Atheism Undermines Knowledge

[pocaracas]

For example, I am a shoemaker, and I awake in the morning to see that all of my shoes that needed repair have been fixed during the middle of the night. I have absolutely no idea how this happened. I can either speculate that my assistant came in during the night and finished my work, or I can speculate that magical elves floated in from another dimension and repaired the shoes. Now, why should I consider the magic elves explanation?

errr... because you watched too many Disney cartoons as a kid?

[downbeatplumb]

You've seen nonsense 1st hand dbp so you stop yourself from thinking?

No, but I do require evidence with my facts.

Philosophy and arguments only get you so far and then need to be validated with data.

Science bitches it works!

[DeistPaladin]

...The denial of god starts an endless cascade of further denials. Without the concept of god, all reason collapses.
...

As others have tried to explain:
doubt =/= denial.

Now on to the larger philosophical issue you bring up, this is the same bare assertion I've seen so often before in the Moral Argument, the Transcendental Argument and the Presuppositional Argument. Typically, the argument is "without God, there would be no..." and then follow with "objective morals" or "laws of logic" or "any way to know anything".

Beyond the fact that these are just a bare assertions (see Bare Assertion Fallacy) they also represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what morality/logic/knowledge is. Based on the nature of these bare assertions and the arguments that typically ensue (yours included), the apologist seems to assume that these things are magical forces in the universe and therefore must have been put in place by (and maintained by) a mysterious magical being.

...gotta take care of some real life issues; I'll continue this post as soon as I can...

[Lord Privy Seal]

LPS, for now let’s take what you say as given: that appealing to transcendent principles “kicks the can down the road”.

Since you're arguing that atheism (as opposed to, say, reductionism) is what "undermines knowledge," then it seems to me rather disingenuous for you to say you're appealing to some kind of generic "transcendent principles" rather than the counter-position to atheism: theism. It's very common for theists to employ a bait-and-switch technique. They start out arguing for something generic, a blank screen onto which anything can be projected (which also has the useful properties of a set of goal posts on wheels): a "First Cause," a "Greatest Conceivable Being," an "Intelligent Designer," a "Formal Cause," etc., and so forth. Then, after casting their invocation syllogism, they tack on at the end, "And this [First Cause/Greatest Conceivable Being/Intelligent Designer/Formal Cause/Etc.] we call God [the one I learned about in Sunday School and my personal favorite--what a coincidence!]" Now, maybe you're not doing that here, but I hope you'll pardon me if my B.S. Detector goes to yellow alert.

I think I could make a fairly good case for "transcendent principles," but such principles would not be interchangeable with "a male Middle Eastern deity who is prone to anger and violence, and had very strong aversions to a long list of human behaviors including wearing clothes of blended fibers and eating shrimp wrapped in bacon, but he got better (or not, depending on who you ask)." To the contrary, any person--especially a really superduperduper person--is high atop Mt. Improbable (being a complex system), and cannot serve as the ontological base. A person cannot exist apart from principles like natural regularity, but natural regularity can apply even if there are no persons.

My response is that curiousity and rational inquiry is all about seeking deeper and more thorough understanding of the world. Let me give an example:

I’m in my car with three of my friends: a mechanic, a physicist, and a priest.

A mechanic, a physicist, a priest, and a Swedenborgian got into a car. The cab driver looked at them and said, "What is this, a joke?!"

>snip<
Then the priest says, “And here I thought the car started because we want to go bowling.”

Can you think of any significant difference between the priest giving that answer, vs. saying, "The car starts by the power of Hephaestus"?

And I’m saying if we call the laws of physics a brute fact, then we have stopped short. There is more to be known, especially with respect to why the law of cause and effects works.

I question the validity of the question. What does it mean to ask "why the law of cause and effects works?" Whatever you propose as your answer ends up being a cause of cause and effect, which is self-contradictory. Without a principle of cause and effect, your proposed "transcendent principle" can't cause anything. The principle of cause and effect has to be operative before there can be such a thing as a particular cause or effect.

"Cause and effect" is a corollary of "existence" (existents exist) and "identity" (an existent is itself; it cannot be itself and not-itself at the same time and in the same respect). An existent entity exhibits certain properties that make it what it is, and not something else. These properties have effects in interaction with other entities; otherwise there would be no distinction between the properties and the absence of the properties. Thus, natural regularity and causality.

"Existence" and "identity" are, as far as I can tell, irreducible and axiomatic. It doesn't make sense to speak of a god/-dess or anything else "creating" or "causing" existence and identity, because the deity would have to exist and have identity as a deity, not a rutabaga, as a particular deity and not some other, and have properties including the ability to "create" or "cause" other things. Can you make a case for a deity that doesn't exist, isn't anything in particular, and has no properties, yet invents existence, causes causality and identifies identity?

In addition, positing the existence of god or transcendent influences will not stop reasoned inquiry. One unique feature of the Christian thought is the belief that god can be known. “God did it” is not the end of my curiosity; it is the beginning. God did it, but I still want to know how, why and understand more about His nature.

Well, OK, but that kinda blows most of the arguments for "God" out of the water. Once "God" is dissected to figure out how he works, what it is that makes his component parts integrate and interact so as to form him instead of Isis, what those components are composed of and so on until you get down to some kind of irreducible Simplicity, "equation that fits on a T-shirt," or whatever, you've demonstrated that "God" is not the First Cause (because now you know what causes him to be him and not somebody or something else), the Intelligent Designer (because now you've figured out where his "design" came from), the source of regularity (because you've uncovered the basis of his own regularity), and so forth. Which means that all of those arguments that were supposed to get us to "God" have taken us right on past him to whatever the irreducible and axiomatic bedrock of reality turns out to be. Which means in turn that you've just yanked the rug out from under all of your proposed reasons for believing in "God" in the first place.

Your only alternative to this is to do the very thing you said you won't do: turn "God" into a thought-stopper, so you don't ask who or what created him, who/what fine-tuned the nature of the spirit realm so that he could exist, who/what is his formal cause, etc..

[Mystic]

I think what ChadWooters is trying to say, is without God, properly basic beliefs cannot be justified, including induction? Am I right?

[The Reality Salesman01]

Is the modern atheist belief that only efficient causes exist consistent with the reliability of observed physical laws on which the acquisition of knowledge depends? No.

The two cornerstones of modern atheism are: 1) the physical universe is causally closed, i.e. devoid of any influence apart from the deterministic chain of cause and effect and 2) dependant on nothing outside itself its continuity or regularity. The modern atheist removes from consideration teleology, final causes and intentionality. In practice, atheism presupposes that everything we know can be described in terms of ‘material’ interactions by means of efficient causes. This excludes any type of formal or final causes that would lead one to posit divine influence. However, this cannot be the case.

An infinite series of ever smaller intermediate causes and effects separates each cause from its corresponding effect.* In order to avoid this paradox, there must be a smallest possible finite unit. You can stack small finite units (of time, space, etc.) to fill a finite gap. In quantum physics, you have a smallest possible unit of time, Plank time or tP. Yet no efficient cause links one tP to the next. They just happen to be ‘next’ to one another. Either relationship between one tP and another is random OR a transcendent order links one tP to all others.

If random, the physical universe would have no logical continuity. In such a universe, no knowledge would be justified. Since the modern atheist denies any transcendentally imposed order he must accept that the universe has no logical continuity on which the base his knowledge. Therefore, the atheist cannot also believe in the valid acquisition of knowledge without contradiction.

* (as per David Hume)

So because I reject that a diety is responsible, I by default accept the universe has no logical continuity? I respect your opinion and the way you describe the God you defend makes it hard for me to reject any supposition of IT. In the sense that God is an abstract entity that marks the very beginning of all events that is beyond my ability to comprehend it, I would also agree that such a CAUSE would be necessary for the universe to maintain its logical substance. I am an Atheist because I have heard no reason to believe that any God(s) proposed by any theist warrants credit for such an accomplishment. I do not assert that God (in the abstract sense defined above) could not exist, only that no such God(s) proposed to me to date is sufficient to serve as an acceptable answer. A moving Goal-post version of God is usually a safe bet, but the individual pretending to know about it, really doesn't know any more than me. They just insist on merely painting a picture of possibilities without any paint or substance. The same picture can be painted of any unfalsifiable character. They themselves are purely speculating about a God that they themselves have not nailed down, but are still clinging to. Therefore, they themselves have no belief in any specific God, they just insist on naming this abstract entity that marks the finite beginning as God.

In other words...There's a finite beginning because an infinite regress could not exist, because we would not exist...that beginning is God (I would say "don't know").The term God becomes quite arbitrary at this point as it has nothing to defend. Really the individual arguing for this representation of God is in the same boat as the Atheist, they just insist on using the word God where I would say "don't know" to describe this necessary unknown event or scource. I'm okay with not knowing, and not trying to fit the word into the puzzle. I would need a reason to attribute these things to a God, and as of now, there is no evidence that such a thing is real or worthy of any property that He/It is supposed to have. Therefore I see no reason to invoke the word.

[Mystic]

Wait I re-read the argument. Basically, it's due to time being unconnected. In fact, I think Ibn Arabi argued on this basis, God is constantly creating and recreating the universe.

However, I think plank time maybe wrong, and set theory maybe be wrong about 1-2 having as much real numbers in between as 1-infinity.

In fact, this is a problem, even if God re-creates moments. What connects moments? If there is no time between one moment of creation to the other, then it has the same problem.

I think plank time is a bad theory.

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Can your argument be summarized like this:

Time being connected is magical and needs outside magical cause.
Time cannot be unconnected or we would have no knowledge.
We do have knowledge.
Therefore time is connected.
Therefore there is a magical causer.

[Mister Agenda]

There is no different aspect of atheism. It's a lack of a belief in god, end of story end of question.

So you couldn't say that there are Buddhist atheists, humanist atheists etc etc...

Don't be silly

They aren't aspects of atheism. Atheism is an aspect of them.

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You should stop using the word atheism and use whatever the word is for the philosophy you're targeting is. Atheists just don't believe in god. They can still believe in other things and just not believe in god. You're arguing with a philosophy. And mistaking atheism for that philosophy.

Yes, you can be an atheist apart from any specific belief. But you cannot be a logically consistent atheist IF you believe in the power of inductive reasoning. In other words, if belief in god is necessary to believe (x) then an atheist who believes in (x) is not being logically consistent.

Or is evidence that belief in god is not necessary to believe (x).

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Splitting hairs.

Mormonism is to theism is as Buddhism is to atheism.

Likewise Christianity is not an aspect of theism? Yeah, use a different word if you like > address the question.

Correct, Christianity is not an aspect of theism.

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As has already been said, you asserted it.

...and you have not refuted it.

Assertions do not requre refutation as there is no good reason to accept them as true in the first place.

[Neo-Scholastic]

You want there to be something more fundamental than the observed world and you call it god.

You're taking half of the world for granted.

The brute facts are what we can measure.

Not everything can be measured. Which is more of a dog Lassie or Pluto? Does love have a mass? How do you measure the difference between one's ability and one' desire? Who is more evil, a shoplifter or a rapist? Are you so dense that you cannot recognize the difference between descriptions about quantity and those about quality?

[pocaracas]

You want there to be something more fundamental than the observed world and you call it god.

You're taking half of the world for granted.

The brute facts are what we can measure.

Not everything can be measured. Which is more of a dog Lassie or Pluto? Does love have a mass? How do you measure the difference between one's ability and one' desire? Who is more evil, a shoplifter or a rapist? Are you so dense that you cannot recognize the difference between descriptions about quantity and those about quality?

Pluto's a planet, silly!

Everything else is just names we've given to psychological states, backed up by brain functions... highly complex brain functions which we haven't yet managed to map adequately... and may never do... but still, brain, neurons and the like...

Of course, this means you're just trying to squeeze god into the realm of mental processes.... god of the gaps, much?