be addressed first since they always seem to pop up anyway.
PRELIMINARIES AND PEEVES
The issue that always seems to come up right off the bat is that of who between theists and atheists carries some assumed burden of proof. Which is funny in a way because I wasn’t even aware that unprovable issues had burdens of proof. You’d think the whole question would be kind of a moot point. Some atheists, while remaining unaware of what I thought would be such an obvious irony as that, nevertheless are able to recognize that since every negative is also a positive and vice versa (disbelief in X=belief in not-X, so disbelief in theism=belief in atheism) therefore they can’t, as many other atheists claim, place the burden of proof squarely on us for being “the positive claimant”, due to their being just as much positive claimants as we are. (That is, they recognize this when they’re not shifting their ground at their convenience between the burden of proof going to “the positive claimant”, “the one introducing the claim”, or “the one making the ‘extraordinary’ claim”.) So instead they try to escape a shared burden of proof by redefining “atheism” as a “lack of belief” in deity.
“Lack of belief”. Now there’s an awkward phrase if ever I’ve heard one. Let me explain it to you. These folks, you see, have decided to call people who have never heard of God and supposedly don’t know about Him atheists too. Just for the sake of argument let’s go along with this for a moment, even though the regular, self-aware kind of atheists seem to be the only people in the world who ever use the term that way at all. Let us call the regular atheism (disbelief in God, whom one has heard of) atheism A, and mere ignorance of God atheism B. The argument in question is that since default position atheism B belongs to category AB along with atheism A, that means that AB (atheism itself) is the default position. (You may need to read that sentence a few times before you can penetrate the incoherence I’m describing.) And therefore we theists have the burden of proof since we’re the ones introducing our claim (when before it was about who was making the positive claim, mind you). Well I’m sorry folks, but AB is not the default (if any of it is), only B. To refer to the whole category of AB as the default is like calling children “men” since as yet they’re neither men nor women and then using this new application of the label in an argument about men vs. women. After all, a child is a non-woman, right? In any event none of the atheism B folks have any bearing on this issue anyway. Forget about them. They’re not the ones in this debate, they have nothing to do with this debate, they’re just being introduced out of nowhere as a non-sequitur or desperate diversion.
Or is the burden of proof, again, on the one with the “extraordinary” claim instead? It’s apparently whatever an atheist needs it to be, actually, but that is not the point. The defense they keep citing during any given fifteen minutes when they’re currently saying it’s the person making the extraordinary claim who has the burden of proof goes, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” That adage might have something to it in and of itself but in this context it presupposes that it’s simply a given that theism is somehow more “extraordinary” than atheism—whatever that’s even supposed to mean. It does seem to me that “extraordinary” is necessarily a very subjective word. And as for my own subjective notions I personally cannot see what makes the idea of the universe having an entity who created it any more extraordinary than ideas like an entire universe spontaneously generating out of nowhere as alchemists thought maggots did from meat, a universe spawning itself (impossible, as nothing can create itself: something has to exist first before it can perform creation or any other action), or even a plethora of entire universes (or perhaps an infinitude) existing to explain how this universe could be the way it is without having been designed that way. Apparently all “extraordinary” means here is “in reference to an outside, supernatural factor”. Or to boil it down a little more, “theistic”.
Similarly, these atheists are always trying to appeal to Ockham’s Razor (the principle that the simpler explanation is to be preferred) to support their beliefs. The rule was always meant to be only a last resort to fall back on in case no other means of determining fact is plausible or applicable, but apparently a lot of people find that part easy to forget. Believe it or not, I actually have my doubts about Ockham’s Razor itself, as a razor is not the best instrument for truly dissecting something so as to see the whole story before you. You see, life teaches that things are always more complex than they appear, not less, and thus to make a point of erring on the side of simplicity seems to me erroneous indeed. But again, there may be something to this rule too all the same—certainly as a rule of convenience for scientists at least. People say that it works for scientists in their studies and I’m sure it does but you must remember that pretending that certain numbers exist even though they are known to be imaginary also works for mathematicians in their studies.
Leave scientific methods and “the scientific method” to the scientists; their only place in matters of the abstract and physically unprovable is either woeful misapplication or grievous pretentiousness, or even as a narrowing of the mind. In any event all of these arguments I have just mentioned are merely excuses to dismiss an argument on some other ground than its own merits anyway.
Let’s get something else out of the way quick: let us please have no more of this nonsense about, “We’re all atheists: I just happen to believe in one fewer god than you do.” I’m apolitical and maybe even anti-political but you never hear me say to conservatives or progressives or Green party people, “Everyone is anti-political; I just happen to believe in the validity of one fewer political philosophy than you do.” Nobody says that, and why? Because it’s asinine, no matter how nonliterally it may be meant. I mean, by such logic we may as well go ahead and define all people as nihilists as well: we all believe in only one more philosophy or value system than the nihilists, don’t we? If the point is merely a call for tolerance or understanding or empathy or identification then I’m sure there are much better, simpler ways to make such a point which are more cogent.
Furthermore, I would appreciate it if atheists kindly stopped using the term “freethinkers” synonymously with “nontheists” or “the nonreligious”, because it is elitist bull which, intentionally or not, implicates that everyone who happens to disagree with their own position is automatically coming to a different conclusion because they’re not thinking freely. To call only your own group The Freethinkers is to insult every dissenting group in the world just on general principles. How do you suppose the Democrats would feel if the Republican Party suddenly changed its name to The Freethinking Party, or vice versa? Apply the golden rule.
I would also like for atheists and other nontheists to stop using “skepticism” to mean “believing in something only when you think there’s evidence for it”, because that is not what the word means, has never been what it meant, and if theists defined our own position that way then I’m sure you would be very offended. Again the golden rule is key here. Disbelief is just disbelief: whatever reasons or criteria may or may not have led to it is an entirely separate issue from what the thing itself is, and thus these reasons or criteria must not be simply presumed in the very definition of the position. It’s almost as haughty and closed-minded in its implications as the “freethinker” label.
And along the same lines, kindly stop referring to arguments for God’s existence as “dead” or “obsolete”, or even “primitive”, just because you happen to disagree with them and other atheists have expressed a similar disagreement in the past. It’s yet another bit of pure elitist arrogance or insouciance—that underlying insistence that oneself must certainly be right that makes my skin crawl. The common arguments for atheism are every bit as ancient as the ones for theism (and, as I will presently demonstrate, God willing, a lot less viable) and you probably wouldn’t want us talking the same way about them, so once again, golden rule. That also goes for referring to religion as “superstition”.
And let us hear no more of these childish (nay, infantile) analogies that atheists like to use as comparisons for God, religion, “proving a negative” , etc.. Santa Claus, “the flying spaghetti monster”, leprechauns in the attic, fairy tales, the “celestial teapot”, invisible pink unicorns, grow up! Even if one leaves aside the utter puerility of all this hackneyed mockery the insult and snobbery involved is still too egregious to ignore. Whether there are any intellectual grounds for these comparisons or not there certainly are no ethical grounds, although some atheists still defend the appeals to ridicule with the claim that anyone who believes the “absurd” things we do deserves to be mocked ruthlessly; and thus do they demonstrate a sense of justice that is no better or more mature than their sense of humor. Whether you’re right or wrong about the point you make, you’re never going to make any point about anything productively by associating the contrary viewpoint with a flying spaghetti monster. Get over yourselves. Sheesh. If you don’t take our views seriously then why are you even bothering to discuss them at all?
Besides, you can’t have it both ways: atheists are constantly admitting to me that science frequently goes against common sense and that it should be valued over logical reasoning itself. Which as good a reason as I’ve ever heard not to make science such an ultimate priority. Indeed, I couldn’t have thought of a better one myself if my very life depended on it.
Finally, let us all, theist and nontheist alike, stop using the word “faith” in this nebulous emotional/intuitive sense which is so often alleged to be opposed to reason. The misconception has become so common now amongst both believers and disbelievers that even some dictionaries are starting to include it as one alternate meaning of the word. “Faith” was never actually intended to mean anything remotely different in a religious context than it means in every non-religious one: “trust”.
“I trust him.”
“I have faith in him.”
“I have faith that God will set things right.”
“I trust that God will set things right.”
And if you know anything about trust then you know that it is not an inherently irrational thing, although it of course can be irrational in certain circumstances, or when formed for certain reasons, or held in such a way. Inversely, trusting can also sometimes be the only rational thing to do: it all depends on the particulars.
Finally, there’s “negative atheism”, although I don’t see any good reason why it shouldn’t be considered a form of agnosticism. This is the idea that one cannot believe in God since one cannot get a coherent definition of “God” in the first place. Of course in such a circumstance one just as much cannot disbelieve in Him either.
Negative “atheism” is based mostly on a confusion between what something is and what it is like. Every dictionary I’ve ever seen defines “God” the same way every theist I’ve ever met would more or less agree on: “the creator and ruler of the universe”. Beyond that it’s all what kind of God you’re talking about, not who God Himself is in the first place. Differing accounts of a human being (let’s name him Kevin) may place him as a good man or a wretch, a person who gets involved with other people from behind the scenes or a person who does not get involved at all, or even by some accounts nothing more than someone’s imaginary friend. But none of this changes the fact that it’s still Kevin we’re talking about, does it, and not anyone else? If Kevin is real then he won’t be a different person altogether if someone’s idea of what kind of person he is turns out to be false. Always remember: what something is and what it is like are not the same thing.
Negative “atheism” is perhaps proof like no other of how utterly obsessed with words the atheistic zeitgeist is, even at the behest of, or in the denial or willful ignorance of, a word’s very well known meaning. But I needed to get the issue out of the way lest everything that follows be perhaps seen as tainted by its absence.
WHY I LEFT ATHEISM, AND WHY IT KEEPS LOOKING LESS AND LESS LIKE I’LL COME BACK
Oh, yes, I was an atheist, and I was pretty hardcore about it too. And I know you atheists are sitting there thinking, “Whoa boy, another one of these, ‘You know, I used to be just like you…’ stories. Here it comes. What was it, a sudden warm feeling in your stomach or something?” No, it wasn’t. In fact, there isn’t much of a story as such to tell at all. The simple fact is that I left atheism because I couldn’t stand continuing to make myself overlook the flaws in its arguments and reasoning, just as you atheists keep accusing us of deliberately overlooking the “flaws” in theism.
More than anything, it was, ironically enough, reading Nietzsche that did it. Though only incidentally. When I read his book Beyond Good and Evil (or tried to: I never really finished it) I came away thinking that it was a lot of dreck unworthy of completion but that it did at least serve to put one single interesting thought in my head. (For that reason perhaps it could be said to have actually succeed more than most philosophy I’ve read in my life, so I suppose I should give the devil his due.) On retrospect, I was probably just misreading Nietzsche but the thought he evoked in me started a chain reaction of cogitation which eventually led me back to belief in God. That idea was (or so it seemed to me at the time) that there are no absolutes in this world, no infallibles to fall back on, nothing etched in stone. If not chaos, then at least unmitigated changeability.
I wondered. Was it true? There didn’t seem very much in life that was certain, that I knew. Time and again I had learned the hard way that in this world there are always exceptions, x-factors, complications. Surprises and frustrations yet to be revealed. So I got to thinking, is there anything we can really fall back on and be sure it’s true? I thought, and I thought, and I eventually came up with one thing and one thing only: we have the laws of the universe. Even in my state of uncertainty I couldn’t deny the infallibility and regularity of those. And all this called to my attention something I hadn’t really thought about all that much before.
Kurt Vonnegut—himself an atheist as I then was—once tried to write a book for children, a complete guide to the world and everything in it. But he had to cease his efforts because he got stuck on how to answer the question, “Why doesn’t everybody just fall off the top of the world?” He realized that the word “gravity” is not an explanation for anything at all, it’s just a word. And because of this one stumbling block he could never finish that book. I was equally stumped and didn’t know if I could ever finish formulating my view of the world. Because not only could I not figure out how these unique absolutes we call physical “laws” or “forces” or “properties” or what have you could be there at all, I didn’t even know what they were in the first place.
It occurred to me quickly enough that no one else did either, including scientists. Indeed, they seemed almost content not to know. Which was fine, but in that case, I thought, they may as well be referring to other unknowns—even religious ones—for all the difference it made. In ancient times, I ruminated, when someone dropped a rock to the ground and it got hurled down by something unseen, they might have said that it was a “spirit” carrying it to the ground. Now we say it’s a “force”. What makes the latter term have any more meaning than the former, let alone any more likelihood of being accurate?? Were “the forces of nature” just the modern day “gods”, a substitute of one nebulous term for another so as to water it down and remove the elements of life and supernature from it to suit one’s own ends?
Perhaps if I could think of some possible way to define the terms myself, I reckoned? One by one the traditional methods of definition failed me. One couldn’t just lump all the laws into a known whole as a subset; we’re not classifying a species here, we’re talking about a nobody-knows-what. Definition by synonyms was no good either, because all the terms I saw used synonymously with “force” were just as meaningless or ambiguous as the word itself was. We don’t know the things’ existential nature. To define them operationally…Ah! Now I had hit on something. Define them operationally…now that I could do. They were the things that formed an ordered foundation for the world, organizing, configuring, regulating. They were the Structurers, the Setters, the foundational guiding principles. The patterns by which it all happens. But how and why? Pattern, structure, and organization are things we have no precedent for believing to just spring up by themselves.
Well before I had this revelation I had already noticed myself repeatedly finding atheistic debaters and writers to frequently overlook what I thought of as the obvious, more genuine refutations when arguing with theists, and go with much worse or more easily contested alternatives instead. And the more and more I read, the more and more I noticed this. I had noticed it, most of all, in the pathetic responses invariably given to the teleological argument from natural law for God’s existence, an argument which it seemed I was now drawing toward on my own by accident. Suddenly everything fit in place: the real reason those other atheists weren’t making the “better” counter-arguments that I would have made myself is because mine weren’t really that much better at all. The real reason I was noticing more and more flaws in the usual atheistic arguments was not because the atheists posing them were unskilled, or that they failed to present their position as best they could: they were simply wrong in the first place. Why else would the argument from natural law (and to a lesser extent, teleological arguments in general) be the one they have the very most embarrassingly terrible answers to when natural (and mathematical) law seems to have been the key all along!
I shan’t recount for you how I got from to this deistic position back to Islam. I have done it elsewhere, it is difficult to summarize in the first place, and it’s nothing to our point at the moment. I shall, however, explain to you now just why those uniquely poor counter-arguments I spoke of don’t work. For some reason there doesn’t seem to be a single one of them I can think of which does not come more or less straight out of agnostic Bertrand Russell’s famous essay Why I Am Not a Christian (an article that was really about theism and hardly says anything about Christianity at all). This includes even the most common, most ludicrous, and most insulting and presumptuous one of them all, which in Russell’s own words goes:
The whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that...
Yes, this actually is the most common counter-argument against the argument from natural law that I’ve ever seen, this insult to the intelligence of the theist that he’s somehow getting “law” as in “human-made, enforced social rule” and “law” in the purely scientific (non)sense mixed up! Just because some of us happen to be using the word “lawgiver” when we make the argument. Who could ever actually make that mistake? Maybe someone who has English as a third language, I suppose. This straw man claim of an equivocation fallacy does not need further elaboration, save to express my awe at hearing anyone say that the mere fact of something being a description entails that the thing being described cannot be said to have a purpose. There’s more:
Because even supposing that there were, you are then faced with the question "Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others?" If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others—the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it—if there were a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate lawgiver.
How could a supernatural being possibly ever be subject to natural law? Only natural things follow natural law. Hence the term “natural law”. Duh. Even if God were subject to His own law of some sort, it would have to be a supernatural law, and the existence of supernatural laws are not demonstrably evident and undeniable in our common experience as natural ones are. And since when does God having motives—motives which Russell merely presumes and dictates—somehow prove He’s subject to law too? Motives are motives. Having a reason to make a particular choice when you’re just as capable of making another one instead is a sign of not being compelled to do so by a higher outside “force”.
Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced [wherein] you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions… On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive…are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was.
Can you see what he’s doing here? You see it, don’t you? He’s just explaining one kind of law (physical) by referring it to another kind of law (mathematical) in order to explain the whole of law. He is, in short, taking exactly the same approach he derided when discussing cosmological arguments for God’s existence in the very same essay I’ve been quoting, and so I would respond in turn with his very own quip:
It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that.
Even now, almost eighty-four years later, it is these same terrible answers of Russell’s that atheists have been parroting nonstop ever since. They haven’t improved on it, or even bothered to change it, one bit. For instance, the “if God is the cause of natural law then He must also be subject to some law of His own” evasion may be the worst argument of its kind yet unfortunately it’s not the only one by any means. There seems to be an entire trend atheists have made out of attempting weakly to stand all the common arguments for God’s existence on their own head. They say that if God created the cosmos then something must have created God. They say that if God designed the world then He must have had His own designer. They say that we’re not following our own logic.
Never mind that all our common experience does teach us all that the causer and the caused, the designer and the designed, are always different, have different characteristics, and may even work in different ways. Never mind that God, if He exists, is a supernatural being and therefore a train of natural law must necessarily end before reaching Him, as I’ve already pointed out. Never mind that likewise a nonphysical being that creates the physical cosmos obviously could not possibly be part of the same chain of physical causation Himself. Never mind that even if God did have His own creator, designer, or higher law, that still wouldn’t change the fact of His existing in the first place, which if you’ll remember is supposed to be the subject at hand. And never mind that God is very likely outside of the confines of time anyway and therefore, by corollary, outside of the confines of causation.
Here’s the low down: if you’re going to say that the laws of nature are the be-all and end-all, and if the most explanatory, full, coherent definition you can give of them is that they are regular patterns (which we already knew), and if you’re going to say that the universe operates solely because of these laws and therefore there’s no designer behind them, then what you’re basically saying is, “The world is operated by patterns. We define these patterns as descriptions of patterns. And because of these patterns there couldn’t have been a pattern-maker behind it all. Because there are these patterns, you see.”
Me, I’d much rather assume that when something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. I can’t prove it but what else am I to think? When I see pattern, structure, organization, and intricacy, not to mention unusually commonly agreed upon aesthetic appeal—in short, all the usual marks of human works like art—I don’t wonder how artists can somehow always incorporate the way the very cosmos works into their own most natural, intuitive, instinctive creative processes (especially considering that the cop-out non-explanation “laws of nature” predated so many of these artists). I wonder how such an obvious work of art could possibly not have an Artist. Experience can be the mother of illusion, I admit, but when it comes to identifying things by all their common marks it really does make for the obvious, natural, and generally most reasonable and accurate criterion.
by Yahya Sulaiman, a.k.a. Ziggy Zag
INTRODUCTION
For many years I have had to endure hearing the same ten or twenty odd arguments from atheists ad infinitum. I do not hold this limited and repetitive repertoire itself against the atheists who use it since they think that these staples work and therefore they should stick to them, and I have no doubt that they view the equally narrow range of common theistic argumentation in much the same way. But I grow weary of repeating myself and thought it useful to lay out all my thoughts at once so that, from now on, all I have to do is just refer people to one article instead of just repeating myself for a thousandth time. I have endeavored to do that with this essay. I don’t expect it to cause anyone to change their mind about anything but it does say a lot of things that desperately need to be said, and which I hope I won’t have to say again. If I end up sounding too caustic or opinionated then I apologize and assure you that it is the mere byproduct of the weariness out of which this article has been written—that same weariness that I’m trying to lay to rest.
I should warn you now that before I can actually get to the clichés of atheism itself there are a number of other clichés related to the subject which must be addressed first since they always seem to pop up anyway.
PRELIMINARIES AND PEEVES
The issue that always seems to come up right off the bat is that of who between theists and atheists carries some assumed burden of proof. Which is funny in a way because I wasn’t even aware that unprovable issues had burdens of proof. You’d think the whole question would be kind of a moot point. Some atheists, while remaining unaware of what I thought would be such an obvious irony as that, nevertheless are able to recognize that since every negative is also a positive and vice versa (disbelief in X=belief in not-X, so disbelief in theism=belief in atheism) therefore they can’t, as many other atheists claim, place the burden of proof squarely on us for being “the positive claimant”, due to their being just as much positive claimants as we are. (That is, they recognize this when they’re not shifting their ground at their convenience between the burden of proof going to “the positive claimant”, “the one introducing the claim”, or “the one making the ‘extraordinary’ claim”.) So instead they try to escape a shared burden of proof by redefining “atheism” as a “lack of belief” in deity.
“Lack of belief”. Now there’s an awkward phrase if ever I’ve heard one. Let me explain it to you. These folks, you see, have decided to call people who have never heard of God and supposedly don’t know about Him atheists too. Just for the sake of argument let’s go along with this for a moment, even though the regular, self-aware kind of atheists seem to be the only people in the world who ever use the term that way at all. Let us call the regular atheism (disbelief in God, whom one has heard of) atheism A, and mere ignorance of God atheism B. The argument in question is that since default position atheism B belongs to category AB along with atheism A, that means that AB (atheism itself) is the default position. (You may need to read that sentence a few times before you can penetrate the incoherence I’m describing.) And therefore we theists have the burden of proof since we’re the ones introducing our claim (when before it was about who was making the positive claim, mind you). Well I’m sorry folks, but AB is not the default (if any of it is), only B. To refer to the whole category of AB as the default is like calling children “men” since as yet they’re neither men nor women and then using this new application of the label in an argument about men vs. women. After all, a child is a non-woman, right? In any event none of the atheism B folks have any bearing on this issue anyway. Forget about them. They’re not the ones in this debate, they have nothing to do with this debate, they’re just being introduced out of nowhere as a non-sequitur or desperate diversion.
Or is the burden of proof, again, on the one with the “extraordinary” claim instead? It’s apparently whatever an atheist needs it to be, actually, but that is not the point. The defense they keep citing during any given fifteen minutes when they’re currently saying it’s the person making the extraordinary claim who has the burden of proof goes, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” That adage might have something to it in and of itself but in this context it presupposes that it’s simply a given that theism is somehow more “extraordinary” than atheism—whatever that’s even supposed to mean. It does seem to me that “extraordinary” is necessarily a very subjective word. And as for my own subjective notions I personally cannot see what makes the idea of the universe having an entity who created it any more extraordinary than ideas like an entire universe spontaneously generating out of nowhere as alchemists thought maggots did from meat, a universe spawning itself (impossible, as nothing can create itself: something has to exist first before it can perform creation or any other action), or even a plethora of entire universes (or perhaps an infinitude) existing to explain how this universe could be the way it is without having been designed that way. Apparently all “extraordinary” means here is “in reference to an outside, supernatural factor”. Or to boil it down a little more, “theistic”.
Similarly, these atheists are always trying to appeal to Ockham’s Razor (the principle that the simpler explanation is to be preferred) to support their beliefs. The rule was always meant to be only a last resort to fall back on in case no other means of determining fact is plausible or applicable, but apparently a lot of people find that part easy to forget. Believe it or not, I actually have my doubts about Ockham’s Razor itself, as a razor is not the best instrument for truly dissecting something so as to see the whole story before you. You see, life teaches that things are always more complex than they appear, not less, and thus to make a point of erring on the side of simplicity seems to me erroneous indeed. But again, there may be something to this rule too all the same—certainly as a rule of convenience for scientists at least. People say that it works for scientists in their studies and I’m sure it does but you must remember that pretending that certain numbers exist even though they are known to be imaginary also works for mathematicians in their studies.
Leave scientific methods and “the scientific method” to the scientists; their only place in matters of the abstract and physically unprovable is either woeful misapplication or grievous pretentiousness, or even as a narrowing of the mind. In any event all of these arguments I have just mentioned are merely excuses to dismiss an argument on some other ground than its own merits anyway.
Let’s get something else out of the way quick: let us please have no more of this nonsense about, “We’re all atheists: I just happen to believe in one fewer god than you do.” I’m apolitical and maybe even anti-political but you never hear me say to conservatives or progressives or Green party people, “Everyone is anti-political; I just happen to believe in the validity of one fewer political philosophy than you do.” Nobody says that, and why? Because it’s asinine, no matter how nonliterally it may be meant. I mean, by such logic we may as well go ahead and define all people as nihilists as well: we all believe in only one more philosophy or value system than the nihilists, don’t we? If the point is merely a call for tolerance or understanding or empathy or identification then I’m sure there are much better, simpler ways to make such a point which are more cogent.
Furthermore, I would appreciate it if atheists kindly stopped using the term “freethinkers” synonymously with “nontheists” or “the nonreligious”, because it is elitist bull which, intentionally or not, implicates that everyone who happens to disagree with their own position is automatically coming to a different conclusion because they’re not thinking freely. To call only your own group The Freethinkers is to insult every dissenting group in the world just on general principles. How do you suppose the Democrats would feel if the Republican Party suddenly changed its name to The Freethinking Party, or vice versa? Apply the golden rule.
I would also like for atheists and other nontheists to stop using “skepticism” to mean “believing in something only when you think there’s evidence for it”, because that is not what the word means, has never been what it meant, and if theists defined our own position that way then I’m sure you would be very offended. Again the golden rule is key here. Disbelief is just disbelief: whatever reasons or criteria may or may not have led to it is an entirely separate issue from what the thing itself is, and thus these reasons or criteria must not be simply presumed in the very definition of the position. It’s almost as haughty and closed-minded in its implications as the “freethinker” label.
And along the same lines, kindly stop referring to arguments for God’s existence as “dead” or “obsolete”, or even “primitive”, just because you happen to disagree with them and other atheists have expressed a similar disagreement in the past. It’s yet another bit of pure elitist arrogance or insouciance—that underlying insistence that oneself must certainly be right that makes my skin crawl. The common arguments for atheism are every bit as ancient as the ones for theism (and, as I will presently demonstrate, God willing, a lot less viable) and you probably wouldn’t want us talking the same way about them, so once again, golden rule. That also goes for referring to religion as “superstition”.
And let us hear no more of these childish (nay, infantile) analogies that atheists like to use as comparisons for God, religion, “proving a negative” , etc.. Santa Claus, “the flying spaghetti monster”, leprechauns in the attic, fairy tales, the “celestial teapot”, invisible pink unicorns, grow up! Even if one leaves aside the utter puerility of all this hackneyed mockery the insult and snobbery involved is still too egregious to ignore. Whether there are any intellectual grounds for these comparisons or not there certainly are no ethical grounds, although some atheists still defend the appeals to ridicule with the claim that anyone who believes the “absurd” things we do deserves to be mocked ruthlessly; and thus do they demonstrate a sense of justice that is no better or more mature than their sense of humor. Whether you’re right or wrong about the point you make, you’re never going to make any point about anything productively by associating the contrary viewpoint with a flying spaghetti monster. Get over yourselves. Sheesh. If you don’t take our views seriously then why are you even bothering to discuss them at all?
Besides, you can’t have it both ways: atheists are constantly admitting to me that science frequently goes against common sense and that it should be valued over logical reasoning itself. Which as good a reason as I’ve ever heard not to make science such an ultimate priority. Indeed, I couldn’t have thought of a better one myself if my very life depended on it.
Finally, let us all, theist and nontheist alike, stop using the word “faith” in this nebulous emotional/intuitive sense which is so often alleged to be opposed to reason. The misconception has become so common now amongst both believers and disbelievers that even some dictionaries are starting to include it as one alternate meaning of the word. “Faith” was never actually intended to mean anything remotely different in a religious context than it means in every non-religious one: “trust”.
“I trust him.”
“I have faith in him.”
“I have faith that God will set things right.”
“I trust that God will set things right.”
And if you know anything about trust then you know that it is not an inherently irrational thing, although it of course can be irrational in certain circumstances, or when formed for certain reasons, or held in such a way. Inversely, trusting can also sometimes be the only rational thing to do: it all depends on the particulars.
Finally, there’s “negative atheism”, although I don’t see any good reason why it shouldn’t be considered a form of agnosticism. This is the idea that one cannot believe in God since one cannot get a coherent definition of “God” in the first place. Of course in such a circumstance one just as much cannot disbelieve in Him either.
Negative “atheism” is based mostly on a confusion between what something is and what it is like. Every dictionary I’ve ever seen defines “God” the same way every theist I’ve ever met would more or less agree on: “the creator and ruler of the universe”. Beyond that it’s all what kind of God you’re talking about, not who God Himself is in the first place. Differing accounts of a human being (let’s name him Kevin) may place him as a good man or a wretch, a person who gets involved with other people from behind the scenes or a person who does not get involved at all, or even by some accounts nothing more than someone’s imaginary friend. But none of this changes the fact that it’s still Kevin we’re talking about, does it, and not anyone else? If Kevin is real then he won’t be a different person altogether if someone’s idea of what kind of person he is turns out to be false. Always remember: what something is and what it is like are not the same thing.
Negative “atheism” is perhaps proof like no other of how utterly obsessed with words the atheistic zeitgeist is, even at the behest of, or in the denial or willful ignorance of, a word’s very well known meaning. But I needed to get the issue out of the way lest everything that follows be perhaps seen as tainted by its absence.
WHY I LEFT ATHEISM, AND WHY IT KEEPS LOOKING LESS AND LESS LIKE I’LL COME BACK
Oh, yes, I was an atheist, and I was pretty hardcore about it too. And I know you atheists are sitting there thinking, “Whoa boy, another one of these, ‘You know, I used to be just like you…’ stories. Here it comes. What was it, a sudden warm feeling in your stomach or something?” No, it wasn’t. In fact, there isn’t much of a story as such to tell at all. The simple fact is that I left atheism because I couldn’t stand continuing to make myself overlook the flaws in its arguments and reasoning, just as you atheists keep accusing us of deliberately overlooking the “flaws” in theism.
More than anything, it was, ironically enough, reading Nietzsche that did it. Though only incidentally. When I read his book Beyond Good and Evil (or tried to: I never really finished it) I came away thinking that it was a lot of dreck unworthy of completion but that it did at least serve to put one single interesting thought in my head. (For that reason perhaps it could be said to have actually succeed more than most philosophy I’ve read in my life, so I suppose I should give the devil his due.) On retrospect, I was probably just misreading Nietzsche but the thought he evoked in me started a chain reaction of cogitation which eventually led me back to belief in God. That idea was (or so it seemed to me at the time) that there are no absolutes in this world, no infallibles to fall back on, nothing etched in stone. If not chaos, then at least unmitigated changeability.
I wondered. Was it true? There didn’t seem very much in life that was certain, that I knew. Time and again I had learned the hard way that in this world there are always exceptions, x-factors, complications. Surprises and frustrations yet to be revealed. So I got to thinking, is there anything we can really fall back on and be sure it’s true? I thought, and I thought, and I eventually came up with one thing and one thing only: we have the laws of the universe. Even in my state of uncertainty I couldn’t deny the infallibility and regularity of those. And all this called to my attention something I hadn’t really thought about all that much before.
Kurt Vonnegut—himself an atheist as I then was—once tried to write a book for children, a complete guide to the world and everything in it. But he had to cease his efforts because he got stuck on how to answer the question, “Why doesn’t everybody just fall off the top of the world?” He realized that the word “gravity” is not an explanation for anything at all, it’s just a word. And because of this one stumbling block he could never finish that book. I was equally stumped and didn’t know if I could ever finish formulating my view of the world. Because not only could I not figure out how these unique absolutes we call physical “laws” or “forces” or “properties” or what have you could be there at all, I didn’t even know what they were in the first place.
It occurred to me quickly enough that no one else did either, including scientists. Indeed, they seemed almost content not to know. Which was fine, but in that case, I thought, they may as well be referring to other unknowns—even religious ones—for all the difference it made. In ancient times, I ruminated, when someone dropped a rock to the ground and it got hurled down by something unseen, they might have said that it was a “spirit” carrying it to the ground. Now we say it’s a “force”. What makes the latter term have any more meaning than the former, let alone any more likelihood of being accurate?? Were “the forces of nature” just the modern day “gods”, a substitute of one nebulous term for another so as to water it down and remove the elements of life and supernature from it to suit one’s own ends?
Perhaps if I could think of some possible way to define the terms myself, I reckoned? One by one the traditional methods of definition failed me. One couldn’t just lump all the laws into a known whole as a subset; we’re not classifying a species here, we’re talking about a nobody-knows-what. Definition by synonyms was no good either, because all the terms I saw used synonymously with “force” were just as meaningless or ambiguous as the word itself was. We don’t know the things’ existential nature. To define them operationally…Ah! Now I had hit on something. Define them operationally…now that I could do. They were the things that formed an ordered foundation for the world, organizing, configuring, regulating. They were the Structurers, the Setters, the foundational guiding principles. The patterns by which it all happens. But how and why? Pattern, structure, and organization are things we have no precedent for believing to just spring up by themselves.
Well before I had this revelation I had already noticed myself repeatedly finding atheistic debaters and writers to frequently overlook what I thought of as the obvious, more genuine refutations when arguing with theists, and go with much worse or more easily contested alternatives instead. And the more and more I read, the more and more I noticed this. I had noticed it, most of all, in the pathetic responses invariably given to the teleological argument from natural law for God’s existence, an argument which it seemed I was now drawing toward on my own by accident. Suddenly everything fit in place: the real reason those other atheists weren’t making the “better” counter-arguments that I would have made myself is because mine weren’t really that much better at all. The real reason I was noticing more and more flaws in the usual atheistic arguments was not because the atheists posing them were unskilled, or that they failed to present their position as best they could: they were simply wrong in the first place. Why else would the argument from natural law (and to a lesser extent, teleological arguments in general) be the one they have the very most embarrassingly terrible answers to when natural (and mathematical) law seems to have been the key all along!
I shan’t recount for you how I got from to this deistic position back to Islam. I have done it elsewhere, it is difficult to summarize in the first place, and it’s nothing to our point at the moment. I shall, however, explain to you now just why those uniquely poor counter-arguments I spoke of don’t work. For some reason there doesn’t seem to be a single one of them I can think of which does not come more or less straight out of agnostic Bertrand Russell’s famous essay Why I Am Not a Christian (an article that was really about theism and hardly says anything about Christianity at all). This includes even the most common, most ludicrous, and most insulting and presumptuous one of them all, which in Russell’s own words goes:
The whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that...
Yes, this actually is the most common counter-argument against the argument from natural law that I’ve ever seen, this insult to the intelligence of the theist that he’s somehow getting “law” as in “human-made, enforced social rule” and “law” in the purely scientific (non)sense mixed up! Just because some of us happen to be using the word “lawgiver” when we make the argument. Who could ever actually make that mistake? Maybe someone who has English as a third language, I suppose. This straw man claim of an equivocation fallacy does not need further elaboration, save to express my awe at hearing anyone say that the mere fact of something being a description entails that the thing being described cannot be said to have a purpose. There’s more:
Because even supposing that there were, you are then faced with the question "Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others?" If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others—the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it—if there were a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate lawgiver.
How could a supernatural being possibly ever be subject to natural law? Only natural things follow natural law. Hence the term “natural law”. Duh. Even if God were subject to His own law of some sort, it would have to be a supernatural law, and the existence of supernatural laws are not demonstrably evident and undeniable in our common experience as natural ones are. And since when does God having motives—motives which Russell merely presumes and dictates—somehow prove He’s subject to law too? Motives are motives. Having a reason to make a particular choice when you’re just as capable of making another one instead is a sign of not being compelled to do so by a higher outside “force”.
Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced [wherein] you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions… On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive…are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was.
Can you see what he’s doing here? You see it, don’t you? He’s just explaining one kind of law (physical) by referring it to another kind of law (mathematical) in order to explain the whole of law. He is, in short, taking exactly the same approach he derided when discussing cosmological arguments for God’s existence in the very same essay I’ve been quoting, and so I would respond in turn with his very own quip:
It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that.
Even now, almost eighty-four years later, it is these same terrible answers of Russell’s that atheists have been parroting nonstop ever since. They haven’t improved on it, or even bothered to change it, one bit. For instance, the “if God is the cause of natural law then He must also be subject to some law of His own” evasion may be the worst argument of its kind yet unfortunately it’s not the only one by any means. There seems to be an entire trend atheists have made out of attempting weakly to stand all the common arguments for God’s existence on their own head. They say that if God created the cosmos then something must have created God. They say that if God designed the world then He must have had His own designer. They say that we’re not following our own logic.
Never mind that all our common experience does teach us all that the causer and the caused, the designer and the designed, are always different, have different characteristics, and may even work in different ways. Never mind that God, if He exists, is a supernatural being and therefore a train of natural law must necessarily end before reaching Him, as I’ve already pointed out. Never mind that likewise a nonphysical being that creates the physical cosmos obviously could not possibly be part of the same chain of physical causation Himself. Never mind that even if God did have His own creator, designer, or higher law, that still wouldn’t change the fact of His existing in the first place, which if you’ll remember is supposed to be the subject at hand. And never mind that God is very likely outside of the confines of time anyway and therefore, by corollary, outside of the confines of causation.
Here’s the low down: if you’re going to say that the laws of nature are the be-all and end-all, and if the most explanatory, full, coherent definition you can give of them is that they are regular patterns (which we already knew), and if you’re going to say that the universe operates solely because of these laws and therefore there’s no designer behind them, then what you’re basically saying is, “The world is operated by patterns. We define these patterns as descriptions of patterns. And because of these patterns there couldn’t have been a pattern-maker behind it all. Because there are these patterns, you see.”
Me, I’d much rather assume that when something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. I can’t prove it but what else am I to think? When I see pattern, structure, organization, and intricacy, not to mention unusually commonly agreed upon aesthetic appeal—in short, all the usual marks of human works like art—I don’t wonder how artists can somehow always incorporate the way the very cosmos works into their own most natural, intuitive, instinctive creative processes (especially considering that the cop-out non-explanation “laws of nature” predated so many of these artists). I wonder how such an obvious work of art could possibly not have an Artist. Experience can be the mother of illusion, I admit, but when it comes to identifying things by all their common marks it really does make for the obvious, natural, and generally most reasonable and accurate criterion.
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