Are Atheists using Intellectually Dishonest Arguments?
March 7, 2018 at 7:27 pm
(This post was last modified: March 7, 2018 at 9:09 pm by vulcanlogician.)
So, last week I was browsing the internets and came across a blog post by Eve Keneinan entitled "Intellectually Dishonest Atheists."
I clicked the link hoping to find an article which would make some significant points and perhaps challenge me to become more intellectually honest. I was sorely disappointed. The article did not challenge me at all. Well... maybe a little bit... but for the most part I felt like I didn't get my money's worth (and keep in mind the article was free to read online.)
Keneinan made three main points, each divided into various subpoints:
1) Atheists often suffer from a "persistent inability or refusal to distinguish God from a god or gods"
2) Atheists often presume "belief in scientism, the logically incoherent claim that 'only scientific knowledge is valid/real/genuine knowledge'"
3) Atheists often engage in "persistent use of the burden of proof fallacy, that is, the rhetorical trope which combines an argument from ignorance (“my position is the default position,” i.e. “my position is true until proven false, so I need not argue for it) with special pleading.
I would like to see discussion of all three main points in this thread, but to keep the OP as concise as possible, I will only treat the first point here.
So, lets unpack this.
Bullshit. If you have programmed your three-year-old to distinguish Yahweh from Zeus, she can regurgitate what you have told her to believe. But no child at that age cares about such a distinction, nor can she articulate it in her own words.
Who gives a shit? Some people have the bizarre habit of capitalizing a pronoun when "God" is the antecedent. This practice has no precedent outside of circles of believers and in no fucking way marks a logical distinction. If I chose to capitalize the word "house" when referring to my own particular place of habitation, would this assign my particular livingspace special significance over others? --"My House is the third house on the left. Just past the white house with the red trim, you will find my House." I fail to see how capitalization proves anything. And, even if it does... guess what? Zeus is capitalized!
This is probably the most valid point made in the article. When arguing with an adherent of a "sophisticated monotheism," one ought not use arguments which ignore the sophistication of one's opponent's particular god concept. In layman's terms: An argument that utterly refutes Drich may not even be appropriate to make against Neo. Oftentimes I find myself leveling criticisms against Christians in general that only really apply to Christian fundamentalists. In this instance, Keneinan makes a valid point. We ought to keep our opponents' actual views in mind, lest we be guilty of strawmanning.
But what about the vast majority of Christians who do not have a "sophisticated monotheism"? I'd estimate around 90% of the Christians I know, do not worship the eternal being of whom Aquinas and Anselm spoke. They worship the tribal god of the Israelites, and they will tell you as much if you inquire about the nature of their god. It seems quite unfair to atheists to have them respond to god-claims that resemble paganism with counterarguments that refute an eternal, cosmic being.
I like to work on myself intellectually. Working on one's own intellectual honesty requires one to reevaluate one's position, trying to spot prejudices and false assumptions. To be intellectually dishonest is to not care if one is wrong. All an intellectually dishonest person cares about is winning an argument. (Plato's critiques of sophism drive this point home.) An intellectually honest person cares about the validity of his or her own arguments. I'm wrong about tons of stuff. I, like anyone else, am susceptible to intellectual foibles (ie accepting false premises as true, logical fallacies, etc.) But why do I feel like this article misrepresents the position we are actually arguing? Why do I feel this article criticizes atheists for minor intellectual transgressions while ignoring the fact that theistic apologetics often uses these selfsame transgressions as the foundation of its position? Why do I feel that this article, in the course of criticizing intellectual honesty, is it itself intellectually dishonest?
I clicked the link hoping to find an article which would make some significant points and perhaps challenge me to become more intellectually honest. I was sorely disappointed. The article did not challenge me at all. Well... maybe a little bit... but for the most part I felt like I didn't get my money's worth (and keep in mind the article was free to read online.)
Keneinan made three main points, each divided into various subpoints:
1) Atheists often suffer from a "persistent inability or refusal to distinguish God from a god or gods"
2) Atheists often presume "belief in scientism, the logically incoherent claim that 'only scientific knowledge is valid/real/genuine knowledge'"
3) Atheists often engage in "persistent use of the burden of proof fallacy, that is, the rhetorical trope which combines an argument from ignorance (“my position is the default position,” i.e. “my position is true until proven false, so I need not argue for it) with special pleading.
I would like to see discussion of all three main points in this thread, but to keep the OP as concise as possible, I will only treat the first point here.
Eve Keneinan Wrote:A persistent inability or refusal to distinguish God from a god or gods. This is a distinction 3 or 4-year-old children can easily grasp, so any atheist who claims not be be able to grasp it is either severely intellectually impaired or lying. In almost all cases, the atheist is simply attempting to conflate God with a god in order to set up a strawman and/or trying to annoy you by belittling God—while ignoring the basic conceptual distinction that all European languages mark by differentiating the word “God” from the word “god” by capitalization. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, in the entry written by atheist philosopher J. J. C. Smart:
‘Atheism’ means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God. I shall here assume that the God in question is that of a sophisticated monotheism. The tribal gods of the early inhabitants of Palestine are of little or no philosophical interest. They were essentially finite beings, and the god of one tribe or collection of tribes was regarded as good in that it enabled victory in war against tribes with less powerful gods. Similarly the Greek and Roman gods were more like mythical heroes and heroines than like the omnipotent, omniscient and good God postulated in mediaeval and modern philosophy.
So, lets unpack this.
Eve Keneinan Wrote:A persistent inability or refusal to distinguish God from a god or gods. This is a distinction 3 or 4-year-old children can easily grasp
Bullshit. If you have programmed your three-year-old to distinguish Yahweh from Zeus, she can regurgitate what you have told her to believe. But no child at that age cares about such a distinction, nor can she articulate it in her own words.
Eve Keneinan Wrote:the atheist is simply attempting to conflate God with a god in order to set up a strawman and/or trying to annoy you by belittling God—while ignoring the basic conceptual distinction that all European languages mark by differentiating the word “God” from the word “god” by capitalization.
Who gives a shit? Some people have the bizarre habit of capitalizing a pronoun when "God" is the antecedent. This practice has no precedent outside of circles of believers and in no fucking way marks a logical distinction. If I chose to capitalize the word "house" when referring to my own particular place of habitation, would this assign my particular livingspace special significance over others? --"My House is the third house on the left. Just past the white house with the red trim, you will find my House." I fail to see how capitalization proves anything. And, even if it does... guess what? Zeus is capitalized!
J. J. C. Smart Wrote:"‘Atheism’ means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God. I shall here assume that the God in question is that of a sophisticated monotheism. The tribal gods of the early inhabitants of Palestine are of little or no philosophical interest."
This is probably the most valid point made in the article. When arguing with an adherent of a "sophisticated monotheism," one ought not use arguments which ignore the sophistication of one's opponent's particular god concept. In layman's terms: An argument that utterly refutes Drich may not even be appropriate to make against Neo. Oftentimes I find myself leveling criticisms against Christians in general that only really apply to Christian fundamentalists. In this instance, Keneinan makes a valid point. We ought to keep our opponents' actual views in mind, lest we be guilty of strawmanning.
But what about the vast majority of Christians who do not have a "sophisticated monotheism"? I'd estimate around 90% of the Christians I know, do not worship the eternal being of whom Aquinas and Anselm spoke. They worship the tribal god of the Israelites, and they will tell you as much if you inquire about the nature of their god. It seems quite unfair to atheists to have them respond to god-claims that resemble paganism with counterarguments that refute an eternal, cosmic being.
I like to work on myself intellectually. Working on one's own intellectual honesty requires one to reevaluate one's position, trying to spot prejudices and false assumptions. To be intellectually dishonest is to not care if one is wrong. All an intellectually dishonest person cares about is winning an argument. (Plato's critiques of sophism drive this point home.) An intellectually honest person cares about the validity of his or her own arguments. I'm wrong about tons of stuff. I, like anyone else, am susceptible to intellectual foibles (ie accepting false premises as true, logical fallacies, etc.) But why do I feel like this article misrepresents the position we are actually arguing? Why do I feel this article criticizes atheists for minor intellectual transgressions while ignoring the fact that theistic apologetics often uses these selfsame transgressions as the foundation of its position? Why do I feel that this article, in the course of criticizing intellectual honesty, is it itself intellectually dishonest?
