The Arrogance of Atheism

[Ryft]

I'd like to know what you think of Austin's rebuttal of your rebuttal, published today on the link you gave.

I will be confronting it Wednesday or Thursday. I'm disappointed by its weakness.

I think he has a good point about presupposing the truth of belief systems; a "belief" is something you think is true, and if you are going to argue from a specific belief system, you are going to hold it as true.

While that is true, it has little to do with the point of my argument. You see, it is not about the epistemic criteria atheists use to argue from their belief system (be what it may). It is about the epistemic criteria atheists expect Christians to use in arguing from theirs. Suppose that in the course of some discussion an atheist says to a Christian, "You would have to prove this God of yours exists in the first place," to which the Christian responds by pulling out his Bible. I don't expect he would get very far before the atheist interjects that the Bible is unacceptable criteria for establishing truth claims.

Well, now wait a minute: according to who? What standard produced that determination? The atheist's own epistemic structure, of course (which almost universally is some form of empiricism). He is presupposing the truth of his self-determined epistemology and expecting his Christian interlocutor to work within the framework thereof. The force of my argument is found in the fact that the Bible-determined epistemology of Christian theism has exactly equal validity as the one affirmed by the atheist—a conclusion that the atheist cannot present a counter-argument against that presupposes the truth of his epistemology, because to do so would commit the logical fallacy of Begging the Question (in virtue of epistemology itself being the subject).

When the atheist pretends that his epistemic structure possesses the only legitimate criteria for establishing truth claims, prohibiting by fiat any competing epistemic structure, he is patently shoving his beliefs down the Christian's throat. This is the "arrogance" which my argument addresses.

I wouldn't say atheism is a belief system ...

The only time I used the word "atheism" is in the title (and references to it). I have likewise maintained, on this site as well as my own, that atheism is not a worldview. When it comes to the actual substance of my argument, atheism per se is never a predicate.

Materialism is the only [belief system] that produces predictable results.

Unfortunately materialism, or metaphysical naturalism, begs the question on the issue, insofar as it asserts that "nature is all there is, and all basic truths are truths of nature"("Naturalism." The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan. 1996 Supplement, pp. 372-373). All things supernatural (e.g., God, souls, etc.) are asserted to be nonexistent prior to any investigation. Reality is said to be "such that there is nothing but natural things, forces, and causes of the kind that the natural sciences study," rejecting out of hand "the objective existence of any supernatural thing, force or cause" ("Metaphysical naturalism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia).

And it further begs the question on another, more pertinent level. Why someone prefers metaphysical naturalism is biographically interesting, but when it comes to a competition about epistemology it is question-begging to presuppose its truth. And begging the question is a logical fallacy, an error in reasoning.

[It is up to the theist] to reason why things like spiritualism are equally valid.

Such is precisely what my argument does. It is equally valid by virtue of the inescapable absence of any means of evaluating a competition of epistemology that does not beg the question.

---

The thing is, though, that it is not atheists who are making any claims ... We simply ask those who make specific claims that they provide evidence to support them. We also ask that this evidence be logical, falsifiable and testable.

In other words, atheists do make claims—unabashed epistemic claims; "Some proposition P is epistemically justified when it satisfies X, Y, and Z."

With atheists you are dealing with the default position.

The phrase "default position" is singular. Based on both study and experience, I reject the notion that there is one position that all atheists affirm—other than the definitional absence of any God-beliefs, which taken by itself is neither an epistemology nor a worldview.

If anyone actually makes a claim concerning a specific proposition, then you are quite at liberty to ask them to substantiate that claim.

Unless, of course, a competition of epistemology is the predicate of the proposition, in which case asking them "to substantiate that claim" engages in the fallacy of begging the question (where the substantiation involves epistemic criteria).