Stumble it!Damned Fools! Those Atheists.
posted in Religion by themaiden |Yesterday my girlfriend asked me if she’d left her glasses at home. I looked around some, and I said “No, I don’t think you did.” A friend asked me what I think of string theory and I said that I do not think it will pan out, ultimately. I have answered similar questions in similar ways probably thousands of times. Apparently I am an irrational fool for it, as we’ll get to in just a moment.
A reader, who comments here as LakeJen, contacted me via email to share a wonderful video– “Atheism - The Religion of Fools”.
The video is the work of Dr. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. Aside from his work at Coral Ridge, Dr. Kennedy has authored over 60 books and is spreading the cancer through four additional organizations– Coral Ridge Ministries Media, Inc., Evangelism Explosion International, Knox Theological Seminary, and Westminster Academy.
The point of Dr. Kennedy’s video is to show that atheism is fundamentally irrational. He further maintains, appropriately I think, that someone holding irrational beliefs is a fool. Consequently, atheists are fools.
His case begins with, to paraphrase, “God says atheists are fools and that ought to be sufficient”. He’s obviously preaching to the choir here, which is almost certainly most of his audience and a showman must play to his crowd. To his credit though, he does seem to “grasp the fact that quoting the Bible in no way influences people who do not already believe the Bible” and so he offers a logical proof.
His case runs like this: ‘Atheism’ means ‘no god’. This is a negative. In fact, it is a universal negative. Universal negatives are impossible to maintain. Rather, to maintain a universal negative you’d have to have absolute knowledge. If you had absolute knowledge then you’d be a God. Putting it all together you get, 1) atheists can’t possibly support their belief that their is no God, since it is a universal negative or 2) if an atheist can support the statement then that atheist is in fact a God and thus is committing a self contradiction. In either case the atheist is using flawed logic. In either case, the atheist is wrong.
In a lot of ways Dr. Kennedy is right. Universal negatives are impossible to maintain, except in some limited circumstances and for someone with absolute knowledge. And this latter case could arguable make one a God, leading to a contradiction.
So what is wrong? Has he convinced me? Have I converted?
We humans make negative statements all of the time. Many of those statements could arguably be called universal negatives. Are we all for those utterances? No. We aren’t fools because language and logic are different. Language and logic follow different rules. Language’s rules are flexible and not at all bound to logic, formal or informal. One must not be tripped up by that difference. One must not get tripped up over language.
The best example I have to make the point is the double negative. Most languages, including, for example, Spanish and including old and middle English, employ double negatives– and triples are not unheard of– to mean stronger negatives, not positives. This of course flies in the face of logic. Luckily, language and logic are not the same thing.
A good logician will tell you that when you translate from a natural language into some kind of logical system you can’t translate mechanically. You have to ask, “What does this statement mean, really?” You’ve got the same situation when translating between natural languages.
Dr. Kennedy didn’t do this. He didn’t ask “what does ‘atheism’ mean”. Instead he dissected the word. He constructed an argument based in the linguistic structure, the morphology, of the word. This, colloquially, is called ‘arguing semantics’ and it is called that not without some derision. Logically, because of this disjunction between the nit-picked structure of the word and its actual meaning, it constitutes a kind of straw man.
People disbelieve in a great many things. That disbelief may vary from individual to individual, but everyone disbelieves in a great many things. Some disbelieve in ghosts. Others do not believe in the predictive power of astrology. Others do not believe in human caused global warming. Some rare few do not believe that the Earth is spherical or that the moon landings actually occurred. Can any of this disbeliefs, whatever your personal take on each, reasonably be interpreted to mean “I know with absolute certainty that nowhere in the universe or any other can this possibly at be true”? I don’t think so.
I think that one one sits and thinks through things soberly it become fairly obvious that these are not statements of absolute universal negation as Dr. Kennedy needs them to be. They are statements about evidence. They are statements about the volume and quality of evidence available to we mere mortals, and they are statements about conclusions based upon that evidence. ‘I do not believe in astrology’ properly means something like ‘I see no reason to believe in astrology’. ‘I do not believe in aliens’ means something more like ‘There isn’t any evidence worth mentioning in favor of the existence of extra-terrestrial visitors’. These are not grand negations. They are small one. They are assessments of fact and they are no more irrational than stating ‘I don’t think you’ll run out of gas on the way to the store’, which strictly speaking would require superhuman, if not absolute, knowledge to utter with absolute certainty.
Likewise with atheism. ‘There is no evidence worth mentioning…’ ‘I see no reason to believe in…’ ‘The evidence for god is not convincing.’
Of course, within any group you can find radicals and there likely are some atheists who fit Dr. Kennedy’s bill, but on the whole he is off target. Dr. Kennedy’s argument fails because he’s missed something very fundamental: Atheism isn’t the grand universal negative he claims it to be. It is a statement about evidence. ‘I do not believe that there is evidence for the existence of God.’ It is no more irrational that ‘I do not believe that there is a monster under the bed’. It is no more irrational than ‘I do not believe this plane will fly’ or ‘I do not believe that ship will sink’.
As for atheism being the “Religion of Fools”. It isn’t. Atheism isn’t much of anything, really…
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