Atheism is a funny thing, isn't it, trying to reason out and prove that God doesn't exist? There's something strange about that project. It's came up twice recently so I'll mention it here, really just to keep track of some interesting discussion.
The first time was a Quora question answer, and the second related to a Facebook post about levels of atheism (or I guess agnosticism really is mid-level atheism, put on that sort of scale).
Quora answer
I answered the question on Quora, What's your proof that God doesn’t exist?:
With a background in philosophy and a good bit of formal study of religion I should put an answer to some form of this question here somewhere. I don’t think that’s the best way to frame such a question, but since I wasn’t looking for any version of the question I’ll just go with this one.
Of course it can’t be proven that God doesn’t exist. How can you prove that Santa Claus doesn’t actually exist? You can explain the origins of the story, and build a strong case for that tradition only relating to earlier forms of culture-based stories shifting to become that particular story, but checking satellite images to confirm that no one really lives at the North Pole is almost as good a counter-proof as that. Proving a negative is tough. Even in this case, when parents have a conspiracy going that involves none of the presents actually coming from some mythical entity, we buy them instead, all of them.
It’s more productive to look at what religions in general are really doing, and then map how Judaism and Christianity work onto that. It’s no small project. It works well enough as a counter-argument that if a minority of people are really Christian, and the literal take on Christianity is that all non-Christians go to hell, then that particular God is ok with most people going to hell. I guess as with really sorting through who might live at the North Pole that gets problematic. Maybe Santa really lives in Antarctica, and the stories got that wrong, and maybe that Jewish / Christian God isn’t splitting people into the heaven and hell-bound groups in that way (or maybe a majority really do go to hell, and then there’s purgatory, etc.). An argument from evil comes up too; why would such a God create this particular world, one in which someone could spend all day pointing out horrible aspects that people and other creatures experience, all sorts of death and suffering.
Again it works better to take a different approach, to dig deeper into what religion really is. To me—only my take—it doesn’t work well to use religions as explanations for first causes or afterlife destinations, even though those are two very common purposes for the story-lines. The conflict between the different versions is one obvious problem, but it’s sort of not about that. More mature takes accept that important patterns in societies are encoded in religions, in the teachings, rituals, social roles, and practices. One good example: if there was no form of morality at all in a society then it wouldn’t be orderly enough to be functional. Reasonably consistent social roles and practices wouldn’t stick; there wouldn’t be enough consistency in behavior and perspective to base laws on, or consistent economic practices, and so on.
It’s a good question if there could be a completely irreligious society, if the same types of principles could conceivably evolve without religion as an input. In one sense I don’t see why not, in another sense absolutely not. Let’s start with the latter, the negative version: people evolved into organized civilizations based on religious practices and religion-based worldviews over the past few thousand years, or at most 10 or 20 (most likely; maybe it’s a lot more complicated than that). There is really no way to initiate a reset that starts a civilization or society completely from scratch, to not build on some of that prior foundation. Here I’m claiming that at the least organized societies and religious principles evolved together, interwoven, although the claim in the sentence before this one was framed as stronger than that, with one underlying the other. Either way conjoining the two still seems to work.
Communist regimes have attempted this, to try and systematically eliminate religion, but even if those had been more successful in some sense they would still be drawing on the assumed structure and general perspective that came before, whether they wanted to acknowledge that or not. In the other more shallow sense why not; a society could retain some of the functional structure of common-ground understanding that evolved along with prior religions while at the same time shedding the literal forms of those beliefs. It wouldn’t be necessary to try to re-form a system of ethics—the underlying assumptions, the detailed principles, etc.—but people could do that, to describe the function, and then to say that’s still a necessary cultural element. Various forms of consequentialism are this type of thing, structures of ideas that say we “do the right thing” because it’s functional to follow those sorts of patterns, that people as a whole benefit from that.
Why would someone want to prove that God doesn’t exist? I guess one answer could be to get to the facts of the matter. Or if someone was concerned about that hell-afterlife possibility maybe a set of arguments could put their mind at ease. But it would be quite difficult to move past the types of general lines of thought that I’ve just described to eliminate the possibility of an entity that served as a first-cause as a possibility.
Some type of creator God could definitely exist. This is where atheists use a bit of slight of hand, it seems to me; they reject the forms of creator Gods that we’ve been proposing, waving away the most absurd aspects, and in the end rely on probability related to their take on a first take. It’s very unlikely that Santa Clause does actually exist, even though we can’t disprove that he does, and if we can flesh out a clear story for what religion is doing as we did with “Saint Nick” stories then we can sweep away the conclusion for existence of a literal God in a similar fashion. It just doesn’t work nearly as well in the case of religion. If there is a creator God we wouldn’t be able to relate to what that entity is like (unless “it” is as chatty as the Old Testament version, or happens to be some living person’s literal parent, then maybe so). So the idea is to reject something beyond our own comprehension instead, some broad category of possible things we couldn’t have much understanding of, which is going to be problematic for argument forms to dispel.
Levels of disbelief in God
A Facebook friend posted this scale of levels of atheism recently:
My initial response was this:
This whole scale seems to imply that one uniform interpretation of God somehow makes sense. If God has to be the chatty, opinionated, divisive Old Testament version or the slightly mellowed out New Testament Christian version he / she / it probably doesn't exist. If God is either some vague type of cause or origin for the universe involving intention or a possible underlying linkage between different forms of life then it's harder to judge.
Of course that didn't really work for the person who posted that; they wanted a number, and they interpreted the question framework as making sense. To me this is why atheists seem to be talking past anyone interested in religion who is not really so concerned if the typical, literal, personal type of god exists. Per my experience people who study religion move past that type of superficial take at the outset, and atheists tend to stick with it, and work around it. Then they say "it doesn't matter," as if it really doesn't, all the while building up arguments and analysis that really use that form or something quite close to it as a crucial starting point.
I'm not sure that point ever became clear, and it's a bit of stretch to map out what religion is really doing in Facebook post comment, but I did answer further about how the question isn't well formed.
That online friend (or contact; however you use those concepts) explained that he thought the question made sense in this way:
While there are a multitude of different ways people follow faith and drastic differences in what those systems or beliefs may lead to in the actions and ethics of different people, this scale's utility lies in lumping all together based solely on what level of adherence one might have to their beliefs. Do you wobble or hesitate with what you believe in, or are you unflinching in your trust? It doesn't matter, in this specific instance, whether it is something innocuous like merely thinking there is some kind of connecting energy inside or between beings, or if it is thinking doing actions in life like feeding the homeless or blowing up nonbelievers will augment some sort of afterlife/reincarnation. In this instance they are all explicitly equivalent with thinking there are supernatural sentient beings that created everything or thinking drinking kale juice will make you lose weight or cure cancer.
This scale doesn't distinguish between what you believe, what that entails, or what it might lead to in your actions throughout life - it just deals with what level you trust in those beliefs. If you think it more likely that what you "know" will stay the same, you are a lower number. If you are perfectly ambivalent, you are pure agnostic. If you think it is more likely that what you "know" will/can be overturned via empirical evidence, you are a higher number.
Interesting; not bad as analysis goes, but this still doesn't seem to work. I explain why I think that as follows:
To me this is asking for an answer to the wrong question. I get what you're saying; as framed it doesn't matter what the type of answer, it's really a question of degree. If someone says "I believe all things are connected in some way; I don't know the form," the question can apply to how strongly they believe that. It sort of doesn't work though, the # 2 relating to "I cannot know for certain but I think that "all things are connected in some way" is probable." This person isn't believing in any God, so per a different and more direct read they're really a #5 or 6. If you assume God or not God, or maybe God, you've already made all the interesting decisions prior to answering the question within the framing, and have already begged the question.
To me this is like the problem in asking the question "what is the meaning of life" according to philosophy. It's kind of the wrong question, in the sense that there are much better questions to start on. One could ask what types of assumptions and context frameworks tend to support an implicit meaning of life. Generally that's too broad a question for either Analytic or Continental philosophy, but it works much better for the latter. In either broad-school context at least you are more directly asking what you are really asking, not skipping over it with assumptions.
Conclusions / analysis; what atheists are doing
I think we're narrowing in on the key problem with atheism and arguments related to atheism here; in one form or another they set up a straw man to reject, that very literal form of God. It's not them that postulate that God initially, it's organized religion, in some forms of interpretation, but they do adopt it in the process of rejecting it.
They say they're doing the opposite, that their arguments work to reject any God, not just the relatively angry one in the Old Testament, or the ass-kicking version that some Muslims take up, or the more compassionate and vague version Jesus talks about (who of course is a bit paternal, in that form). But really God has to be a super-person in those systems, in the form atheists tend to reject "him." A bit of sleight of hand, as mentioned in that Quora answer, is involved in mixing between personal God and first-cause minimum level type of agency. But this only makes the problems worse, rejecting a selected continuum, without really digging deeper into the function of religion.
If you don't think it through religion is all about solving the first-cause problem and the after-life problem, and deriving morality based on an appeal to authority. I think the main function is much closer to the latter, but the draw, the personal appeal, is perhaps coming from that first set of two purposes. This really would run long if I tried to explain what I think religion is doing, and it would be a personal take, there is no way that one person can explain a narrow range that's really it in a nutshell.
But in a one paragraph version, I think religion codifies guidelines for how people should live in ways that support the development of an organized society. It defines a system of morality that makes people working together in social roles possible, and helps define those social roles, to some extent. Monogamy makes for a good example of both; identifying an institution of marriage, the concept of marital fidelity, and a stable family structure works as a basis for society. That can even extend into non-traditional interpretation, eg. gay marriage, but problems can occur if a society doesn't gravitate towards defining family as some sort of valuable construct. I'm not saying that a single parent can't possibly raise a child, and of course they can, instead that it's functional for there to be a norm that two people set up some form of contract towards the shared goal of raising children. The project takes a lot of work even with two people on it, and the nearly two decade commitment time-frame is a bit extreme. Other examples of the function of religious teaching relating to respect for personal property ownership or honesty also work. It just gets complicated to flesh out how any one norm plays a clear role in grounding a society, and how real-life interpretation, codes of conduct, and exceptions tend to play out.
It might well seem that now I'm proposing some sort of interpretive slight of hand, that instead of discussing if there was an agent that caused the universe I've shifted to the function of teachings of a religion as the main point. I would agree, that I just did that, except for not agreeing with the part that it's in error to do so.
Oddly a lot of the ideas I'm proposing are coming directly from a derivation of Christianity, from progressive religion interpretation from the second half of the 20th century. Essentially within that tradition they were discussing how God as a super-person really didn't make sense, that this was a superficial form the ideas can take that has little relation to the actual function of a religion. I suppose the earlier post here on Stages of Faith a bit earlier fills in more details on that.
As far as me answering that question goes, where I fall on the atheism scale, I suspect that all things are connected in an unusual way, at a deeper level than we can tend to experience. Since that's not much of a personal God it doesn't work well to use that scale to reject or embrace one. I suppose if you force that online contact's interpretation I hold that belief at the level of #3 (I cannon know for certain but I am inclined to believe that in some deeper sense things are connected), it just doesn't work as well to map that back onto a more literal theism / atheism.
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