You Can't Prove Atheism and Naturalism are Correct!

In shifting from defense to offense, theists sometimes attempt to turn the tables by attacking with, "you can't prove atheism is true!", or "you can't prove naturalism is true!", or "atheism and skepticism require just as much faith as Christianity!" The unstated premise in such attacks is that, without an iron-clad proof, atheism/naturalism/skepticism are no more reliable a guide to understanding the world than religion - that all of them ultimately rely on belief and faith. They say that one is faith in god, and the other is faith in science or empiricism, faith in the continuity and predictability of nature, or faith in man. This equating of religious faith and empirical faith is "false balance" or "false equivalence". It so distorts and dilutes the word, "faith", as to render it practically meaningless. If "faith" means having any expectations at all about how the future will turn out based on inference (such as "faith" that the sun will rise, or "faith" that a red hot burner will hurt if I touch it, or that an apple will fall when dropped), then the meaning of that word has been so altered as to be completely useless. I don't think any objective and fair-minded person should call the trust we put in those sorts of expected outcomes to be "faith". Rather a better word for the second type is "trust". It is trust in natural processes which are the essence of naturalism. It is a set of true, justified, expectations that allows all living creatures to interact with the world and to move safely through it.

At first, this may simply appear to be an attempt by religious believers to bring science down to the their level – i.e., having no firm and provable basis for belief. But it is more than that. It is the first step in a process of the destruction of the scientific/rational worldview. That first step to to equate their foundations. The next shoe to drop would be to show that scientific faith is weak and lost without reliance on god; that it is an inferior form of faith, that science "presupposes" god, or that Christianity somehow is responsible for the Scientific Revolution. Next would be to persuade the scientific minded to abandon their principles and join the “saved” and those who subscribe to the “true” faith.

Belief based on empiricism, logic, theory, evidence, testing, and outside review is not at all like a faith whose first principles are inscrutable deities, personal revelations, mystical, myth-filled text, cultural traditions, strong personal emotions, societal pressure to conform, and priestly admonitions. The objects of rational belief – the real world entities to which those beliefs refer - do not reveal themselves only to the privileged few. They are not matters of taste, preference, bias, opinion, tradition, culture, and custom. The truth of these beliefs is easily demonstrated and reproducible by anyone who cares to test them. They are not culturally dependent, and not learned at the foot of priests. If specialized education is required to comprehend some of the more arcane topics, anyone with the aptitude, intelligence, resources, and interest can obtain the training and experience of that knowledge, firsthand. As Phil Plait wrote:

“Trust is when you accept what well-sourced evidence tells you. Faith is believing in something despite evidence to the contrary.”

To put it another way, where there is good evidence, there is no need for faith. And where faith is needed, it is principally due to a lack of evidence. It is simply a devious and dishonest language game when apologists use very broad term, "faith", to describe both kinds of activities. Skeptics approach religious claims, and other faith-based beliefs, very carefully to avoid being taken in by every new idea that is proposed. Skepticism, itself, is not a faith or a belief system. It does not represent an active desire to disbelieve what others believe. It is a very reasonable approach to evaluating truth claims. Skepticism is the hallmark of an adult who thinks for himself. If after approaching a truth claim with skepticism, it survives, then the skeptic has good reasons to accept it. A skeptical approach filters bunk from reality. Skeptics only accept truth claims that pass through the filter. Without that filter, practically any claim would have to be accepted. We see non-skeptical gullibility in popular culture, and we see it in religion.

But what about the proof they request? Is a request for proof of atheism and naturalism reasonable? Can we really prove anything in the real world to a sufficiently high degree as to be convincing to a theist? The atheist, taken off guard, may begin to feel a little queasy at the idea that his antagonist actually may have a good point. But this attack is a smokescreen and is without merit. Of course you can't prove either way of viewing reality - as surely as we can't prove with complete, 100% certainty anything in the world (although there are some things we can be certain of...). Solid proofs and deductive reasoning are applicable primarily in highly controlled scenarios such as in deriving and proving mathematical theorems, formal and symbolic logic, and in applied areas of technology such as software and circuit design - all areas where the conclusion is completely contained in the premises, and the premises are totally clear, unambiguous, and universally agreed to. In other words, rock-solid deductive proofs only can be obtained in extremely constrained and "clean" scenarios. Math and logic, though they lend themselves to the deductive proof, don't reveal truths about the actual world. Instead, they reveal the consequences of their axioms and premises. They start with an axiomatic structure and set of rules, and from those building blocks, theorems can be derived. They don't tell us which of the axioms are actually true. For that you need to go into the real world and look around.

So, what can we be certain of? We cannot be certain of the uniformity of nature, of the existence of other minds, of the external world, the reality of the past - that doesn't leave much does it? But we can be certain of the outcomes of our own logical systems. Logical propositions, do have certain truth value (binary true/false), and we can be certain of their truth - certain in the real sense of the word. The certainty I am talking about depends on the difference between Hume's "statements of fact" or Kants "synthetic" statements (about phenomena in the world) and Hume's "relations of ideas" or Kant's "analytic" statements, which deal with entities that exist in the abstract, non-physical realm (the world if ideas, propositions, and concepts). Relations of ideas do have true/false values. Certainty doesn't play into that kind of knowledge. Analytic statements say nothing of the outside world, but only express the consequences of axioms which we have the ability to define. The truth of their conclusions can be known with certainty - for example, if we define "bachelors are unmarried men", and posit a hypothetical man "John, who is unmarried", then we know with certainty that our hypothetical "John" is a bachelor. However, if we actually met a flesh-and-blood man, John, on the street who claimed to be unmarried, we could only say he is probably a bachelor, because he might be misrepresenting himself, or forgot he was married, or developed rapid onset amnesia, is is a spy, or is cheating on his wife, or something messy like that. The same with the rules of arithmetic. We know, by definition, that 2 + 2 = 4 is true, not just "probably true". But if someone gives us 2 apples and 2 oranges, and we want to determine how much fruit we have, we can't be sure - one of them might be made of wax, or a hologram, or some kind of magic trick, or the giver may have taken a piece back before we get a chance to count them. Usually we will have 4 pieces of fruit, but not always. The real world is messy, the analytic world is not. So for "relations of ideas" we can have certainty, but not for "statements of fact" and one statement of fact is "God told me thus and such" or "I know Jesus died for my sins". You can't know that with any type of certainty, even if you feel certain about it. These are assertions of existence (about god) or some recollection (god talked to me), and we can be, and often are, mistaken about those sorts of things.

Further, science doesn't attempt to "prove" its theories. This has been well understood ever since Karl Popper wrote The Logic of Scientific Discovery in which he introduced the concept of "falsifiability" instead of relying on "verifiability". Nor does science claim that it can "prove" that its Scientific Method is the most reliable way to discover new information - it uses the methods that seem to work best. The Scientific Method and Methodological Naturalism, allow us to create tests about hypotheses that can be disproved, but never really proved with 100% certainty. We have not "proved" that all apples will fall to the ground when dropped, but every experiment done so far to test the hypothesis that gravity acts on apples has failed to be disproved. The results are so consistent that no one is interested in making additional observations of this phenomenon.

As David Hume first clarified 250 years ago, we cannot have "absolute certainty" in some basic things that we must take for granted. Among these are the existence of the external world, of the past and our memories, of other minds, that the sun will rise tomorrow, etc. But we have "reliable knowledge" that these things exist, enough confidence to allow us to get out of bed and proceed with the day. According to Hume, even though our belief in the reality of an external world is irrational, although it is utterly unjustifiable, that belief is natural and unavoidable. It is just something that humans do. We are in the habit of supposing that our ideas correspond to external entities, even though we can have no real evidence for it. Now, Hume thought that there really was an external world, but just felt compelled to note the disquieting fact that you can't really prove it. He recommended that we fall back on a "mitigated skepticism" that readily concedes the limitations of human knowledge, but still continue to pursue our lives, our investigations, and in pushing the frontiers of knowledge forward. We should not be immobilized by the fact that much of life is uncertain, but should press on.

Life is not like a mathematical formula. Deductive proofs are not really of much practical use in daily living, and certainly when trying to understand the nature of reality. They never convince anyone who didn't already believe. If we want to understand our universe, it is going to involve going out and looking at it. When, during that investigation, certain "facts" are discovered, we can go back to the mathematical and logical systems that were invented before the discovery, and find one or more of them that logically map onto the new aspects of the universe that were discovered, and at that point we can follow the logic to the conclusions to try to predict what the consequences of these new facts will be. As Sherlock Holmes put it so well:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

That describes the apologist approach to their various proofs exactly. Apologists don't do empirical investigation. They engage in this armchair philosophizing in trying to explain "life, the universe, and everything". They think about all of the possible ways the world could be, and conclude that those ways must somehow include the idea of god. There is no step in their thinking process in which they actually go out and look at how the universe actually is, and experiment with their ideas. You don't need to do that in their way of thinking, because they are just interested in finding ways to argue to the conclusion that they have already reached, which is that god must be the centrual hub of the universe. This kind of reasoning has never has never taught us anything true and interesting about the actual world. The early religious cosmologists saw the universe as being made of the flat, circular surface of the earth (the land circumscribed by the horizon), a heavenly firmament (a solid celestial sphere with stars rigidly embedded in it) above, a world of water above the stars and firmament, and another world of water below the surface of the earth. In the complete absence of data, they reasoned their way to this based on the bible:

"And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven."(Genesis 1:6-8)

and

"In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." (Genesis 7:11)

Here, I offer some proofs...
Getting back to the much desired deductive proof of atheism - there is a form of logical reasoning called “denying the consequent” (AKA - “modus tollens”), which is valid form of reasoning in Propositional Logic. It can be used to "prove" god doesn't exist. But of course, this will convince no one who is already committed to Christianity. The abstract form of the argument is:

• If P, then Q.
• Q is false.
• Therefore P is false.

where "P" is the premise, and "Q" is the conclusion. Used in a simple example:

• If it is raining, the sidewalks will be wet.
• The sidewalks are not wet.
• Therefore it is not raining.

That is an absolutely sound and valid set of propositions. Translated into a concrete set of propositions concerning god:

• If GOD EXISTS, then GOD'S PROMISES will be kept.
• GOD'S PROMISES were NOT kept.
• Therefore GOD EXISTS is false.

So, what is it that constitutes GOD'S PROMISES? How about the promise that Jesus would return within one generation? Specifically:

• Matthew 24:34 - Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.
• Luke 21:32 - Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all has taken place.
• Mark 13:30 - Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

These passages all look pretty similar, but that is just because Mark wrote it first, and then Matthew and Luke plagiarized him. But that is for a different chapter... In any case, we have three prominent new testament writers communicating a promise from god - that Jesus would return before "this generation" passes away. If you read the preceding verses, you can see that "these things" refer to his second coming. The chapter starts with his disciples asking, "what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?". He answers them with references to "the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory", "heavenly bodies will be shaken", "the stars will fall from the sky", and "he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds".

Obviously Jesus didn't come in that or any other generation. So this appears to be a very serious set of broken promises. This bring us to the conclusion: GOD DOES NOT EXIST. Apologists have accomplished some of their most impressive verbal gymnastics explaining this serious problem away. I won't get into every one of their rebuttals, but among them are:

• the kingdom of god DID come in "this generation", when Jesus died, his spiritual kingdom began.
• "this generation" refers to some future generation. The story is not about the present but about some set of future events.
• "these things" that were going to take place refer to the fall of Jerusalem to Rome in 70AD, not the return of Jesus.
• Jesus did return spiritually before that generation passed away, in judgment on the nation of Israel, when Titus besieged and destroyed Jerusalem in 70AD.
• etc.

Here is yet another proof that god does not exist:

• If GOD EXISTS, then he would not allow gratuitous evil to exist.
• Gratuitous evil does exist.
• Therefore GOD EXISTS is false.

What is "gratuitous evil"? It is evil that has no possible redeeming value, like a fawn being slowly burnt to death in a forest fire (not caused by man), where no one ever learns of the fawn's suffering and agonizing death. Of course Christians have an answer for that - we cannot know god's mind, and there may yet be some underlying good that results from something that (on the surface) seems entirely unnecessary. There are other ways they justify it which I won't go into. But once again, they bend over backwards to show the argument does not work.

So, will these "proofs" convince any Christians that god does not exist yet, that atheism is true? No, I didn't think so. That is because no one really wants to use deduction for this type of problem - there is no deductive proof that would convince a believer. And likewise, there is no deductive proof of God's existence that would convince a confirmed atheist. As the philosopher, Immanuel Kant said, there is a sharp distinction between "analytic judgements" (analogous to Hume's "relations of ideas") and "synthetic judgements" (analogous to Hume's "matters of fact"). He showed that no collection of deductive analytic statements (for example proofs about god's necessary existence) could establish a synthetic conclusion (such as god really and truly exists). Because neither scenario (his existence or his non-existence) causes a logical contradiction, no deductive proof can be brought to bear on it. Each are logically possible, so to prove his existence, we will have to go out and find him, the way we would prove the existence of Bigfoot by going out and catching one. Likewise, if our naturalistic worldview is all an illusion and we are being fooled in a devilishly consistent manner by some devious alien intelligence or malevolent demon (e.g., Descartes' Evil Demon), this would cause no logical contradiction. The truth or falsity of the religious and of the naturalistic worldview do not lend themselves to deductive argument. Instead, I would recommend that one apply the "Criteria Of Adequacy" to decide which world view (religious or naturalistic) is a better fit with our experience. Which has better explanatory power, or explanatory scope; which is more fruitful, consistent, conservative, and modest? Which "fits the data" of our experience better?

Of course no Christian would concede and say, "well, those look like good deductive arguments - I'm convinced!" There are so many opportunities to redefine the details of an argument's premises, interpret events differently, make it seem like it is not a problem, that any offered proof becomes useless. But we already knew that - it is utterly futile to try to use deductive logic to "prove" god doesn't exist. No matter what set of formal propositions you come up with, there will be some way for the motivated theist to find a loophole.

Again, using the argument form of “denying the consequent” (aka “modus tollens”) we can offer a positive deductive proof that naturalism is correct. The argument that we can rely on empirical evidence and naturalistic (rather than supernatural) explanations follows:

• If (P) "using naturalism and induction from sense experience to make inferences about the world" is invalid and unjustifiable, then (Q) "science (which relies on inference and naturalism) has no hope of working".
• However, "Q" is false! Science does work! There are countless examples of the progress that it has introduced, discoveries that it has made, and new technologies it has spawned. There are no counter examples to its success during the centuries it has been practiced.
• Therefore, (P is false) "using naturalism and induction from sense experience to make inferences about the world" IS valid.

Obviously if there was significant evidence in support of the claim that drawing conclusions through the scientific approach was invalid, then opponents would have a case. But such evidence is entirely absent, and there is overwhelming counter-evidence. Nor is there any competing theory as to why science tends to produce correct, useful, consistent, predictive, and informative results. Barring the existence of a competing explanation that accounts for its success (trickery by Satan to test our faith is one such untestable explanation, as is Solipsism), it’s plain, obvious, common sense to accept as fact that inference from the real world is valid, and these real-world experiences are not interspersed with miracles. It would require agonizing logical contortions to explain away the falseness of statement “Q” above (i.e., “science has no hope of working”) using some other argument. The rule of Parsimony would indicate that the obvious explanation, above, is the correct one. Still, this does not convince Theists. Though they may ask for conclusive proof, when it is provided, they reject it.

So, the theist request for the atheist to "prove god doesn't exist" or "prove atheism is true" are just blocking tactics. When such a proof is delivered, the theist rejects it, debates it, and finds ways to redefine the problem so that the proof doesn't satisfy them. I am quite sure that there is no proof that could be provided to the theist that they would accept. To quote Massimo Piggliuci from his Rationally Speaking blog, when discussing a recent lecture by Richard Dawkins, the famous "New Atheist":

"Dawkins still appears to be convinced that religion will be defeated by rationality alone. Were that the case, David Hume would have sufficed."

This is in reference to Hume's Dialogs on Natural Religion, in which he systematically shows how miracles and the resurrection of Jesus almost certainly didn't happen. Logic, reason, and empirical evidence will not be what eventually move Christians away from their faith, if that ever happens. If they were effective, then theism would have died out 250 years ago.