Why Are 73% Of Philosophers Are Inclined To Atheism?

[Solitary]

By Gary Gutting

This is a concluding reflection on my series of 12 interviews with philosophers on religion. I’m grateful to all of them for the intelligence, clarity and honesty with which they responded to my questions, and to the readers, who posted hundred of comments on each interview. It seemed natural to keep to the interview format, even though I (G.G.) had no one to interview except myself (g.g.). Taking some of the recurring views and concerns expressed by the readers into account (there were too many to cite individually), I’ve tried to submit myself to what I hope was the polite but challenging voice questioning my interviewees.

G.G.: What was the point of talking to a bunch of philosophers about religious belief?

g.g.: The immediate impetus came from the poll I cited at the beginning of the first interview: 73 percent of philosophers said they accepted or were inclined to atheism, while 15 percent accepted or inclined to theism. Only around 6 percent identified themselves as agnostics. I would have expected a good majority to identify as agnostics.

G.G.: Why did you expect that?

g.g.: The question of whether God exists is a controversial one: there have been, and still are, lots of smart, informed and sincere people on both sides. So it would seem that philosophers, committed to rational reflection on the big questions, wouldn’t be atheists (or theists) without good reasons. But it is also obvious that the standard arguments for and against God’s existence â€" first-cause arguments, the problem of evil, etc. â€" have stimulated an enormous amount of debate, leading to many complications but to no consensus. (To get a sense of contemporary discussions on theism see the Stanford Encyclopedia’s articles on the cosmological argument and on the problem of evil.) Given this, it seemed to me that at least a good proportion of philosophers would be agnostics, undecided about God’s existence.

Read the full interview by clicking the name of the source located below.

VIA Gary Gutting
SOURCE NY Times

[Hakurei Reimu]

First off, the link is here. You're welcome.

g.g.: There’s no scientific evidence, but there are other sorts of evidence.

G.G.: I suspect that most atheists think scientific evidence â€" evidence that ultimately appeals only to empirically observable facts â€" is the only sort of evidence there is.

g.g.: That may be their assumption, but how do they show that it’s correct? It certainly isn’t supported by scientific evidence, since that tells us about only what is empirically observable. The question is whether there is anything else.

This guy g.g. has his head shoved up his ass. The kinds of evidence that are presented for the existence of God â€"evidence from scripture, eyewitness testimony, emotional, spiritual, etc.â€" which g.g. claims might be evidence but far and wide freethinking athiests don't consider to be, do in fact make factual claims that are susceptible to empircal testing, and when those tests are performed, those kinds of evidence turn out to be terrible and low-quality evidence. They are only useful for establishing the most mundane of claims, and are not nearly strong enough to establish a grand, factual claim like the existence of a being outside our direct experience.

It is absolutely ludicrous that these kinds of evidence are terrible and low-quality in the empirical mode, but suddenly become reliable and high-quality in non-empirical mode. I think it's far more likely that when a kind of evidence shows itself to be unreliable and low-quality within a domain that can be tested, that it continues to be unreliable and low-quality when leaving the domain in which it can be tested.

g.g.: Agreed, but then they have to show that. They can’t just keep saying “there’s no empirical evidence” and think they’ve shown that a theism based on metaphysical reasoning or nonempirical experience is irrational. The core question is whether there is anything beyond the empirical â€" some transcendent reality we can call God. I think it can be rational to say there isn’t a transcendent reality. But to show that it’s irrational to say there is, you’d have to end the impasse in philosophical discussions of theism. That’s where atheism falls short and agnosticism is the preferable position.

I can show it is irrational to suppose of any such transcendent reality by pointing out the obvious â€" "transcendent" is taken to mean "beyond the emperical" â€" that is, beyond what is evidenced by observation and experiment, and appealing to those forms of evidences that are unreliability and low-quality and too weak to support the notion of a transcendent being, given that their poor performance under conditions we can measure carry over to conditions where they cannot. The adjective "transcendent" is thus a complete cop-out, purposefully putting the concept beyond the scope of our best tools for ascertaining truth and only allowing access to much, much poorer forms of evidence. It is also an admission of defeat, given that "beyond the emperical" can be very sensibly interpreted to mean, "has no effect on the material world," and thus is congruent to those concepts that are described by another adjective, "imaginary."

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Wait.. Did he ask PhattMatt, the deep philosopher?

[Jmpty]

“I have had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” I believe when Kant wrote this, he was admitting and revealing something about all philosophers and great thinkers; that they are, as we all are, flawed human beings.

[DunkleSeele]

And this is one of the many reasons why I consider philosophers a bunch of tossers.

[Solitary]

I like this comment made about why people are religious:

Since this philosophical series was not able to make much progress or reach any definitive conclusion, perhaps it would make much more sense to study religion from a purely psychological perspective instead of a 'philosophical' one.

If you wash a child's brain in French, it will speak French.

If you wash a child's brain in Christianity, it will think Christian-like thoughts.

One cannot just gloss over thousands of years of intergenerational religious brainwashing and then expect to have an even handed discussion over the existence of 'God'.

The disproportionate majority has been conditioned to default to theism before their intellectual defenses were fully developed.

What would help to settle the question would of course be nothing less than a scientifically controlled experiment.

We already have the results on the billions who were brainwashed from birth on religion; many of them retain their brainwashed religiosity, although an increasing minority opt out into agnosticism and atheism.

What's missing is the study of a few million children without religious brainwashing and then offering them religious brainwashing after their intellects are formed and watching their reactions.

Would many jump at the chance to be 'religious' or would they simply treat is as some sort of weird invitation to witchcraft ?

The reality is that organized religion - and the 'belief' that goes with it - is simply the world's most popular and socially acceptable psychological disorder.

Solitary

[GSOgymrat]

I don't necessarily need empirical evidence to believe in a god or spirit or something beyond our current ability to quantify. I do need a theory that provides some kind of explanation that fits with current knowledge, both empirical and intuitive. This is where religions that I have been exposed to fail. I've yet to be exposed to any religion that makes a plausible theory for the nature of existence that is consistent with what we know about the physical universe and human psychology. Religion has inspired people to do all kinds of terrible and wonderful things but it hasn't adequately explained anything.

[AST111213]

The atheistic philosophers are inconsistent and dishonest. You cannot have logic, reasoning, and knowledge apart from the knowledge of the existence of God -- specifically the Christian God of the Bible. You may ask any given atheistic philosopher how they know what truth and/or reality is. They will ultimately say that they know by their senses and/or reasoning. When asked how they know their senses and/or reasoning (cognitive faculties) are valid, the conversation will go one of two ways and the folly of their worldview will be exposed:
1. They will employ their senses and reasoning in their justification -- using viscously circular reasoning as the foundation of their entire belief system.
2. They will say that there is no way they can know that their senses and reasoning (cognitive faculties) are valid. (To know for certain that you have invalid reasoning, you would have to have valid reasoning.) This is a worldview based on absurdity! It is the equivalent of saying that you could be wrong about everything you think you know -- a self-refuting position.

This leaves them with no justification to bring any objection to Christianity -- or any other worldview for that matter -- as they have to admit that they could be wrong about their reasoning behind any raised objection.

[Minimalist]

I think the better question is, why are 15% of them so stupid that they believe in invisible sky-daddies.  I'd expect that from a slow class of 9 year olds.

[Hakurei Reimu]

The atheistic philosophers are inconsistent and dishonest. You cannot have logic, reasoning, and knowledge apart from the knowledge of the existence of God -- specifically the Christian God of the Bible. You may ask any given atheistic philosopher how they know what truth and/or reality is. They will ultimately say that they know by their senses and/or reasoning. When asked how they know their senses and/or reasoning (cognitive faculties) are valid, the conversation will go one of two ways and the folly of their worldview will be exposed:
1. They will employ their senses and reasoning in their justification -- using viscously circular reasoning as the foundation of their entire belief system.
2. They will say that there is no way they can know that their senses and reasoning (cognitive faculties) are valid. (To know for certain that you have invalid reasoning, you would have to have valid reasoning.) This is a worldview based on absurdity! It is the equivalent of saying that you could be wrong about everything you think you know -- a self-refuting position.

This leaves them with no justification to bring any objection to Christianity -- or any other worldview for that matter -- as they have to admit that they could be wrong about their reasoning behind any raised objection.

Get that Plantiga shit out of here. Of course an atheist philosopher could be wrong. That's not really the relevant question, because certainty in anything is impossible to achieve in the real world; Christians who say otherwise are only fooling themselves. No, the relevant question is whether he is likely to be wrong. To that question, the answer comes to be a definite NO.

First off, yes you can have logic, reasoning, and knowledge apart from the knowledge of the existence of God, because the "knowledge of the existence of God" is itself a... knowledge. You can ask the Christian philosopher how he knows God exists, and it will always boil down to his own experiences as well (reading from the bible, being told about it, holy visions, etc.), where you can play exactly the same kind of presuppositional word games with them and destroy their arguments just as soundly.

If the logical absolutes are true, then they are true regardless of whether they stem from God, or are simply stand-alone facts separate from God's existence or non-existence. We can use them regardless of whether or not we know God exists, because if they are true, they'll still be true if we prove that God doesn't exist.

The bottom line is that assumptions/axioms are unavoidable. Period. End of discussion. Logic cannot tell you that it is correct: any system of logic powerful enough to tell you so, and actually does so, is automatically contradictory (Gödel's incompleteness theorems). You need grounding. If your senses and cognitive faculties are sound, then they are sound regardless of the existence of God; if your senses and cognitive faculties are not sound, then nothing will fix that, even proposing a God â€" and even proposing a God makes the proposal of God suspect.

In order to even know that a God exists, Christian philosophers have to assume that their senses and cognitive faculties are somewhat reliable. This puts them on an even playing field with atheist philosophers in terms of how certain their knowledge is. Then it's just a matter of evaluating the evidence using the rules of reasoning, which both parties agree on as they conform to logic.