Arguments with Shallow Atheists

This web log seems to be where I publish my thoughts about metaphysics. I suppose that's OK as long as nobody reads it.

I got in an interesting argument with a self-described atheist last night after the POTUS debate. I overheard this guy say that no rational person could possibly believe in God. Well, I agree to some extent, at least that metaphysical things like gods are not subject to ration. But I instinctively seized the opportunity to make a case for theism. Full disclosure: I'm not a theist. I'm not even an theistic agnostic. And, I admitted to the guy up front that I was playing Devil's Advocate.

I started things off by asking what problems he saw with believing in the existence of a personal God who interferes in human affairs. He began by saying that there exists cause and effect. I immediately challenged a looming assumption, in order to prevent him from assuming it. I responded that we do not have any evidence that there are single causes for single effects, i.e. pure causal chains. Each effect is a complex or a network of effects and each cause is a network of causes. So, what we really have is a cause-effect mesh. He denied that by pushing his wife slightly and asserting that his push was the cause of her slight forward motion effect. I replied that an additional cause is her flexibility. Were she a rigid object, weighing in at 120 lbs or so, she would not have moved. So, his simplified identification of the cause was too simple.

Now, it was a pretty long conversation with lots of tangents. But I'm only going to write enough of the story here to document my thinking. Were he to ever read this, I'm sure he would have different thoughts he could document here or elsewhere.

Anyhoo, at this point, he asserted that the world was a continuum and cause-effect had to be understood in that continuum. Again, I immediately stopped him and explained that this makes my rhetoric even easier. If we live in a continuum, then it's very clear that there are no unit/atomic causes, only smears of causal distributions.

This is where he went fundamentalist on me. He claimed that we have to agree on something in order to make any progress. For example, if we can't agree that 1+1=2, then we have no basis for rational discussion. Of course, since he wanted to assume that the world was a continuum, I denied there was such a thing as "1". There is only 1.0. Hence, 1+1=2 is a delusion but 1.0+1.0=2.0 is real (no pun intended). He then picked up his beer glass and asserted that, surely, I had to agree that this is 1 glass and adding it to another glass produces 2 glasses. Of course, I did not agree. If he insists that the world is a continuum and he also insists on setting up a language wherein we can discuss things rationally, then we have to define our terms. What does "1 glass" ... or for that matter "glass" mean?

Here he kinda flipped out. He began asserting that I am irrational and nobody could possibly have a rational discussion with me. So, I let it drop and went for another pint of beer. We all wandered around the party for awhile. But a third party rebroached the subject. He offered that "1 glass" is a label for "a receptacle made from glass". Even though I could have argued with that, I didn't because I wanted to accept the compromise he introduced. My acceptance seemed to astound them and there was an awkward pause.

Then our protagonist asserts again that I had to admit that 1 receptacle + 1 receptacle = 2 receptacles. Of course, I disagreed because it depends on how we define the binary function "+". Even if we simply place each glass on a table, since we live in a continuum (remember I'm playing along with that assumption because he wants me to), we can still find a point half way between them so that if we only look at that region of the table, we only see 1 glass. The unit is an attribute ascribed by an observer, not a fundamental property of the receptacle.

Well, he flipped out again and reiterated that I was irrational. But he also began calling me all sorts of other names. I began to get the feeling that he might be insulting me. So, I asked him if he were insulting me. I had to ask several times. "Are those insults?" He responded with something like "Maybe. It depends on you. If you take them as insults, then they're insults!" To which I asked, "So, I can say anything I like to you, call you any name I want, and it's only an insult if you decide it's an insult? My intent doesn't matter?" To which he answered, "Yes." He also offered that I was free to insult him. I turned him down.

Remember, I admitted up front that I was playing Devil's Advocate. I even repeated a few times during the course of the rhetoric that I don't necessarily believe any of the assumptions we're making as we go. I'm doing it to follow through with his assertion that only irrational people could believe in God.

And the conversation ends with him insulting me.

Later, I wished I'd asked him why he was insulting me. I suspect it was because my refusal to implicitly adopt the mountain of assumptions he wanted me to adopt so we could jump to the end and talk about vague, undefined things like "God". That refusal frustrated him and, rather than just stop trying to talk to me, the irrational Devil, something inside him made him want to do something ... continue somehow ... get through to me somehow. And in the end, the only thing he could do was insult me.

A friend of mine recently said he thought "faith" was a kind of short-cut in one's justification of some action or behavior. Each person has a kind of limit to the "drill down" they're willing to do into rationalizing or explaining their plans or past actions. And at bottom, everyone must resort to faith or else they'd seize up and never do anything ... they'd be stuck in an infinite recursion, diving ever deeper into the well of justifying every little thing.

I suspect my protagonist in this story has a very shallow receptacle for his justification, a low tolerance for nuanced, holistic, or integrated rhetoric. He has faith that anyone who defends a belief in God is irrational. And he's quick to arrive at the bottom, shunt the justification, and act in blind faith.