Is there any rigorous philosophical basis for atheism?

Question

Definition/Update

In what follows I use the term God to refer to an entity that has at least one of the following properties:

1. Has created the universe
2. Is omnipotent
3. Is omniscient

Approaches to Atheism

A great many philosophers and scientists have put together their efforts to form what today is known as rationalism; from Socrates in ancient times to Kant in the 18th Century. Rationalism is the underlying foundation in science nowadays as any claim is not valid unless - simply put - no logical contradiction accrues from its acceptance. However, in my humble opinion, this principle has not been extended to apply in religion as - to the best of my knowledge - the following two trends prevail amongst atheists today:

1. Historical scepticism
2. Scientific omnisciency

Historical scepticism

The first amounts to rejecting the idea of an "almighty God" because the Holy Bible as well as other religious books contain historical inconsistencies. First of all this approach requires the concept of religion to define itself therefore cannot form a rigid basis and any discussion or inference on this basis is doomed to fail. The debate on this basis boils down to the acceptance of the dogma "I'm right because you're wrong" (from all sides).

Scientific omnisciency

The second trend is more or less the approach that people like Richard Dawkins use. Dawkins in his book titled The God Delusion concludes that one should not believe in God because science provides all necessary tools to reach the truth and leaves no place for the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient entity. The problem is that this very last sentence is not scientifically sound. Was it like that there would be a proof (in scientific terms) that there is no God for example or - at least - there would be a chance that we have such a scientific proof. Science unfortunately does have its limits and this is not something to demean its value; on the contrary... Science should be aware of these limits. This is something one can learn studying statistics. Many say statistics is a big lie in science. This is a glorious manifestation of ignorance! Statistics is science because it knows its limits and its domain of applicability.

Playing devil's advocate I say that the theory of evolution does not imply that there is not God. God created the species as described in Genesis and also the laws of Nature as a control mechanism that guarantees sustainability blah blah... Evolution is about the maintenance of the species; it does not explain how the first cell appeared on Earth. Therefore, evolution to me is not the proper tool or basis to talk about God.

The question

So my question is whether there is some better structured and systematic approach to the question of the existence of God or some interesting atheist treatise published.

Rigor

I would like to clarify a few things about the term rigor here. A statement in science or philosophy is said to be rigorous if (i). Someone made certain assumptions that do not contradict one the other (ii) they used rules of logic to arrive at this result. Different assumptions lead to different results all of which are correct with respect to the initial set of assumptions. Also, more rarely, different logic systems may lead to different results. But, again, a logic system is itself built up on non-contradicting assumptions.

Answer 1

Off the top of my head, I think it's better to look at the criteria you've proffered for identifying "God". Working backwards,

1. Omniscience. It's an untenable idea, especially since David Wolpert's proof against Laplace's Demon. We can see this easily, as we can break down omniscience over the universe as these four possibilities:

   a. God is omniscient and the universe is deterministic

   b. God is omniscient and the universe is indeterministic

   c. God is not omniscient and the universe is deterministic

   d. God is not omniscient and the universe is indeterministic

   For omniscience to be true, we can only have (a) or (b). But given Wolpert's proof, it's a impossibility for (b) to hold and God's omniscience to not contradict logic. Given (a) as the only remaining option, we can address

2. Omnipotence. The Epicurean trilemma works well enough: If God is omnipotent, but not willing to stop evil, it remains difficult to claim He's good, unitary, or any of the other common attributes we want a God to have.

   Possibly the best direct answer to the trilemma is Plantinga's Free Will defense, roughly paraphrased as the concept that free will requires that even an omnipotent deity not intervene to allow morally good beings to exist. However, (a) above appears to entail a very strict form of determinism, which forces one to accept a very particular kind of compatibilism for free will to be a useful answer to the trilemma's challenge.

   In fact, the free will to be accepted here is so ineffectual that possibly your only recourse for continuing to support the proposition of an omnipotent God at all is to accept a Calvinist model of predestination, a morass in which I for one refuse to set foot.

3. Omnicausal (Created the Universe). Finally the heart of the matter: I tend to think that people only want to know that there's someone responsible for it all, to either praise or blame. At this point perhaps there's no real argument against God as first mover; however, a rational answer would have to provide some kind of identity for the first uncaused cause, as there's a bit of dispute over the matter. Allah? Yahweh? Vishnu? Chaos Monkey? Take your pick.

   This, finally, is where the scientific method declines to answer, as it doesn't need to. If the universe is singular and deterministic, anyone can claim that the Big Bang was set off by a single deity and there's no strictly logical counterexample to dispute that.

   Oh, but wait! It's not just that there is no counterexample, it's that there can be no counterexample, as any kind of multiverse theory already poses further problems: if God created our actual universe, did He create them all? Are there any possible universes which exist that He didn't create? Could God have not created any additional universes, or even prevented them from existing, if there was ever a real possibility of their existence? Where does that leave omnipotence, or omniscience, or even the slightest hint of a relatable Deity that can have an opinion about the way we live our lives?

The problem with God is not lack of evidence, or contradiction with science. It's merely that if you really investigate it, the entire notion of a God as separate Creator is incoherent, which is a much bigger obstacle to surmount than any of the arguments that Harris, Dawkins, or Hitchens levels at religious belief in general.

Answer 2

I think the simplest and most succinct answer to the OP's question ("Is there any rigorous philosophical basis for Atheism?") is yes, the scientific method is the basis upon which atheism—and in general, religious skepticism—rests. There is no "Atheist Treatise" or codified book that sets the standard for atheism; it is merely the rational acceptance of the inevitable discovery through the scientific method that God (and in general, all miracles and deities) lack(s) verifiability (and falsifiability). Regarding the last point, this also informs the rational atheist that his belief can never be fully absolute; that is, Atheists who believe there is absolutely no God are in fact misleading themselves. As a position, most atheists ought to and really only can hold the position that there is almost certainly no God.

Science unfortunately does have its limits and this is not something to demean its value; on the contrary... Science should be aware of these limits.

Yes, science has limits, but that is only because humans have limits. These limits are not of science intrinsically, they are inherent in all epistemological models based on logical reasoning.

The take-home point here is that science—and by extension, atheism—are not epistemological models which disprove theism directly; science offers truth through falsification and induction. There are no arguments in science which absolutely disprove the existence of God. The reason people are atheist today is because all the arguments and reasons for God are either scientifically unverifiable or philosophically unsound. Atheism, then, is a default position until any other position can be proven true.

Answer 3

Non-contradiction is significant, but non-contradiction can only apply to that which can actually be known.

To be known, as opposed to simply being a concept which is a floating abstract, something must have some grounding in reality. It must exist and it must be provable to exist or at least shown that the basis for belief in the existence has basis in reality.

It is the existence of such evidence that allows is to know whether something is or is not, because when the evidence is present, we know it (whatever it is) is also present, and when the evidence is absent, we know that in the time and place in question, it is not present.

Any concept which has no such grounding is arbitrary - and there is no evidence to support it's existence - and no evidence to disprove it either. Since it can't be proved true OR false, one cannot know anything about the concept, one can only have these floating abstractions from which we then draw conclusions that are as baseless as the concept itself. (Simple logic - any argument founded on an unsound premise is an unsound argument)

So the rigid philosophical basis for atheism (not capitalized, thank you, we're not a religion) is the same rigid philosophical basis for not believing in the idea that there's a species of intelligent alien beings living in our upper atmosphere, that we cannot perceive by any normal means. Its not that there isn't any proof - it's that there is no proof possible.

The better question to ask is, "Is there any rigid philosophical basis for Religion?"

Answer 4

Rationalism is the underlying foundation in Science nowadays as any claim is not valid unless - simply put - no logical contradiction accrues from its acceptance.

This is an odd way to frame it; I'd suggest we remove the double negative and say that "rationalism" (in this context) simply means "committed to the probity of reason."

The first amounts to rejecting the idea of an almighty God because the Holy Bible as well as other holy books contain historical inconsistencies. [...] The debate on this basis boils down to the acceptance of the dogma "I'm right because you're wrong" (from all sides).

No, not really. There is one side making specific claims (in this case, historical and metaphysical) and another side arguing that those claims do not hold up. These things can be debated rationally and logically, and with recourse to evidence; there is no need for a reliance on dogma for either position. (And, it is useful to remember where the burden of proof lies in this case.)

Playing devil's advocate I say that the theory of evolution does not imply that there is not God. God created the species as described in Genesis and also the laws of Nature as a control mechanism that guarantees sustainability blah blah... Evolution is about the maintenance of the species; it does not explain how the first cell appeared on Earth. Therefore, evolution to me is not the proper tool or basis to talk about God.

But that's where Occam's razor comes in; if evolution can explain things without recourse to God, there's no need to posit a God.

And that is the basis of most structured approaches to atheism. It is not necessary to prove the impossibility of their being a God; it is enough to demonstrate the contingent fact that there doesn't happen to be a God matching the description posited by the believer. If a believer wishes to remain committed to the probity of reason, the burden of proof is on the believer to argue that the existence of the God of their choosing is a) consistent with reason, and b) the most parsimonious way to explain the given state of affairs. The atheist, to prevail, must argue that either a) or b) have been violated in relation to the positive claims made by the believer.

As to your final question: besides the Western sources, there is a long classical/medieval Indian debate tradition, which contained many debates between the Nyāya (who attempted to prove the existence of Īśvara) and Buddhists who argued from a strictly atheist position.

Answer 5

I suppose your two trends are broadly correct (not counting the reactionary atheists who had a really bad experience with some religion and almost seem to be disbelieving in God in order to punish him).

But I think you mischaracterize historical-skeptic arguments that can be found in many places including the writings of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. These at their core go something like this (my summary, not a real quote):

People believe in piles all sorts of different religions, and have for ages. These are almost all mutually contradictory; which religions are widespread and which are not has varied dramatically. Therefore, consensus on religion is not, on its own, a reliable guide to truth. Thus, we must seek other evidence free from confirmation bias, social pressure, and so on. If we have no evidence, given the mutual contradictions between (and sometimes within) religions, we should assume any given religion is false because many more must be false than true, and we can't tell if we've got a true one (if they even exist) or a false one.

This brings us to the Dawkins/Harris-style application-of-science arguments, which go something like so (again, not a real quote):

Because popularity contests have, historically, been so unstable, one might seek to try a more reliable evidence-based approach to determine whether any religions are true. And these approaches make the prospects for truth of religions dismal indeed--we can explain pretty much everything via natural mechanisms, and the religious explanations, when testable, are not borne out by evidence.

Anyway, there are plenty of treatises from various people (Daniel Dennett comes to mind), but I don't think you've fully grasped even, say, Dawkins' arguments. If you say

Evolution is about the maintenance of the species; it does not explain how the first cell appeared on Earth

you do not appear to really be understanding the issues involved--speciation at various levels, drift, the distinction between abiogenesis and evolution, etc. etc. etc.. There is a huge gulf between explaining the first cell and everything just being "maintenance", for instance. I'm not sure that better structured philosophical treatises are what's going to help you here as opposed to a much deeper understanding of the history of life on earth and the physical processes that underlie life and evolution. Planet Earth: Cosmology, Geology, and the Evolution of Life and Environment by Cesare Emiliani is a decent starting point. (If you read various books by Dawkins carefully, you can get a lot of the same material, but it's not very efficient or complete.) Without approximately that much background, I'm not sure it's possible to even understand why Dawkins, for instance, seems to think there are not any gaps for God to hide in any more.

Answer 6

I think you are missing the point of the scientific case against religion entirely. It's not that science is pretending to be omnipotent or even potentially so. Of course science is limited.

The point is that up till this day, the only reliable method to uncover truth as far as we can tell has been science. And when we use that very method to explore religions, we can only make the constatation that they fall apart.

Answer 7

I believe each time we are looking for a proof, we refer to reason.

Kant has well defined the boundaries of the realm of rationalism, and its demonstration of the impossibility to prove the existence of God is also applicable to God's non-existence.

So I do not see any possibility of giving a rigorous philosophical basis for atheism.

Answer 8

Disclosure: I'm agnostic with Ietsist streak.

Definition of God

Omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence and creator-of-the-universe do not make a God. The defining characteristic of a God is he/she demands worship, obedience, sacrifice and holy fear. That's why its called religion, it involves respect, reverence and allegiance. It means a relationship or bond between a man and his God. It's excellent though if you bonded with an entity who is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good.

Edit:

Religion in the Biblical equates to the term "covenant", and is found in Genesis 17. I quote here the relevant parts:

17 When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, 2 that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly.” 3 Then Abram fell on his face. And God said to him, 4 “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. 5 No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. 6 I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. 7 And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. 8 And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God...... 17 The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, 18 seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? 19 For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.”

I have bolded the obligations and italicized the rights (blessings) under the covenant, among other things.

Is there any rigorous philosophical basis for atheism?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Asking for a rigorous philosophical basis of atheism or theism is to ignore knowledge's very limitation, no matter how rigorous it is and no matter how seemingly useful it is. All philosophical beliefs may be debatable given sufficient inclination. But do we just rely on that and stop (or start) believing in a God? Knowledge might be incrementally expanding, but there is a real limit to what humans can know. One example of limitation would be that what is shared by all men, like the gap between noumenal and phenomenal world that's been the subject of Descartes' meditations, Hume's enquiries and Kant's critiques. How do we know that our net has caught from the noumenal world everything we need? Our net might be rigorous but still, it got holes.

Philosophy concerns itself with reason, and spirituality/religion with faith, so has much larger scope than philosophy. Deep philosophical and thoroughly rational proofs may exists and may have value in certain circumstances, but for me, they're inadequate and less valuable than direct experience. All philosophical, rational beliefs and proofs will fade once confronted with direct experience. My belief is based on what I can experience in my current short lifetime.

And this is my experience: yes, the world is beautiful, mysterious, even mystical there must be something out there from which radiates these manifestations, but what is it? I know of no entity who has communicated to me and to other humans wanting him/her to be my and other humans' God without any intermediary. And that is very important: if I have to have a relationship or bond with another entity, it has to be direct, not through any intermediary, because it is supposed to be a personal relationship. That entity must also be identical with what other humans have experienced. Since he is all-powerful and all-knowing, he would know how to achieve that. I can follow, but up to my limitations. He has to adjust to my limitations because supposedly he has none.

I do not exclude the possibility of meeting a fear-inducing/inspiring entity in the future who will cast me into perdition. But that would be his/her fault, he/she should come/appear to me when it would still make a difference, like I'm still on earth and able to do his/her commands. I'm easy to talk to, I'm supposed to be weaker/dumber than him/her. I'm not really waiting, but my door is open.

I do not exclude the possibility of a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, or even many Gods, existing now. Or them not existing at all now. My attitude towards theistic and atheistic beliefs is like how Pyrrhonic skeptics will deal with them: they're dogma, therefore I must suspend belief.

In summary, I reject both philosophical atheism and theism. I value direct experience as more primary than abstract philosophical musings.

Answer 9

Yes There is and No There is not :

In mathematical logic there are some logical statements that are independent of all other statements in the system, the choice of including or non-including them within the system does not make the system inconsistent, for example the with or without continuum hypothesis there are 2 sets of mathematical set theory.

Now with philosophy the extra axiom of existence of God or Gods ( Although nobody has a proper definition of what they are ) does not add anything to the system nor it is required to have it within any Philosophical framework.

So at the end neither the Atheism nor the opposite can be proved or disproved, but only followers of one have the choice of accepting the other or not.

However once the God (aka a non defined entity ) is included in the system, there will be many new questions spawned from it, and has an effect on the decision making within the system that can no longer be explained by mere logic alone, the choice at the end does not make an iota of difference on the effects of the philosophical system that individuals are toeing.

Answer 10

Omnipotence implies the ability to manifest paradoxes in reality. This critically includes the ability for a thing to be true and false simultaneously.

Showing that an argument leads to a paradox is the root source of all knowledge of falsehood.

Claiming the existence of an omnipotent being would either require (to maintain consistency) rejecting the sum total of all logic, especially the most fundamental, or accepting that no logic is possible.

edit: I should also mention that various religions have definitely and clearly addressed this. The Christian religion addressed it during the Council of Nicea and developed the Nicene Creed which modern churches still accept as central dogma and which most Christians recite on a regular basis in their churches. It absolutely rejects logic, and accepts that real paradoxes are and have been manifested by their god. The Council of Nicea defined attempts to defend the Christian belief system as logical or rational to be heresy and this is a position still held by modern Christian churches - although seemingly unbeknownst to most active Christians who actively engage in exactly the heresies the Council was formed to combat.

Answer 11

The simplest rigorous defense of atheism is that reference must be an intentional cognitive act. Lacking any knowledge of or understanding of god, we have no way to refer to him. Under these circumstances, belief in god is logically impossible.

For example, 5,000 years ago, no human could have believed that semiconductors could exist. They simply lacked sufficient information about semiconductors to refer to them. Anyone who claimed to have such a belief would simply be mistaken.

Answer 12

A good argument I have seen against the existence of a God is based on Occam's Razor. In particular, consider the formulation of Occam's Razor:

When deciding between two theories that predict the same phenomena/events/results, one should choose the theory that is less complex

When considering how the Universe works, for the purposes of this question, we have two theories:

Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and whatever ties them together

OR

Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, whatever ties them together, and God

If these two theories predicted different physical events, then we could scientifically test which is correct. So far it seems that such scientific investigation is impossible, so these theories predict the same thing. The second theory is more complex because it adds a class of entities while keeping the rest of the theory the same.

Therefore, by Occam's Razor, we should assume that the first theory is more likely to be true than the second, so we conclude that without further evidence, there is no God.

Answer 13

The framework for modern atheism is usually logical-positivism, the idea that knowledge should be reduced to statements about sense-impressions using a precise formal language, and that questions which cannot be decided using sense impressions are meaningless. This is an axiom of thought as I see it, and it makes two of your statements about God impossible:

• God created the universe

This is meaningless in logical positivism, since you can't make any sense impression about something outside the universe.

• God is omnipotent

again, how would you know anything sufficient to decide omnipotence in the standard sense?

These two claims are kind of ridiculous in light of logical positivism:

• God is omniscient

this one is not so ridiculous, because knowledge is abstract, it's software. When you are talking about these abstract things, you can define a notion of an omniscient God which is logically positivistically satisfying, and which explains what is all that stuff that religious people are talking about.

The basic premise is that all individual intelligence is tied together into large networks with greater intelligence, through shared literature and communications, making an internet of brains in the world. This internet has its own ideas, separate from those held by individuals but composed of these, the same way a brain is made up of neurons.

This allows you to identify gods as collective agents, and then the notion of an omniscient God is just a limiting conception, of the agents grouping together to make larger and larger agents and so on. This conception is fine within logical positivism, since it makes testable predictions on collectives of people.

One of these predictions, of a limiting conception of God, is that collectives of people will come to agree on various questions as their collective agency approaches the omniscient limit. This means that if you grab two snapshots of the knowledge from two different times, the earlier people will know less collectively, the later people will have more knowledge, and more accurate knowledge, and their ethics will be better, when evaluated from any later point. This is reasonably accurate, and surprising.

The progressive notion of God is the main point--- the ethics of social collectives improve as the intelligence of the social collectives grows. It goes forward because literature is roughly stable. The progressive notion means that one can back-extrapolate to a beginning, and if all you are looking at is literature, you would date this beginning of time to approximately 6000 years ago, roughly the date of invention of writing. This is the age of the world in the Bible, which is expected given the nature of God in this point of view.

The importance of this conception is that it gives you faith that if you know something more than other people, there will come a time when they will all know it, since God will be revealed more perfectly through the action of the holy spirit (in the Catholic way of saying it), or your works will be fruitful (more protestant or anti-trinitarian description), or your "tikkun olam" will work (the Jewish version), or your jihad will succeed (the Muslim version), and this gives your life purpose and meaning--- making a permanent change in the knowledge or structure of humanity. That's a pretty significant thing, so people have a strong stake in faith. Even people without faith say they want to "change the world", where it is implicit that if the change is permanent it is for the better. What law of nature guarantees that all permanent change is for the better? This law of nature defines the positivist conception of God.

But the atheism of logical positivism--- the assertion with confidence that it is meaningless to say "God created the universe" in anything but the most annoyingly metaphorical way, or that "God is omnipotent" in anything but the most teleologically minded way, or "God is omnipresent" in anything but a stupidly vacuous way, this insight still stands. So it is not a mistake to go around spreading atheism, because the claims of religious faiths regarding what is a permissible question and what constitutes a plausible answer leaves much to be desired, and it is in direct conflict with methods of scientific knowledge accumulation, methods which in modern times have done significantly more to reveal new truths and ameliorate human suffering than all the faiths put together.

Answer 14

Yes, there is.

In short, the rational approach when thinking about existence is to assume there's a strong asymmetry related to truth and falsity.

We don't assume everything is true and eventually test some of the beliefs about that (for any reason whatsoever). It's the other way round.

If we look at how we come to believe things (at least the kind of believable ones we're talking about here), we'll see that we are born without the idea of the thing and, of course, the belief in it's truth or falsity.

In this respect, although there's a difference in believing something false and don't having even the concept o this something in mind, both are equivalent in relation to how we act in the world in respect to the existence of this specific thing, that is: we don't take this concept into account when reasoning and acting.

So, the burden of proof seems to relates to the cost we have for adding an entity in our "model of the world" as well as investigating what implications it has for us. This explains why is natural to ask for a proof when someone says to us that there exists "mysterious being X", but strange to ask for somebody to proof that such thing doesn't exist in absence of any motive for believing on its existence.

This doesn't mean that the burden of proof is always with the theist, but seems to imply that any necessity of proof of non-existence implies there's already some justification for the belief (that's why accepted it in the first place). Additionally, part (most?) of these "proofs" end up just being arguments against the justifications of the belief (so they don't really proof non-existence).

Answer 15

As far as I know the Baruch Spinoza - 'the prince of the philosophers' - demonstrated in his Ethics (Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order) with logical rigor that the Universe is ALL and made of only one substance. He left no room for any kind of God or more than a single one substance.

from Plato.stanford.edu

Spinoza’s fundamental insight in Book One is that Nature is an indivisible, uncaused, substantial whole—in fact, it is the only substantial whole. Outside of Nature, there is nothing, and everything that exists is a part of Nature and is brought into being by Nature with a deterministic necessity. This unified, unique, productive, necessary being just is what is meant by ‘God’.

In physics we try to obtain the simplest description of the universe and we have identified four distinct forces. We have to try harder.