Philosophical Atheism: A Review
Photo by Ed
Robertson on Unsplash
“No!” I wanted to shout at the open book. “Atheism has no connection to religion beyond the suspension of belief in its claims pending sufficient evidence to the contrary.” I pressed on, determined to debunk Nagel’s tagging of atheism as a philosophy and a component of religious thought. Atheism, I would counter, is simply the disbelief in a god or gods. Nothing more. Nothing less. To call it a philosophy is like calling creationism theory a philosophy. Mere disbelief does not make a philosophy of atheism. To insist on the atheist philosophy argument play too easily into the laughable theist claim that theism is a religion.
"Philosophical Concepts of Atheism" begins with a definition of theism as the view “that
the heavens and the earth and all that they contain owe their existence and
continuance in existence to the wisdom and will of a supreme, self-consistent,
omnipotent, omniscient, righteous and benevolent being, who is distinct from,
and independent of, what he has created,”
That is a definition of a transcendent god, but it does not
address pantheism. Did Nagel feel that pantheism was not subject to criticism?
Or that it is not a part of “the great tradition of religious thought”?
Also, defining atheism as a philosophy presented a greater
challenge that forced the author to break atheism into two categories and four
sub-categories: (1) “those which hold that the theistic doctrine is meaningful,
but reject it either on the ground that (a) the positive evidence for it is
insufficient, or (b) the negative evidence is quite overwhelming; and (2) those
who hold that the theistic thesis is not even meaningful, and reject it (a) as
just nonsense of (b) as literally meaningless but interpreting it as a symbolic
rendering of human ideals.”
That, too, aroused some kickback from me for the “or” in
(1.a.) and (1.b.). Why not “and?” Can’t we question supernatural claims for
both insufficient positive evidence and overwhelming negative evidence? Of
course it can. I do not see why an atheist cannot hold both positions, and
that (2.a.). is an added legitimate position. Nagel appeared to claim that the
three positions are mutually exclusive. I contend that they are not.
It is when he takes on theists’ arguments for the existence
of their god that his essay shines. He dismantled the argument from design, and
the cosmological and teleological arguments. His thoughts on the ontological
argument- the claim that because God is a perfect being, “he is one whose
essence or being lacks no attributes.” Nagel’s debunking caused a problem: Repeating
Immanuel Kant, Nagel said that “existence” is not an attribute. Understanding that
premise is above my pay grade. Why is it not an attribute? His answer to the
question requires a greater education in philosophy than I currently hold. So,
I will put that into the category of “weak atheists’ arguments” until I can
better understand the attributes of existence. And why it is not itself an
attribute.
Moving on.
Speaking of weak arguments, tackling the argument from design
is- for someone of Ernest Nagel’s intelligence, like shooting fish in a barrel
(pardon the cliché). He first takes apart the watchmaker argument on which so
much of the argument from design depends, and then he dismantles the “Divine
Mathematician” segment of creationists’ insistence on filling any hole in
scientific knowledge with a supernatural deity.
Then, we come to my favorite: the Problem of Evil.
Apologetics for evil have been so thoroughly debunked that it would be
redundant to discuss Nagels’ disposal of them. It, like the argument from
design, is beneath Nagel’s attention. That he expended ink and intellectual
energy on the topic can only mean that such apologetics were a common response
to unbelief in 1959.
Having dismissed the common claims of evidence for a
supernatural being or beings, Nagel turned his attention to his stated purpose
in drafting the essay: to “show how atheism belongs to the great tradition of
religious thought.”
He parses philosophical atheists into three major groups:
(1) those which “reject the assumption that incorporeal agents can exercise a
causal agency.; (2) atheists generally agree that “controlled sensory
observation is the court of final appeal in issues concerning matters of fact,”
a wordy way of saying that the empirical method (of which I considers
methodological naturalism as a significant component; Nagel does not elaborate)
is the final arbiter in disputes of fact; and (3) philosophical atheists “have
generally accepted a utilitarian basis for judging moral issues. It is on this
claim that I wrestle with. Years ago, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with
that, but reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from
Omelas” changed my mind about utilitarianism as a basis for morality, but I
have yet to find its replacement.
In summary, “Philosophical Concepts of Atheism” offers
effective arguments against the claims of the existence of a supernatural
entity or entities but falls short of providing evidence that “atheism belongs
to the great tradition of religious thought.” He wrote an otherwise brilliant
essay that would have served better if his stated purpose had been to debunk
common arguments for supernaturalism.
##
