Atheism 101: II–Deductive atheology
Attempting to prove that god does not exist, the deductive route
I’m looking forward to teaching a summer course at the University of Turin about the so-called New Atheism, the short-lived but impactful movement that was spurred by the publication of four landmark books by Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens during the period 2004-2007. The movement was at least in part a conscious reaction to the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers in New York, and the original group was soon joined by writer and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ali, however, converted to Christianity in 2023, which led to an open letter by Dawkins expressing his skepticism about her conversion.
Anyway, preparing for the course has also meant digging into some of the more scholarly literature on atheism, and particularly into Matt McCormick’s exquisite article in the peer reviewed Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a major source for this mini-series of essays.
Last time I talked about terminology, trying to understand exactly what the word “atheism” means in the first place, as well as epistemology, discussing the bases for claims about supernatural entities. In this post I’m moving to consider what is referred to as “deductive atheology,” that is, the class of arguments denying the existence of god that are based on deductive logic. (Next time we’ll take on inductive atheology, based on the use of inductive logic and empirical evidence.)
The first move by deductive atheologists is to question something that is normally taken for granted when we talk about gods. Most people assume that the concept of a god – regardless of whether they believe in it – is logically coherent, but what if it turned out that god as is typically described, say in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim traditions, is in fact, logically impossible? Maybe “god is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent” refers to something analogous to a four-sided triangle, or a married bachelor, that is something that is logically self-contraditory.
One could, of course, rescue the notion of god by dropping one or more of the attributes that trigger the self-contradictory status, but doing so comes at a cost. First of all, presumably believers who accept that particular conception of god wouldn’t want to give it up just on penalty of being told they are illogical. After all, faith transcends logic, doesn’t it? (I don’t actually know what that means, but people do talk that way.) Second, if the standard definition of god truly turns out to be incoherent, it represents a seriously shaky foundation from which to derive a modified definition of any kind, regardless of the believer’s intent. Third, even should such a move be allowed, the atheist would have lost nothing, since she would still be in her right to ask for positive arguments and/or empirical evidence supporting the existence of any god. And of course, any move by the theist to modify the initial definition of god in order to counter the atheist’s criticism would represent a pretty flagrant admission that the atheist had a point. (McCormick goes into further details on additional consequences of changing the definition of god, but that will suffice for our purposes here.)
