Do Theists Claim God Exists?
I don't do a lot of atheism blogging -- frankly, what would be the point? -- but I've been thinking about some related topics lately, and I wanted to set a few things down in writing and let such others who might be interested give them a good chewing over.
For starters, I should say what my epistemological frame is -- i.e. how I think humans can obtain valid knowledge about the world. I'm pretty firmly embedded in what I've come to call the Western Inductive Scientific Paradigm (or WISP, because everything needs an acronym!). There are undoubtedly other epistemological frames, but I adopt this one because it appears to be uniquely privileged by the universe. Put simply, WISP yields vastly more powerful magic than any other frame that has existed in human history. And since the universe privileges WISP above all of the alternatives which anyone has thought to try, I'm happy to go along with it.
Now, atheism is sometimes understood to be a claim that "X does not exist," with X variously taken to be "the God of Abraham" or "such entities as people happen to denominate with words we traditionally translate as 'god'", or "the supernatural, including 'gods'." (Historically, the first is probably the most accurate, if we view "atheism" as a historical tradition rooted in the Enlightenment (as opposed to a free-floating philosophical abstraction). Enlightenment atheism took root in an environment in which the non-existence of, say, Shiva, was considered to be just as self-evident as the non-existence of Thor or Hera. At that time, and in that place, there was just one god left in which to disbelieve.)
In any event, atheism is often taken to be an affirmative claim of the non-existence of an ill-defined (or at least ill-specified) entity. And that leads to confusing questions like, "How can you prove non-existence?" and "How can you claim that X doesn't exist without a clear specification of what X is?"
I want to argue that questions along these lines -- and the understanding of atheism that underlies them -- reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of how existence claims work under WISP, and rely instead on an intuitive concept of existence.
Let me start by unpacking the intuitive concept of existence, where it comes from, and how it works.
Our intuition that "objects exist" arises, I believe, from the operation of two fundamental human cognitive capabilities. The first is our capacity to resolve the ongoing stream of sensory input into discrete objects. Some light hits our retinas...complicated neurological stuff happens...and we think, "There's a table lamp. It sits on a table. Next to a stack of papers." And so on. We also impute identity to objects, such that if we move the table lamp to another room, we still say that it is "the same" lamp that it was before. And we get the joke when George Carlin says that someone broke into his apartment and replaced everything with an exact duplicate. The humorous tension arises because we understand that there's something a little bit odd about our intuition that this table lamp is not the same as that table lamp, even if they are indistinguishable on the basis of every observable characteristic. Object identity is a funny thing.
The second cognitive capability in play is object permanence: the ability to understand that objects continue to exist even when they are outside of our perceptions. We do this by building a mental model of the world as a collection of objects, some of which happen to be in our visual field (or otherwise directly perceived), and others of which are, in some sense, hidden. That is, we believe in the existence of things unseen.
This capability goes beyond "object permanence," strictly speaking. Not only do we have the ability to understand that objects, previously perceptible to us, continue to exist when unperceived. We also have the ability to entertain conjectures as to the existence of objects not previously perceived. For example, we can imaging that there might be a lion behind a big rock, even if we did not see a lion go behind the rock.
This capability is useful because it allows us to take precautions against dangers (or to seek out opportunities) even if we can't perceive them. But the capability is, subjectively, quite independent of the consequent behavioral changes. That is, we understand the proposition "There is a lion behind that rock," as something completely separate from the proposition, "If I go past that rock, I will see a lion there, which will also see me, and which, with high probability, will chase me." The existence claim and the prediction about observable reality are understood to be separate claims.
And here is where WISP and intuition part company. Under WISP, existence claims are merely shorthand for claims about how the observable world behaves.
To understand how WISP handles existence claims, it's instructive to look at the history of things which were once thought -- by Science! -- to exist, and which, today, are pretty much universally recognized as non-existent. Two examples which come to mind are the aether and phlogiston.
Light, as you've probably heard, has wave-like properties. But waves, if we think of them as mechanical waves like sound or the waves that wash up on the beach, require some kind of medium. That's what a wave is: a systematic variation is some property (like density) of some medium. So physicists hypothesized that light really was a wave, a mechanical wave of some kind, the disturbance of some property of some medium. And "aether" was the name given to the medium. Clever theoreticians then set about deriving some interesting predictions about how light would behave if, indeed, it really were a mechanical wave in a medium, and intrepid experimentalists devised ways to ascertain whether light in fact behaved this way. And it turns out that it doesn't. Frak.
Now, nobody today says, "Well aether doesn't work the way we thought it did, but it might exist nevertheless." The point being that the existence of aether was never conceptually separable from the body of predictions about the behavior of light. "Aether" was always simply shorthand for "Light behaves like a mechanical wave propagating through a medium." Which it doesn't.
Phlogiston played a similar role in a now mostly-forgotten theory of combustion. Chemists hypothesized that combustible materials contained some special substance, and that combustion was the process whereby this substance -- dubbed phlogiston -- escaped. Now, it turns out that this isn't how combustion works at all. And nobody now believes that phlogiston exists -- because "there exists phlogiston" was always simply shorthand for "combustion works this way."
So, within the WISP frame, for an existence claim to have any content at all, it must be shorthand for a fairly specific set of claims about how the observable world behaves.
Which brings us back around to theism. The first question someone operating within WISP is inclined to ask of theists is whether they actually claim that god (or whatever) actually exists -- that is, do they make an existence claim that is cognizable as such under WISP.
Once upon a time, they sort-of did. For example, the Christian God hypothesis was not so long ago understood to imply that the universe was spatially geocentric: that all observed astronomical bodies occupied orbits around the Earth and that no astronomical body orbited any other. The Earth occupied a distinguished position (albeit not a privileged position -- in fact Earth was said to occupy the lowest position in creation, the most distant from God, who occupied the highest, outermost position) in the spatial arrangement of the universe corresponding to its distinguished role in the scheme of creation.
But it turns out that the universe isn't geocentric. And it also turns out that "God" wasn't really shorthand for a set of claims about how the world worked. The proposition, "God exists," turns out to be completely independent of any claim about how the world can be observed to work.
Which means that it doesn't qualify as an existence claim at all.
So a WISP-y atheist, such as myself, isn't in the position of arguing that the theists' existence claim is incorrect. Rather, we simply notice that there is no such claim. From within my epistemological frame, theists don't claim that God exists at all.
For starters, I should say what my epistemological frame is -- i.e. how I think humans can obtain valid knowledge about the world. I'm pretty firmly embedded in what I've come to call the Western Inductive Scientific Paradigm (or WISP, because everything needs an acronym!). There are undoubtedly other epistemological frames, but I adopt this one because it appears to be uniquely privileged by the universe. Put simply, WISP yields vastly more powerful magic than any other frame that has existed in human history. And since the universe privileges WISP above all of the alternatives which anyone has thought to try, I'm happy to go along with it.
Now, atheism is sometimes understood to be a claim that "X does not exist," with X variously taken to be "the God of Abraham" or "such entities as people happen to denominate with words we traditionally translate as 'god'", or "the supernatural, including 'gods'." (Historically, the first is probably the most accurate, if we view "atheism" as a historical tradition rooted in the Enlightenment (as opposed to a free-floating philosophical abstraction). Enlightenment atheism took root in an environment in which the non-existence of, say, Shiva, was considered to be just as self-evident as the non-existence of Thor or Hera. At that time, and in that place, there was just one god left in which to disbelieve.)
In any event, atheism is often taken to be an affirmative claim of the non-existence of an ill-defined (or at least ill-specified) entity. And that leads to confusing questions like, "How can you prove non-existence?" and "How can you claim that X doesn't exist without a clear specification of what X is?"
I want to argue that questions along these lines -- and the understanding of atheism that underlies them -- reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of how existence claims work under WISP, and rely instead on an intuitive concept of existence.
Let me start by unpacking the intuitive concept of existence, where it comes from, and how it works.
Our intuition that "objects exist" arises, I believe, from the operation of two fundamental human cognitive capabilities. The first is our capacity to resolve the ongoing stream of sensory input into discrete objects. Some light hits our retinas...complicated neurological stuff happens...and we think, "There's a table lamp. It sits on a table. Next to a stack of papers." And so on. We also impute identity to objects, such that if we move the table lamp to another room, we still say that it is "the same" lamp that it was before. And we get the joke when George Carlin says that someone broke into his apartment and replaced everything with an exact duplicate. The humorous tension arises because we understand that there's something a little bit odd about our intuition that this table lamp is not the same as that table lamp, even if they are indistinguishable on the basis of every observable characteristic. Object identity is a funny thing.
The second cognitive capability in play is object permanence: the ability to understand that objects continue to exist even when they are outside of our perceptions. We do this by building a mental model of the world as a collection of objects, some of which happen to be in our visual field (or otherwise directly perceived), and others of which are, in some sense, hidden. That is, we believe in the existence of things unseen.
This capability goes beyond "object permanence," strictly speaking. Not only do we have the ability to understand that objects, previously perceptible to us, continue to exist when unperceived. We also have the ability to entertain conjectures as to the existence of objects not previously perceived. For example, we can imaging that there might be a lion behind a big rock, even if we did not see a lion go behind the rock.
This capability is useful because it allows us to take precautions against dangers (or to seek out opportunities) even if we can't perceive them. But the capability is, subjectively, quite independent of the consequent behavioral changes. That is, we understand the proposition "There is a lion behind that rock," as something completely separate from the proposition, "If I go past that rock, I will see a lion there, which will also see me, and which, with high probability, will chase me." The existence claim and the prediction about observable reality are understood to be separate claims.
And here is where WISP and intuition part company. Under WISP, existence claims are merely shorthand for claims about how the observable world behaves.
To understand how WISP handles existence claims, it's instructive to look at the history of things which were once thought -- by Science! -- to exist, and which, today, are pretty much universally recognized as non-existent. Two examples which come to mind are the aether and phlogiston.
Light, as you've probably heard, has wave-like properties. But waves, if we think of them as mechanical waves like sound or the waves that wash up on the beach, require some kind of medium. That's what a wave is: a systematic variation is some property (like density) of some medium. So physicists hypothesized that light really was a wave, a mechanical wave of some kind, the disturbance of some property of some medium. And "aether" was the name given to the medium. Clever theoreticians then set about deriving some interesting predictions about how light would behave if, indeed, it really were a mechanical wave in a medium, and intrepid experimentalists devised ways to ascertain whether light in fact behaved this way. And it turns out that it doesn't. Frak.
Now, nobody today says, "Well aether doesn't work the way we thought it did, but it might exist nevertheless." The point being that the existence of aether was never conceptually separable from the body of predictions about the behavior of light. "Aether" was always simply shorthand for "Light behaves like a mechanical wave propagating through a medium." Which it doesn't.
Phlogiston played a similar role in a now mostly-forgotten theory of combustion. Chemists hypothesized that combustible materials contained some special substance, and that combustion was the process whereby this substance -- dubbed phlogiston -- escaped. Now, it turns out that this isn't how combustion works at all. And nobody now believes that phlogiston exists -- because "there exists phlogiston" was always simply shorthand for "combustion works this way."
So, within the WISP frame, for an existence claim to have any content at all, it must be shorthand for a fairly specific set of claims about how the observable world behaves.
Which brings us back around to theism. The first question someone operating within WISP is inclined to ask of theists is whether they actually claim that god (or whatever) actually exists -- that is, do they make an existence claim that is cognizable as such under WISP.
Once upon a time, they sort-of did. For example, the Christian God hypothesis was not so long ago understood to imply that the universe was spatially geocentric: that all observed astronomical bodies occupied orbits around the Earth and that no astronomical body orbited any other. The Earth occupied a distinguished position (albeit not a privileged position -- in fact Earth was said to occupy the lowest position in creation, the most distant from God, who occupied the highest, outermost position) in the spatial arrangement of the universe corresponding to its distinguished role in the scheme of creation.
But it turns out that the universe isn't geocentric. And it also turns out that "God" wasn't really shorthand for a set of claims about how the world worked. The proposition, "God exists," turns out to be completely independent of any claim about how the world can be observed to work.
Which means that it doesn't qualify as an existence claim at all.
So a WISP-y atheist, such as myself, isn't in the position of arguing that the theists' existence claim is incorrect. Rather, we simply notice that there is no such claim. From within my epistemological frame, theists don't claim that God exists at all.