Theism and Atheism Explained
To begin...
Ahh this again :) The theist/atheist debate seems to have been going on forever with no resolution in sight. Members of both sides fiercely defend their beliefs (or lack thereof) from scrutiny and yet they also continue to present their arguments, despite the inherent defensive attitude of their counterparts. It seems to me that our desire to be understood, to be heard and perhaps to articulate to ourselves aloud what we are thinking and feeling is more central to the debate than the rehashed material itself. One of the more redeeming outcomes of the debate is that it tends to be more beneficial in bringing like-minded people together in healthy discussion than it is detrimental in driving opponents apart in bitterness. Some may argue me on that point but I think it’s had a net positive effect. There are of course extreme cases where this controversial topic has done harm but most people look forward to meeting others with whom they can discuss theism/atheism because they want to learn and share. I actually find it really interesting when I come across someone who’s changed teams and who had really strong conviction of their belief during both periods of their life. I always wonder what made them change their minds…
When I decided to write this article I wanted to present a balanced view representing both sides. However, being poorly versed in theology, I feel ill equipped to do the theists justice. Furthermore my own background is one of the natural sciences so I feel more qualified to speak to the atheistic arguments so I would invite theists to offer a more complete argument to supplement this article. Still, my purpose here is not to make a case for either side. What I will try to do instead is focus on articulating and clarifying, as well as I can, what the atheist is trying to bring to the table in response to the most popular arguments made by the theist.
I wanted to properly prepare by doing some research into the theist point of view by reading several hubs written by theists and also by listening to a few debates online. The best way to begin is to make a proper case for the theist without distorting anything or introducing bias. I came across a few recurring arguments, which I feel are the highest ranking reasons for a belief in God. I will be paraphrasing since I’ve read variations of each argument so I do hope I represent most theists with my choice of wording here. Let’s begin by presenting these in a list (in no particular order).
The Case for God
Causality
Every effect has a cause. The universe came to be (effect), thus it had a cause. The cause is God. God transcends all things (time, energy, awareness) and therefore does not require a cause Himself.
Fine Tuning
The universe, Earth and the human body are marvels of sophistication and design. They are all finely tuned in such a way as to support not only human life but all the life around us. Such beauty of design does not occur by accident and implies a designer. That designer is God.
Absolute Morality
Absolute moral law exists. Since a law demands a law giver, there must be a law giver to have established moral law. That law giver is God.
Personal Conviction
I feel and/or speak to God. He is present in my mind and heart. Such feelings are founded in science as a manifestation of sentience. We rely on sentience to establish other scientific truth. Therefore God exists.
Immaterial Existence
Thought and feeling are immaterial yet we accept their existence. God is also immaterial and ought to exist in the same vein.
Majority
Most people on Earth believe in a supreme being or god. It is not likely that such an overwhelming majority are wrong.
Miracles
There are reports of incredible healings that have not been explained by science. Such work could only have been achieved through divine intervention.
Scientific Enlightenment and Atheism
Famous scientists such as Isaac Newton, Max Planck and Albert Einstein, 2 of whom established the pillars of science known today as “classical mechanics” and “relativity” believed in God. Therefore God exists.
Historical Records
Events foretold in the Bible (which is the word of God) have occurred, just as predicted. Supernatural events have also been witnessed by people whose testimonies have been recorded in the Bible. This is evidence of the existence of God.
There are other arguments that are either related in some way to the above or they are less commonly employed in debate but these are the ones I see most often and the ones I feel carry the most weight. I’m now going to provide each argument with an atheistic counter-argument and clarify as best I can, the core logic in each case. I thought about taking a philosophical approach using syllogisms and such but in my personal opinion this doesn’t necessarily make the arguments clearer or more accessible so I’m opting instead to use a discussion style of approach.
The Reasonable Case Against
Causality
Every effect has a cause. The universe came to be (effect), thus it had a cause. The cause is God. God transcends all things (time, energy, awareness) and therefore does not require a cause Himself.
Counter
Causality is a notion used both in physics and in common day experiences to express the relationship between “temporal events”. That is to say, causality describes events separated in time. All change requires a cause and effect with an event of duration in between. To speak of the universe as an effect is invalid as it does not obey causality. The reason is not that there was nothing [before] the big bang. The reason is that, according to most recently accepted theory, time itself distilled out of the big bang and causality with it. To speak of what came before is actually impossible (at present) and any speculation as to what the kernel of the big bang was or what properties it had is inadmissible as evidence. If you believe in a cyclic, repeating universe, useful speculation would have to go back to the end of time in the previous universe but such a belief would invalidate God since a repeating universe, by definition, has no beginning.
Having abandoned causality, what we are left with is a complete absence of information at the moment of the big bang. The big bang therefore is inadmissible as evidence. The implication is that the atheist has no idea how the universe began, if it began at all but does not accept God as a plausible beginning, given that a complete lack of evidence allows for innumerable possibilities, of which God is only 1.
Fine Tuning
The universe, Earth and the human body are marvels of sophistication and design. They are all finely tuned in such a way as to support not only human life but all the life around us. Such beauty of design does not occur by accident and implies a designer. That designer is God.
Counter
The atheist acknowledges the sophistication of the universe, of the Earth and of the human body but claims that these systems are the way they are because most other systems would not support life so we wouldn’t be around to have this discussion. In other words, the environment in which we live happened to be capable of sustaining life, which is a feat in itself so it stands to reason that we would make such an observation and describe it as being finely tuned. Other environments are not capable of supporting life, which is why these places are barren. It is difficult to comprehend the scope of how large the universe actually is but if you do the math, there are “on the order of” 400 million planets in our galaxy and 10s of billions of galaxies. This constitutes a “physics simulator” of epic proportions, inside of which matter is interacting in every way imaginable. Why it does this is irrelevant because “why” implies a reason. Quantum uncertainty is so far sufficient to demonstrate the random behaviour of the universe. From a mathematical standpoint, it is highly probably that at least 1 particular planet in the universe would end up with the characteristics favourable to support life and have the time required for life to occur. The Earth has existed for about 4.5 billion years, which again, is difficult to conceptualize but with the raw ingredients in place, life is one outcome of many whose likelihood of occurring increases with the passage of time, without the need for intelligent design.
A design, in the context of this discussion, can be thought of as an organized system that operates within constraints and accomplishes goals. A designer is not strictly necessary for a design because the spontaneous interaction of matter can produce systems like this. The sun is a fairly basic system (although the science of how it works are complicated) that consists of matter (mostly hydrogen), constrained by gravity, possessing rotation. With these 3 ingredients, you have the design for a powerful magnet, a fusion reactor, a heater, etc. The design is simpler than the human body but where do you draw the line between what is of natural origin and what is manufactured with intent? Over time, simple systems can evolve into more complex ones. Evolution gives us a timestamp of every morphology life has gone through since inanimate matter formed the simplest LIVING cell system billions of years ago. In fact, when defining life, we end up making reference to inanimate matter at some point. For example, are nucleotides alive? When a system shows certain organized behaviour we begin to ascribe life to that system. Human beings are merely the culmination of a system that perpetuates itself and evolves because its simplest forms exhibited behaviour we call life.
Absolute Morality
Absolute Morality
Absolute moral law exists. Since a law demands a law giver, there must be a law giver to have established moral law. That law giver is God.
Counter
The atheist asserts that morality is relative and that God is not required for a human being to know the difference between right and wrong. Modern people understand right and wrong but those are man-made constructs and do not exist outside the scope of our own existence. Stealing goods from someone else is wrong because we say it is. However it is our interpretation of witnessing such an event and our subsequent empathy for the victim which precipitates moral law. The atheist does not discard morality because it is a man-made construct. Rather, he acknowledges it as such and rejects the notion that it is absolute. Under a certain set of conditions, stealing could be “right” in the sense that it results in the greatest good. If the majority agree that the act resulted in the greatest good, then the law cannot be absolute. The atheist is content in ascribing moral standards to each situation he encounters in life as if that situation is independent of all others and such a person who has the intent to do good to himself and those around him can do so without a rigid framework handed down by God.
Personal Conviction
I feel and/or speak to God. He is present in my mind and heart. Such feelings are founded in science as a manifestation of sentience. We rely on sentience to establish other scientific truth. Therefore God exists.
Counter
Humans do rely on their own sentience in order to take measurements and establish truth. This is necessary because our sentience is the only means we have of perceiving our environment. However, because our sentience is sometimes unreliable, we increase the level of confidence in our measurements by having others reproduce them. When measurements are reproducible, we can assume beyond a reasonable doubt that they are reliable. Otherwise we would question the very existence of our bodies, as Descartes did. When it comes to personal conviction, the presence of God within a person is not a measurement that can be reproduced by anyone else. That is to say, person B cannot measure the presence of God in person A. Therefore, good intentions aside, the testimony of person A is inherently unreliable. The accuracy of such a testimony warrants further scrutiny because a person is a flawed biological system and is vulnerable to cognitive impairment, among other things. That does not mean the person IS impaired but this remains a possibility and without being able to verify the presence of God, it cannot be assumed true.
Immaterial Existence
Thought and feeling are immaterial yet we accept their existence. God is also immaterial and ought to exist in the same vein.
Counter
The atheist agrees that thought and feeling, as concepts, are immaterial but they arise from and require physical systems. From a medical perspective, thought and feeling are the end result of a series of coordinated electro-chemical events in the central nervous system. The neurons and chemicals involved are in fact the infrastructure that supports the manifestation of what we call thoughts and feelings. Without that infrastructure, they cease to exist. Aside from the words themselves, everything about our perception of love or wellbeing is physical and can be localized in the body. Since we really have no analogue for an immaterial object that can be proven to exist, the existence of God does not follow from anything we are familiar with in our everyday lives.
Know your audience!
What do you believe?
Majority
Most people on Earth believe in a supreme being or god. It is not likely that such an overwhelming majority are wrong.
Counter
Atheists point out that majority alone is insufficient to establish truth. In mathematics this can be said another way. If you come up with 100 or even 1 billion examples of a theorem that works, it does not prove the theorem if one of its axioms can fail to hold in even a single case. As a really bad example, if I tell you that n + (n+1) = (n+2) for all integers, this works for n=1 but that’s it. With any other integer it fails. Therefore a finite set of examples for something (a finite set of people who believe in God) does not constitute a proof.
Miracles
There are reports of incredible healings that have not been explained by science. Such work could only have been achieved through divine intervention.
Counter
Similar to other phenomena that have eluded the sharpest minds of the time, miracles are simply unexplained events. The atheist points out that lack of physical evidence or lack of understanding on the part of the observers should be treated as an event we currently cannot explain and nothing more. As with the origins of the universe, when there is a lack of information, it is best to search for some and suspend judgement until information becomes available. The lack of information is not proof of God.
Scientific Enlightenment and Atheism
Famous scientists such as Isaac Newton, Max Planck and Albert Einstein, 2 of whom established the pillars of science known today as “classical mechanics” and “relativity” believed in God. Therefore God exists.
Counter
The rebuttal to this argument is the same as that for the “Majority” argument. The only difference is that these people were revered for their amazing achievements in science and there is an assumption that people with scientific backgrounds should be atheistic unless they have special insight as to the existence of God. There may be a pattern that science breeds atheists but if there is, it’s not a rule. Despite the admiration and respect these scientists have earned, they do not have special insight. They are all equally fallible and can no further prove the existence or non-existence of God than anyone else.
Historical Records
Events foretold in the Bible (which is the word of God) have occurred, just as predicted. Supernatural events have also been witnessed by people whose testimonies have been recorded in the Bible. This is evidence of the existence of God.
Counter
An atheist would point out that, as in the counter for the “Majority” argument, one example of a prophecy that came true is not proof of the Bible having predictive power. This could be attributed to coincidence and a distinction needs to be made to discern events that happened by coincidence and those that did not. There are also trivial predictions such as "there will be rocks in the future". These sorts of predictions are fairly worthless as evidence of anything.
With regards to witnesses of Biblical events suggesting the existence of God, much of the Bible describes events that predate recorded history, which makes it an unreliable source of information. People mentioned in the Bible who lived more recently should be scrutinized for the accuracy of their accounts based on physical evidence linking them to their claim. Since I lack a familiarity with the Bible myself I will differ to others to elaborate on this point since I feel I haven’t properly developed it.
Carl Sagan helps us find our place in the universe
In Closing...
In our quest of discovery and pursuit of truth, theists and atheists alike should remind themselves that science and faith have a place in our lives. You need not abandon your faith to appreciate science and you need not feel betrayal for believing in something. The laws of nature do not have to be cold and empty. You have to look with better eyes than that. There is plenty of beauty around us, waiting to be found.
I hope I’ve helped illuminate some of the big hitters when it comes to atheistic point of view. I look forward to your comments and encourage further discussion because I could use some insight myself when it comes to the theistic perspective! I don’t think this topic will die anytime soon but that’s ok because for me at least, it’s enough to talk about it and hear what others have to say. That where the pursuit of truth begins :)