Theistic Atheism: Faith is a type of belief

This is the second part of my exposition of Theistic Atheism. Recall that the position holds that one ought to be an atheist on the grounds of a statistical rationality view of belief, yet one can plausibly still hold the belief that God exists regardless. In this post I'm going to discuss how one believe in God whilst being Atheist under the statistical rationality view of belief.

The first thing to note is that belief's don't necessarily require justification. It seems at least, that I can believe that Earth is round, or that 2+2 = 5, regardless of whether it is justified or not. Now, simultaneously, it seems that a belief that possesses this type of justification (making certain reference to internalist theories of knowledge) are virtuous in some sense. To some people, it might be argued that a person can only be rational if their beliefs are justified or at least obey a certain type of logic.

The statistical rationality view can be thought of as providing a framework for rational argument and justified beliefs. It is not the only framework, and perhaps not the best one for dealing with most cases. Yet I think it has a certain intuitive strength when tasked with assessing a belief in God. There is a strong intuition by many who would identify as Atheists, that whilst they may not be able to directly prove the non existence of God, they are still allowed to reject God, or at the least the variety of religions that surround it. A note here that some Atheists adopt the position in order to express a negative attitude towards religions, whilst maintaining an agnostic position with regards to God's existence. I assume in this essay that the Atheist we are dealing with has a negative stance towards God's existence, beyond an agnostic position.

So the statistical rationality view was how I justified that rationally I think that we should adopt the Atheist position. When we're trying to discuss God's existence, I simply don't think there is enough evidence for us to accept an alternative hypothesis that God exists. Thus on these grounds, one rationally ought to be an Atheist. A key word here; ought. We note that there are many things we ought to do, but we nevertheless might not do. Perhaps I ought to clean my bed everyday, or to get up early in the morning. It does seem however that perhaps by definition, to say that I ought to have this belief on these grounds, suggests that there is something wrong in not doing so. That I am being in some sense, doxastically irresponsible. Thus at the moment, there still seems to be something questionable about having a belief in God, if one adopts this Atheist rationale.

To resolve this, at least rationally, I seem to have to appeal to a contextualise argument. Essentially I would argue that it's fine for me to adopt the Atheist position on grounds of rationality, and it's also fine for me to believe in the existence of God, as long as this second belief is on different grounds. Thus here I appeal to the notion of faith. 

Faith I define as a belief that is not necessarily grounded in rationality. One can have a faith that there are flying pigs circling the moon, that there is an alien conspiracy or that there is a floating man in the sky. Faith does not require the type of justification that statistical rationality does. There is not this supposedly objective measure of evidence that is required for me justify this belief. I can justify a faith using any reasons, or even no reasons at all.

 Now, note that whilst I can plausibly have a faith in any claim, the status of of my faith belief appears to be much weaker when expressed to others. For example suppose I had a faith that homosexuality was immoral. Whilst it seems reasonable for me to believe this myself even perhaps without justification, I encounter a significant difficulty when I try to convince others of my position. It might even be thought that a direct expression of my faith is a political statement and is unjustified, especially due to my (possible) inability to provide arguments. The main thing is that because is without justification, it seems that I also lose the ability to use such a belief as justification for other actions. That is, again if I had a faith that homosexuality was immoral, in virtue of this belief being ungrounded in rationality, such a belief would not properly justify an action such as a potential choice to send all homosexuals to prison. If I wanted to justify this action, my belief of homosexuality being immoral would need to be justified rationally.

So broadly speaking, when I say that I have faith in God, the claim is actually rather meaningless from an outsiders perspective. Because with regards to them, I need no justification when discussing my faith to them, and I am also not entitled to use this faith as any justification for an action that would affect other agents. This doesn't take anything away from my ability to believe of course. I can still believe in God given the 'contextual' modifier of faith, and simultaneously adopt the Atheist position when confronted with doxastic demands of rationality. To sum things up, one could be an Theistic Atheist if their theistic belief, and their atheistic belief belong to different belief classes, generally one rational and the other simply faith based.

This sounds rather complicated. So here's perhaps a simpler example. Consider a football fan, who hopes that their local team will win. Now we ask the fan whether their team actually will win, and what they actually believe. The fan responds that when discussing this topic seriously, if you look at the statistics of all of the other teams and engage in a degree of analysis, the odds of the local team winning are rather slim. Thus when we are discussing a type of belief that demands such evidence, the fan says that the local team is unlikely to succeed. Yet plausibly, the fan still has a degree of belief in his teams victory. Even though he knows the odds are against him, the fan still believes in his team. His faith in his teams victory goes against the rational evidence, and he certainly doesn't think he'd have the ability to convince someone else (especially one who is less emotionally invested) into believing in the local teams victory. Yet he believes regardless.

In my final post, I'm going to discuss my reasons for actually believing in a God on grounds of faith and why I call it faith as opposed to any other term. To conclude this post, I want to briefly discuss whether one is justified in having beliefs that appear to belong to different classes - statistical rationality and faith. I think the justification for rational beliefs is rather uncontentious, so the main issue is whether we think one justifiably have faith based beliefs. Rephrased we ask whether there is any issue with one having a belief that they know is purely faith based and may lack rational justification. I think the thing to note is that many faith based beliefs are non entirely without justification, it just happens to be justification that would be insufficient to convince a present non believer. Yet it seems that we have many such beliefs that one might class as faith on a daily basis. Many of our emotions for example seem to belong to this category. One might of course view emotions in a rather negative light as opposition to the sort of cold logic of rationality that we have discussed, but I think such a view is mistaken. At the least there doesn't seem to be anything innately wrong with one having emotions, and to deny this seems to dismiss an inherently human element of ourselves. I'll discuss the importance of emotions in another post, but for now I hope I have provided some intuition on why we should not immediately object to people having faith based beliefs, as long as they do not use such belief in justifying actions that would actually affect other agents.    
      

Theistic Atheism: Rejecting the alternative hypothesis

In this post I am going to express my view on God's existence and the particular religious stance I have. The position that I endorse I have called theistic atheism, which to many sounds fundamentally contradictory. I argue however that one can hold beliefs for multiple reasons, and that one can justifiably hold what one might take to be 'contradictory' beliefs if such beliefs belong to what I would view as different belief classes.

Briefly, my thesis is that the way an atheist rejects the existence of God is not based on asserting God's non existence but instead that there is insufficient evidence. As a result, their belief belongs to what I call Class SR (for statistical rationality). At the same time, a theist who believes in God will using a different type of belief known as Class F (Faith), which use an entirely different type of justification. Due to this, it is possible for one to be both an Atheist in that there is insufficient evidence for proving that God exists, but simultaneously recognise that they belief in God regardless.

I recognise that there are a number of claims going down here and thus I will split this essay over a few posts. In this post I am going to discuss what I take to be an Atheistic position and why we should adopt a Class SR approach.

Before we begin, let me make an important note. I use an extremely liberal notion of God here; I won't assume that God necessarily has traits such as omniscience, omnipotence etc. I don't assume uniqueness, accessibility or being a creator. Instead I will use a broad notion of God as something that is in some sense supernatural. Many will likely be critical of such a vague definition, which I think would be justified. I do however think that most of us will be able to have a sufficient intuition on what I mean by supernatural. For now, just think about your favourite God from literature and grant them the benefit of doubt that their existence is not an immediately contradictory notion.    
 
Now, Atheists often ask believers why they believe in God. The Atheists ask what evidence the believers have to justify their position. "How can you prove that God exists?" The atheist might question. Suppose now that the believer responds "How can you prove that God does not?". We might think that it is impossible to empirically detect whether God exists, especially when certain versions of God includes its ability to be 'beyond the understanding of humans'.

Whilst some will take such a discussion to be direct reason to be agnostic, I think such a position is hasty. There is of course a debate with regards to defining these different positions. However I think it is fair to characterise the Agnostic position as one where a person believes that nothing can be known about the existence or nature of God. In some sense one might think this is decidedly neutral. The atheist however often agrees with the claim that they can not prove that God does not exist, yet they seem to nevertheless express a negative stance towards the existence of God. One might think that such atheists are being irrational, and that we should instead all be agnostics. I think however that the atheists are instead adopting a certain standard for their belief, that I call statistical rationality.

Let us carry on the conversation. The Atheist might respond to the believer by asking the believer whether they think that there is a Giant Squid in outer space. The Atheist tells the believer that even though the believer is unable to verify whether the Squid exists or not, surely they do not need to remain neutral towards Giant Squids in outer space. One could carry on by inventing further ludicrous objects that might exist somewhere we lack the resources or ability to verify and yet one does not need to be neutral about each of such objects. The Atheist instead claims that whilst we are unable to show that the Giant Squid doesn't exist in outer space, the lack of any evidence or plausible reasons to suspect its existence is enough for us to express a negative attitude towards its existence. In a similar way, the lack of evidence of God or inability to prove God's existence (or so it is claimed) is sufficient for one to take the position of Atheism; to reject the existence of God.

So to clarify, what I am arguing is essentially that the Atheist position is one where doesn't think there is sufficient evidence to believe in the existence of God, and due to this rejects the position. The claim here is that the Atheists think that the onus in some sense lies on the believer to prove that God exists. If there is insufficient evidence or reason to think this, then one should be an Atheist. This position is incredibly similar to what one might do when they engage in hypothesis testing. Essentially if one wishes to argue for a position that deviates from the 'base' or 'null' position, then they need sufficient evidence for that. If they fail to achieve that level of evidence, then there is insufficient reason to deviate from the null hypothesis. I've discussed it before, but imagine a multiple choice (4 choices) test with 100 questions. Perhaps the teacher thinks that their students have learnt the material. However if the average mark is 25, then the teacher's position doesn't seem to be backed by the data. Only once it reaches a certain point (dependent on the level of rigour) perhaps in the 30s or 40s would we think her claim reasonable.

Joining these things together, the Atheist position is the following:
1) The null hypothesis is that God's lack of existence, with the alternative hypothesis that God does exist
2) There is insufficient evidence to be swayed towards the alternative hypothesis.
3) As a result, one should not deviate from the null hypothesis and thus should reject the notion of God.

Now there are some important things to note in this argument. I've already justified 3, which I think follows directly from 1) and 2). Claim 2) also seems quite reasonable; there just isn't enough evidence to confirm that God exists. Whilst some might claim that various natural phenomena could only be the result of God, there seems to be reasonable scientific explanations that argue otherwise. The Atheist position relies on a certain type of belief system that prides itself on evidence or logical reasoning, and thus will naturally bias itself towards supporting scientific explanations. The theist that denies 2) will often argue for evidence of God that is difficult to verify scientifically under the approach that Statistical Rationality would think necessary. There are of course difficulties in deciding what we mean by 'swayed'. In statistics we would of course be referring to a confidence level, but such notions might not translate directly in our discussion. As a result we will need to assume a reasonable level, with agents that are largely epistemically responsible with respect to scientific explanations. Given all these factors  It think that 2) is fair.

Thus the difficult is now in justifying 1). We can note that one could easily reverse the argument if we were able to show that the Null hypothesis ought to be God's existence, and the alternative the lack of. Plausibly we would be unable to provide sufficient evidence to support God's lack of existence and thus we would adopt the null. Now the question is whether such a reversal is tenable. What we are really asking is whether we should adopt the existence of God as a tenable 'initial position'. I think that there is considerable reason to think that it is not. The null hypothesis is what we want to be our 'base', before we start positing additional theories. Although we are willing to allow for certain 'obvious' intuitions, the existence of a God does not seem to be one of them. One might be willing to allow in the past for the people to claim that there must be something 'supernatural' out there, on the basis of things like the Sun. Yet now there are explanations of Sun movements, rain etc without requiring such a theory. In this sense, I think that whilst we might not be able to prove that God does not exist, we are able to show that we would not need a supernatural being to explain certain natural factors. One might counter arguing that it is actually a God that is controlling the rain or who made the sun in this way, but I think this proposes an additional claim, which would seem to have to go through the exact same process; why should we posit this additional complexity of there being a God over a different explanation? The main point is that because we don't need to posit the existence of a God to explain certain things, why should it be our null position? Presumably our null position should be the simplest or most 'obvious' explanation for a phenomena?

I think that 1) is actually rather difficult to justify. To some, it is an obvious position. To those more sceptical, I hope to have provided some initial motivating reasons in thinking it.    

Anyhow, I have now characterised the Atheist position, and the reasoning that might motivate one to adopt it. I can say that I personally take this position in that I don't think there is sufficient evidence for us to think that God exists. In the next post I will go on to expand my position in terms of faith based belief.