Saturday 21 July 2007

Rationality of Atheism

As many people consider the belief in a deity/intelligence behind reality to be irrational with the obvious implication that atheism is the rational view I thought it might be interesting to examine the rationality of this view.
To begin with an analogy let us say you were to enter a concert hall and listen to an extremely complex symphonic piece and upon subsequently enquiring as to its composer you were told that it had no composer but that it had simply emerged, authorless from the void. Upon expressing surprise you are told that this reaction is irrational, & it to be expected that the symphony be capable of its own creation. This would seem to be the position of atheism towards something of infinitely greater complexity than the most elaborate of mere symphonies ie the universe.
What then what are the explanations of this emergence from the void? Well there are two possible positions. Firstly that it actually has not emerged at all but has been in a state of beginningless, perpetual existence. Rationality though tends not to look favourably on things being in states of perpetual, beginningless existence. Reason, in other words, would have problems with the dead-end explanation for the arising of something's state of being amounting to- "It has just always been there". Perhaps this is true, but if so then this is essentially a kind of mystical position, from which standpoint our conception of rationality is inconsistent.
The more orthodox and possibly atheism-friendly stance is that yes, the universe has had a beginning, it did arise. Using reason I deduce that prior to its existence or becoming reality there was something we can call "not existing". What was the nature of this "not existing"? Well, of course, this must be the absence of anything; hence a state of absolute nothingness. Using very simple logic I deduce that absolutely nothing is capable of emerging from a state of absolute nothingness.
And from there to electrons banging off each other or whatever-an enormous leap has been made amounting to explaining the existence of the universe with "Well first of all, you have a universe and from there....."

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

One not-too bad argument that atheists have is that if things have been around for trillions of years, then it is possible that something would arise by chance, indeed that something complex like this world would arise; also, i recall the great misanthropist Schopenhauer, in his essay 'On the apparent intention of fate in the life of the individual' (in German all one word, no doubt), says that we tend to automatically perceive order that isn't there, so we could be like lizards basking on a broken statue, thinking 'how nice that someone created this sunbed for me!' - Schopenhauer then refutes this, because like me he supposes there is order in things.

Beyond a certain point - as with JFK's end & 9/11, one's position tends to come more from one's emotonal set-up than any structured looking at the evidence. There are so many websites claiming that the opposing websites are lying on JFK that i go with my gut feeling that it was a conspiracy, because i no longer have any idea what 'evidence' is evidence, and what was invented.

Likewise with 9/11, it was immensely profitable for a totally amoral and shameless & unpopular president, and it just seems kind of unlikely that all those planes could have got through the civil defence protocols - the rest, well, there's always someone who'll say that such & such a video is fake, or that actually plastique doesn't work like that, or whatever - in my gut, it was a conspiracy, and my gut is always right.

Right now that gut tells me to eat shortbread - like a pig.

Andrew said...

I think I covered that first motion arising by chance, Elberry, as from a position of absolute nothingness absolutely nothing can arise. There is nothing which can impel chance to occur. Chance itself is effectively bringing a God entity into the equation, but simply under another name.

Andrew said...

Also, to add that chance exists within the framework of fluctuations of certain givens, such as a lottery where 30 or so numbers are shuffled & a few picked from a drum. From the starting point of nothing, there is nothing upon which Chance, were we to allow the existence of such a dynamic force, can act. There is nothing to shuffle, therefore nothing results.

Anonymous said...

It may be that non-being contained within it, as with Godel's Theorem, the countering possibility of being; and so this reality is a tangled mess of being & non-being - neither absolutely present, but rather at some points more one, more the other. When there's more non-being about there's a great deal of fear, aggression & suffering; when there's more being in the mix, people generally aren't so afraid, and there's more beauty & enlightenment.

i spent a while thinking about how things were, originally - it's quite tough because time is part of the created universe, so one has to imagine a time before time. i seem to recall my old friend St Augustine answering the question, "what did God do before He created time?" with "He thought up punishments for people who ask stupid questions."

i think you're right that if there was originally absolute nothingness there could never have been this world, or any world, or any thing. Because i suppose non-being is latently present, as a contradiction - it has immense power & agency but 'doesn't exist', then i imagine originally the two were in some kind of agonistic semi-equilibrium.

'Tis most vexing.

J. K. Jones said...

Interesting post.

Have you ever read or thought about Jonathan Edward's statement that we cannot even concive of nothing? The idea is that as soon as we say what nothing is, we have made it into something.

Elberry,

If we percieve order that isn't event there, is the sentence that "we percieve order that isn't event there" a rational sentence?

Andrew,

What is chance?

Andrew said...

I'm afraid I've not even heard of Edward, JK, but I'd agree about the utter strangeness of absolute nothingness. The mind is capable of immensities & perhaps in akind of thoughtless meditative vision, one can have an idea of this absolute absence & the impossibility of anything to arise from it. However, even this is a kind of idea of Nothing as opposed to the thing in itself. Maybe one would have to actually be this absolute absence to fully conceive of it & consciousness by its very nature of being something, this an impossibility.

Non-being, I presume in this context delusional states of being where one manaes to divorce oneself from what is, Elberry?
I think if reality conformed to atheism, then there would be no reality, as I've hopefully shown. I've a kind of poetic, mystical idea of the universe as an artistic creation like a symphony(not to be cnfused with the mechanical watchmaker God creator notion):

The universe exists as the natural outpourings of the composer's mind, and exists simultaneously in the mind of the perceiver which owes its existence to the universe it perceives which in turn owes its existence to the mind which perceives it.

As for chance, JK, I've done the lazy thing & loooked it up & I'm told:
a. The unknown and unpredictable element in happenings that seems to have no assignable cause.
b. A force assumed to cause events that cannot be foreseen or controlled; luck

The Chinese I Ching people might have a thing or two to say about this notion, though.

Anonymous said...

Jones: ah of course you're right, lazy sentence, that! Schopenhauer was thinking about things like seeing faces in clouds, i'd be more hip & up-to-date and go on about Rorschach Tests.

i guess atheists would have no interest in really fundamental questions of ontology like being & non-being. They don't generally seem able to think beyond some kind of cosmic soup - if you ask why there was this cosmic soup rather than nothing, they just look at you funny. They are simple souls, bless them.

Interesting comment, Andrew: as Yeats wrote, how can we tell the dancer from the dance?