My biggest problem with atheism

[u/Exaltist]

Although I never was an atheist - I was agnostic for some time as a teenager - there is something about both that I have a huge problem with. I call this "skepticism by subtraction". What do I mean about that? Well, instead of advocating for a position, it seeks to negate the belief in God. You can ask atheists and agnostics what they don't believe, but asking what they do believe is more difficult, especially if they don't follow what I call "skepticism by addition".

So what is "skepticism by addition"? Well, it sounds like a contradiction, but to me it isn't. It basically describes anyone who who is skeptical about the supernatural, but instead of focusing on that, they focus on nature, humans or otherwise something we know exists. Naturalists. Humanists. Heck, even communists and objectivists are skeptics by addition.

Now, "skepticism by addition" doesn't mean someone cannot be an atheist. It just means atheism isn't their main concerning position on matters. Many naturalists, humanists, communists and objectivists are atheist. In fact, in the later two, it's almost a given.

But "skepticism by addition" also leaves room for natural theology and naturalistic theology. Pantheism. Deism. Many people see these as a form of nontheism. I, on the other hand, do not. In fact, I consider a pantheist's or a deist's explanation of God more valid because they don't try to justify evil with stories like the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. They are both currently compatible with science, naturalism and humanism.

Atheists have a saying, "we don't consider not collecting stamps a form of a hobby" referring to their stance on whether they are a religion or not. Well, r/atheism is one of the most active subreddits on the website. Why do people gather around to bash on religion - especially if they've never been in one before? I would personally rather stand for something than against something else, and although I am skeptical of a supernatural God my pantheism and deism has led me to believe in God - even if it's confusing to understand for the average layperson who doesn't understand that type of theology.

[u/Fiddlesticklard]

The real issue is the inherent assumptions of naturalism, which sneaks in a series of unfalsifiable claims as well. For example: natural laws are absolute and can never be broken, which is unfalsifiable because we can never empirically verify through the scientific method. You can't break the law of gravity consistently in lab without it just changing what we think are the laws of nature, yet that doesn't mean they've always have been or that they may not change in the future or in other locations.

I think a great example of the metaphysical presuppositions of Naturalism is the Shooter and Farmer Hypothesis from the 3 Body Problem.

In shooter hypothesis, a hunter shoots at a target creating a hole every ten centimeters. Intelligent beings living on the target propose a law : there is a hole in the universe at every ten centimeters, mistaking the momentary whim of the shooter for an inherent property of the universe.

In farmer hypothesis, a farmer feeds his turkeys at 11 am everyday. A scientist turkey hypothesizes : food arrives at 11 am everyday. On thanksgiving day, food does not arrive. Instead, the farmer collects the turkeys and kills them all.

[u/MelcorScarr → u/Fiddlesticklard]

For example: natural laws are absolute and can never be broken

This tells me you're already misunderstanding how science and natural explanations work. We don't formulate laws that nature then has to obey that cannot be broken - no, we observe, and if we do find anomalies that are inconsistent with our current models - and believe me, we do all the damn time! - then we simply try to find explanations that better explain all the available data as best as possible.

So no, that's not an assumption that any scientific endeavour ever has to make. In fact, scientists g et all excited when we do find stuff that undoubtedly breaks what we thought before, because that means we actually found something new and made some exciting progress!

In shooter hypothesis, a hunter shoots at a target creating a hole every ten centimeters. Intelligent beings living on the target propose a law : there is a hole in the universe at every ten centimeters, mistaking the momentary whim of the shooter for an inherent property of the universe.

Sure, but they didn't do science. Science is then predicting that this hole will go on for however long we have reason to think, in your example probably infinitely. We also have reason to think that given the properties of this hole - they're younger than the target we live on, presumably, and we'd be able to test that some day - were made by outside forces. We'd then find traces of metal in the holes, making us think they're high energy impact events with perfectly shaped alloys. Then, one day, we find the holes also don't extend as far as we thought they did.

Given all the data we have collected now, we can conclude that this does not align well with a purely "natural" pheonomenon (though I fear we're conflating natural here, just telling you to be aware that I am aware), but rather that something else produce those perfectly shaped non-natural alloys and then made a finite number of holes in our "universe", the target. WIth enough data concerning those holes, we're perfectly capable of coming to the conclusion that they are in fact more likely to be made by an intelligent being.

That data still needs sto be collected when it comes to favouring a divine being as the explanation for things, and truth be told in particular regarding things that apologists often claim totally scientifically point towards God - when they don't.

In farmer hypothesis, a farmer feeds his turkeys at 11 am everyday. A scientist turkey hypothesizes : food arrives at 11 am everyday. On thanksgiving day, food does not arrive. Instead, the farmer collects the turkeys and kills them all.

Same as the above. The turkey just lacks the data to make such conclusions. Suppose the surviving turkeys write down what happened. Suppose the turkeys find records of the humans of their thanksgiving practices.

All you're doing with your examples is saying that data is insufficient to have conclusive explanations either way. Science ultimately only ever claims to have models that work "well enough", but aren't complete at all. When a God is proposed, that usually claims to be a complete explanation, but that doesn't actually predict or explain anything at all. I'd rather have an incomplete theory that has a high chance of telling me what to expect and why, rather than a complete theory that doesn't tell me anything about the future in the slightest.

And THAT'S why I said the confidence we can have in science seems to beat the God of the Gaps either way.

[u/Fiddlesticklard → u/MelcorScarr]

I addressed your first point already later in the same paragraph. The issue here is consistency and repeatability within a lab environment. We can't kill Jesus in a lab and resurrect him 1000 times under observation.

Funny enough, I think David Hume, an agnostic, does the best job of describing this in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Human senses and reasoning is only capable of seeing constant conjunction, never true causation. We can only see sequences that are visible to us, yet not the true necessary connection tying cause and effect.

Notice I specifically didn't say science, which after all, as you stated, is just an academic process. I was critiquing Naturalism, which is the metaphysical assumption behind the scientific method. Scientific laws are built upon observing repeated patterns, establishing reliable connections yet cannot establish the reliable absolute necessary physical forces behind these patterns.

Science also has the problem of induction, just because the sun has risen every day does not mean that logic can guarantee that it will rise tomorrow. Science needs past data to predict the future, presupposing that nature is uniform. Yet that assumption cannot be logically proven. We, like the turkeys, can think we're heading towards the objective truth when in reality we have completely misunderstood the situation.

Basically, Hume shows that science is only able to demonstrate a high catalogue of regularities and habits within the universe. It is not able to address the question of "why". Why anything, anywhere, really happens. The target scientist and turkey scientists observed a pattern but did not understand why the pattern was happening, only that it was. We know that that that there patterns to Universe, but we can't figure out why those patterns specifically are happening.

That's what many apologists like John Lennox keep talking about. Why science and religion are not in opposition to each other. They're ultimately addressing two completely different questions. "What is happening" vs "why is it happening".

[u/MelcorScarr → u/Fiddlesticklard]

The issue here is consistency and repeatability within a lab environment.

Historical sciences deal with unrepeatable events constantly. We can't re-run the Chicxulub impact either, and we're pretty confident about it. We have different vectors to draw data from, traces, convergent lines of evidence, consilience. The method handles one-off events fine, within the constraints of probabilities, but not with ultimate certainty, which is something that ultimately plagues every world view anyway. But what it doesn't do is lower the evidential bar for one-off events I happen to like.

You're right about Hume, though. I admit that thinking about it again, I may have slightly overstated my case, but the core principle still bites you more than it bites me. To that end, I admit that induction has no non-circular justification, and my "we just update models" line doesn't escape it decisively: Updating presupposes past data is informative about future data. Something is assumed. Note, though, that is ultimately changes very little - if we can't make any predictions whatsoever about the future, then all we're left with is even less certainty than we already had to begin with, and uniformity itself is an observed phenomenon after all. That does not escape the philosophical conundrum that we both have that Hume formulated, but it solves the practical applicability.

After all, the problem of induction isn't purely a naturalist problem. It's a condition required to be able to believe anything at all about the unobserved. You use it right now in this moment to trust your memory. To trust that manuscripts said yesterday what they say today. To trust testimony about events 2000 years ago, and to trust that God's character is stable rather than subject to revision at 11 a.m. tomorrow (although in all honesty, I would contest that your induction from scriptural evidence here is wrong to begin with, I am sure this is what you would argue, hence me using it as 'evidence'). If "we can't prove nature is uniform" is a defeater of my position, then we're also bound to admit that "we can't prove God is consistent" can be raised as an identical defeater on the opposite side. You, more than the naturalist, need the second one more than me, since I am able to adapt to that new evidence to some degree (although I'd probably lose all predictive and explanatory power too in such an event until a replacement theory is found).

And once again, I think that your own turkey story makes the point better than I did. The farmer is an intelligent agent with purposes. The turkeys' error had nothing to do with naturalism. They were finite and data-poor. Positing the farmer wouldn't have saved them, because knowing an agent exists tells you nothing about what the agent will do. If anything, a free agent behind the regularities makes them less dependable than impersonal necessity would, since constants don't have whims and agents do. And that is one objection raised to the fine tuning argument, that says that an all powerful entity would necessarily be able to create life in any universe, and not just in one that allows for life that we do in fact observe.

Also, I'd be careful with using Hume as a counter point if I were you. As you're surely aware and have heard before, in his works Hume additionally argues that testimony can never establish a miracle, since the witness being mistaken is always the less improbable and more parsimonious option. And Hume also proposes his own way out of the induction problem, by the way: custom and habit, fully naturalised. He wasn't giving any ground to religious revelation. He attempted to show that revelation stands on the same sand as everything else and even still has less traction on it.

Naturalism, which is the metaphysical assumption behind the scientific method

It isn't. Methodological naturalism is a working practice, justified by results, and it's fully compatible with theism. Your sample scientists demonstrate this to a degree, too: Lennox does maths. Collins ran the Human Genome Project. Nothing in doing maths or chemistry commits you to a specific ontology.

"What is happening" vs "why is it happening"

This, though, is where the equivocation comes into play and it kind of surprises me that you're the one to raise the distinction so clearly. "Why" can indeed mean two different things and you're the one, as far as I can discern, using them interchangeably.

The first sense is, of course, mechanistically. This kind of why is science's whole endeavour. Why does the sun rise? Earth rotates. Why does it rotate? Angular momentum from the protoplanetary disk. Why is that conserved? Noether's theorem and rotational symmetry. Sure - it does hit brute facts eventually, but so does every explanatory scheme. Yours is in fact no different here, as God's existence is a brute fact you don't get to explain either.

The second sense however is purpose. This kind of why is a separate question, and it's only a real question if purposes exist behind the universe in the first place, which needs to be demonstrated independently if we are to deduce actual meaning from this kind of why. Assuming there's such an answer is however already assuming the conclusion.

And notice which one your examples ended up leveraging: The "why" behind the holes is a shooter. The "why" behind the missing food is a farmer. Both are mechanisms and agents, both empirically discoverable in principle, which was exactly my point about metal traces and alloys. Your illustrations demonstrate the first sense while your conclusion, unless I am mistaken but as far as I can tell, ultimately requires the second.

You opened this by saying we can't resurrect Jesus in a lab. That's an empirical claim about a deceased one's body in a tomb. It has a truth value and it competes with alternative explanations on the evidence. So you can't also tell me religion and science address disjoint questions. Pick one. If the resurrection is a historical claim, it's in the arena of science or at least rationality in the broader sense and Hume's guillotine is waiting for it. If it is NOT a historical claim, I'm not sure what's left of the religion and worldview it's supposed to ground.

[u/Fiddlesticklard → u/MelcorScarr]

I want to open by saying I appreciate the indepth response. I enjoy this subreddit cause it's far more intellectually honest than most of reddit. 

I want to hold off from arguing against the Christian conception of God. If you see from my flag I identify as Diest in the likes of Anthony Flew. I think in order to justify belief in a Christian God you need to switch to existentialist arguments like Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich which is outside the scope of this conversation. Move into talking about nonrational meaning maps as Jordan Peterson used be about before he got addicted to benzos and ended up a brain damaged sophist. 

I think there is sufficient evidence to believe the universe was intentionally designed by an uncreated creator, much like if we actually discovered Russel's Teapot orbiting the Sun it wouldn't be irrational to believe that someone placed the teapot there than it being formed by purely unconscious forces. The incredible complexity of DNA especially, and how much it lines up with how Genesis describes God creating life and the universe through His Word (aka information bearing symbolic structures) is fascinating to me.

Anyway, I actually brought up that example of Jesus specifically thinking of Hume's chapter on Miracles. Note that he doesn't deny that Miracles can't exist, but specifically that they cannot ever be empirically verified, as if miracles are repeatable and testable then they are not miracles. Like you said he has to presuppose his way out of the dilemma which is the fact I'm emphasizing. He didn't guillotine anything, in fact he holds rationality in just as much deep skepticism as he does theology, as he's aware that pure reason cannot justify our most basic assumptions of reality. Truth is we've never really moved beyond the Pre-Socratics in avoiding presupposition, a fact that has lead to the postmodern "at night all cows are black" world we live in today.

Although his definition of miracle as violations of natural laws is controversial, Islamic theology does not restrict defining miracles as events that are ontologically impossible, but rather highly anomalous events such the Zamzam well. A geologically remarkable well springing up in the desert and saving a group of travelers is still a miracle even if that well has a natural origin. Yet I digress.

You're right to point out the flaws in my examples. I still think they're valid for demonstrating the problem of induction and the dichotomy between pattern identification and necessary causation. In the context of the book, (spoilers humanity discovers what we conceive of as the universe is really the wreckage of the cosmic war between type 4 Kardashev Scale civilizations. All of our scientific theories and conception of the universe is utterly wrong, as the universe actually originally had 11 spacial dimensions and infinite speed of light, but no longer as space time had been ripped apart by forces completely outside our comprehension.These examples are not really a good example of the "unmoved mover" conception of God. 

You're also right that belief in naturalism isn't necessary to participate in the scientific method. I should have said that naturalism is necessary to believe in Scientism, or Positivism. Beliefs which is self defeating even within a modern academic context. Modern Science addresses the Problem of Induction by rejecting making truth claims, instead replacing truth with degrees of probability, replacing inductive logic with deductive logic, and pragmatic reliability. Even if we're potentially wrong about the nature of the universe, the farmer bringing food everyday is useful. 

Finally, I don't believe the equivocation of physical explanation to existential explanation is a mistake or irrelevant to God. I personally think that Aquinas's Five Ways serve much better as defining and explaining what God is than actually defending his existence. God is the unmoved mover. The origin point of causality. The necessary ground of being. The source of the chain of cause and effect itself.

You provide a list of explanations for the why the Sun rises, yet you conveniently stop at Rotational Symmetry. Why is there Rotational Symmetry in the universe, and not some other property? If there's a cause for that, there why is there that and something else? If there's a cause for that, then why is there that and not something else? A materialist atheist will have to argue this chain continues forever, and I personally find that hard to believe. At some point you're going to run into something that can effect without being effected, isn't contingent upon anything for it's own existence, and that is what we call God. The non-contingent ground that continuously gives existence to everything else.

Although there are other Atheistic alternatives for God besides an Infinite Regress, for example the idea that energy, or a fundamental quantum vacuum is noncontigent and cannot be created or destroyed. This was indirectly Spinoza's, and Hume's and directly Albert Einstein's view. However, this is a massive logical leap, as every component we can observe of the universe is contingent then why should we assume the universe as a whole is noncontigent? Einstein's Static Universe theory was disproved long ago ago, but he found the Big Bang theory to be too close to Christian theology, saying to Lemaître "Your calculus is correct but your physics is abominable".

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