A New York Times article says God is incoherent. Actually, it’s atheism that’s incoherent.
It’s been a few months since I posted, not for lack of desire, but mostly based on being very busy and not having the inspiration to write about anything in particular. But I read an article recently that I wanted to say something about.
The New York Times recently published an article by philosopher Peter Atterton, who argues that the idea of God is incoherent. He brings out several classic objections, such as the question of whether God can do the logically impossible, the problem of evil, and the meaning of God’s omniscience, that people have debated since time immemorial and that have been addressed by philosophers and theologians through the millennia.
Over the next few weeks, I’m sure plenty of people will write responses to him. I’ve even talked about a few of these topics myself. But what I want to do here is talk about atheism — particularly the brand of secular, naturalistic atheism that’s popular in the West. Many of its adherents like to uphold it as the view of reason and science against religious superstition, but in reality, atheism faces glaring logical problems of its own. In fact, if you carry modern naturalistic atheism to its logical conclusions, it becomes evident that it is not only incoherent and contrary to universal human experience, but it’s impossible to live a life consistent with such a view.
First, atheism is incoherent because it renders free will impossible. One of the most foundational assumptions of our human existence is that we have the ability to make choices about our actions, and that we are responsible for those choices. But an integral part of modern Western atheism is materialism, the idea that there is no supernatural or immaterial realm — all that exists is the material. We are just collections of atoms and chemical compounds that react in accordance with their environment like any other atoms and chemical compounds do. Even the thoughts we have and the choices we make are simply atoms and molecules and compounds interacting with each other in such a way as to produce those effects. But atoms and chemical compounds are bound to the laws of nature. The laws of nature are deterministic. They don’t make choices, and if that’s all we are, then neither do we. Free will cannot exist if atheism is true. Everything is a natural, inevitable reaction to everything else — even the atheist’s belief in atheism!
Yet we know that we and others freely make choices, and we know that we are personally responsible for those choices, and that it’s right to hold others personally responsible for theirs. The idea of free will and personal responsibility is incoherent within a consistent atheism. But if God has created us and endowed us with an immaterial being capable of acting independently of the chemical reactions going on inside our bodies, then we can coherently speak of making free choices and having personal responsibility for them.
Secondly, atheism is incoherent because it removes any basis for trusting in human rationality and reason — including the very rationality that many claim led them to conclude atheism is true! The atheist would say we evolved from a common ancestor by a completely natural process — no divine direction, intervention, or setting in motion. The way evolution works is that the creatures with the traits most beneficial to their survival are the ones that survive. Thus, the traits, instincts, and behavioral patterns common to a species are optimized to help that species survive, by whatever means necessary.
For humans, that would include our rationality, our ability to reason. But if our ability to reason developed via evolutionary processes, then our reasoning methods and abilities are best adapted to help us survive, not necessarily discover the truth. The two are not necessarily one and the same. Sometimes false beliefs can be more helpful to our survival than true beliefs. Ironically, the atheist may see religion as a perfect example of this, since religion is what motivates some people to live a productive life, and studies show that religious people actually live longer.
But if that’s true, then what basis do we have for trusting our ability to reason to lead us to discover truth, instead of leading us to simply believe what helps us survive? Our reliance on our own ability to reason is incoherent if atheism is true. But if we are designed by a God who made us in his image and gave us the ability to reason so that we could discover truth, then we have a basis to rely on our reasoning abilities.
Thirdly, atheism is incoherent because it destroys any basis for our properly basic beliefs that help us make sense of the world. Western atheism tends to exalt scientific inquiry as the method by which we discover all truths we need to know, and some would even go so far as to say it’s the only reliable way to discover truth. Yet science cannot even prove some of the most foundational beliefs we hold.
For example, you can’t scientifically prove that the past is real, and that the world wasn’t created yesterday with the appearance of age and implanted memories. You can’t scientifically prove that minds other than your own exist. You can’t scientifically prove that certain acts are good or evil. You can’t even scientifically prove that reason and logic is a valid way to know truth. Modern science must simply assume these things. These are known by philosophers as “properly basic beliefs.” We all know they are true, but the scientific method cannot prove them. Atheism that looks to science as the only or foundational arbiter of truth is simply incoherent.
While claims about the incoherence of theism are well-known and amply addressed by thousands of scholars and philosophers, these incoherent aspects of atheism have gotten far less attention. And I think they are much more injurious to atheism than arguments like the ones Atterton presents are to theism. Most arguments against the logicality of theism deal with the inherently mysterious, the spiritual and the supernatural. They are speculations about the nature and acts of God, and things we wouldn’t expect to understand. But the arguments I’ve presented here concern the material world, here and now, and experiences we have every day. Atheism is incoherent and inconsistent with our universal experience.
