Atheism: Its Logical and Philosophical Foundations

by Frank R. Zindler

A lecture given at the 26th National Convention of American Atheists in San Francisco, Saturday, 22 April 2000.

Not even within the narrow confines of American Atheists am I thought of as a philosopher, nor do I think of myself as a philosopher. Nevertheless, as a professional Atheist I have had to deal with philosophical issues repeatedly during my lifetime so far - and I am certain I will continue to have to do so during whatever time remains for me. (As you may remember from my lecture last year on the subject of the prospects for physical immortality, I plan to be around for quite a while yet.)

Confessedly, I am an amateur in the field of philosophy. Even so, I wish to convey to you all what I hope will be at least a practical understanding of the logical and philosophical foundations of Atheism which you can use in your own discussions with theists.

Both my formal and informal study of philosophy took place after I became an Atheist at the age of eighteen. Whether it was due to lack of experience or dullness of wit, I found myself being convinced and taken in by each philosopher I studied. Again and again, I found myself thinking, "This is right! This really makes sense. This is the philosopher for me!" - until I read the refutations by the next philosopher in turn. Through all of this, a practical feeling of "common sense" began to develop in me, and I began to identify with Omar Khayyam after each new philosophical encounter:

Myself when young did eagerly
frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard
great argument About it and about: but ever
more Came out by the same Door
where in I went.

And so, after several years of intense study of symbolic logic and reading most of the philosophers you - probably know about - as well as some you probably haven't heard of - I gave up on philosophy as fruitless: nothing is ever settled in philosophy as compared to science.

After all, the road to scientific progress is well-marked out by milestones with which we are all familiar. Despite the cavils of young-earth creationists, it is a fact that the earth is billions of years old. This is a hard-won discovery of science. It is not going to be reversed by the next geologist who picks up a spade.

It is a fact that life is not a special creation, but the process of material forces acting over eons to cause life forms to change - to evolve. The fact of evolution is established not only at the organismal level but at the chemical level as well. DNA is a fact. The genetic code is a fact. Natural Selection is a fact.

Evolutionary theory is a milestone on the road of scientific progress. It is not going to be disproved by a "creation scientist," even if, anomalously, he should have a Harvard degree.

It is a fact also that there are living things too small to see with the unaided eye. The microbial world is a reality, even if it was not known to the ancient Greek philosophers or the scientifically illiterate blokes who wrote the Hebrew Bible. It is a fact that some of these microbes help to produce the oxygen we breathe, the nitrate fertilizers needed for growth of plants, and the leavened bread of which we are all so fond. It is a fact that many microbes can cause diseases. No Christian Scientist disciple of Mary Faker Eddy is ever going to win an argument against an anthrax bacillus! Microbiology is another milestone - like which there is nothing similar in philosophy.

In dismay, I gave up my pursuit of the solid-as-stone philosophy, even as the ancient alchemists eventually gave up their pursuit of the philosopher's stone. I settled on the Logical Positivists and their descendants the Logical Empiricists - philosophers whose work most easily fit in with my pursuit of science. Bertrand Russell provided the general frame of reference for my thinking, but it was A. J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic, with its theory of verifiability, that became my vade mecum - both in my pursuit of science and in my disputes with theists. When Karl Popper refined the principle of verifiability into the principle of falsifiability, I incorporated the nuance without inconvenience.

These philosophers had practical utility for my career in science, and so I pretty much stuck with them, but I despaired of finding justification for my Atheism in philosophy. I was an Atheist because of the evidence of the world: science, history, psychology, and biblical criticism provided all the justification I needed.

I developed my ideas almost completely independently of various philosophers who, unknown to me, were publishing widely read works that said - usually more clearly, as it turns out - many of the same things that I was laboriously bringing to mental birth in my own mind. Unknown to me at the time, there was the work of Antony Flew, and Kai Nielson's distinction between meaningful and meaningless religious talk. There was George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God (1979) and Michael Martin's Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1990). These works contrasted two types of Atheism, variously termed weak vs. strong, negative vs. positive, or implicit vs. explicit Atheism. It was belated reading of these philosophers that caused me to return to the contemplation of the philosophical and logical foundations of Atheism.

Here is what I have gleaned from these and other authors - patched together with some of my own threads of thought.

Weak Atheism

The weak Atheist is an a-theist - a person without theism, someone in whom god-belief is absent. The prefix a- is the so-called alpha-privative of Greek grammar. It signifies 'not' or 'without'. In this sense, Agnostics are weak Atheists - for the simple reason that they are without god-beliefs.

As George H. Smith puts it (p. 7) "Atheism, in its basic form, is not a belief: it is the absence of belief. An atheist is not primarily a person who believes that a god does not exist; rather, he does not believe in the existence of a god."

This should lay to rest arguments that Atheism is itself a religion. Atheism is not a belief system, it is a system without beliefs. As Madalyn Murray O'Hair always used to say, "Calling Atheism a type of religion is like calling health a type of disease."

For weak Atheists, the burden of proof is on the theists. Atheists only need to poke holes in theist attempts. The challenge to theists can often be made stronger by asking them to define their god. That which cannot be defined cannot be believed in.

The request for definition can sometimes have a devastating effect on the theistic apologist. Some years ago, I had occasion to do a radio debate with John Koster, the author of a book-length libel entitled The Atheist Syndrome. I asked him to give an operational definition of his god. If a geologist can give an operational definition of 'harder than' by saying that if Rock-A can scratch Rock-B, A is harder than B, surely a theologian should be able to define divinity. "What does your god do?" I asked him. "What procedure must one follow to detect your god?"

The question blew him out of the water. He had never been asked to define his god, and he never recovered. The debate was mine.

It is sometimes lamented that Atheism is such a "negative term" - that it defines us in terms of what we are not or what we are against. I like to ask such complainers if they think 'independence' is a negative concept. After all it has the negative prefix in-. Independence is free of dependence. Is independence negative?

Or how about the medical term asepsis? It means the absence of sepsis - the absence of infection. Isn't that a terribly negative concept?

Strong Atheism

In addition to being free of god-belief, the strong Atheist positively denies the existence of one or more gods. The explicit Atheist might deny, for example, that the deluge deity of the Old Testament exists, citing the positive evidence of geology to show that the earth was not recently scoured by quintillions of gallons of water. Hence, the god whose definitional biography alleges he destroyed the earth's inhabitants by drowning all but a few of them cannot exist: the evidence of geology leaves no room for such a god.

The positive Atheist might deny the existence of a Jesus of Nazareth on the grounds that the city now known as Nazareth did not exist in the first centuries BCE and CE. Just as there could never have been a Wizard of Oz if Oz is a fiction, there could not have been a Jesus of Nazareth if there was no Nazareth at the time he is alleged to have been driving devils into Porky Pig and his extended family. A Jesus of Cucamonga or Hoboken, maybe - but that's a different god and a separate problem.

A strong Atheist might also deny the existence of a deity that is defined as being both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, citing Epicurus' trilemma as proof:

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; Or he can, but does not want to; Or he cannot, and does not want to.

If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If he neither can, nor wants to, he is both powerless and wicked.

But if (as they say) God can abolish evil, And God really wants to do it, Why is there evil in the world?

The existence of evil quite decisively must rule out the existence of such a deity.

The strong Atheist might argue against deities that are logically incoherent: If a god is all-powerful, can it build a wall so strong it cannot tear it down? If a god is infinite, is s/h/it everywhere? Inside the devil? Is the deity in my Dial-an-AtheistŪ messages that argue against s/h/its existence? Clearly, for a god to be infinite, it must be everywhere - there is no place it cannot be. But if it has to be everywhere, it lacks the power to absent itself from certain places. If it lacks power in any way, it is not omnipotent! So it cannot be both omnipotent and infinite. An explicit Atheist might argue that talk about such deities is meaningless.

The Principle Of Testability

This brings us to the principles of verifiability, falsifiability, or testability as criteria of meaning. TD give you a common-sense idea of these abstruse philosophical concepts, I'd like to have you consider two rather silly propositions:

1. The moon is made of green cheese.
2. Undetectable gremlins inhabit the rings of Saturn.

An adherent of the testability theory of meaning would assert that only one of the above propositions is false. He or she would argue that if a proposition can't be tested even in the imagination it can't even be false: it is meaningless.

Applying this principle to the two sentences above, we may see that the moon-and-cheese proposition is easily testable. Even before we had rockets and went to the moon and discovered that moon dust made lousy salad dressing - I guess I've confused green cheese and blue cheese here - it was possible to imagine how one could go about testing the statement without violating either the laws of logic or the laws of science. In fact, studying the reflectance and the spectrum of light coming from the moon had shown over a century earlier that the moon was based on silica, not carbon.

Frank Zindler is the editor of American Atheist Press. Formerly a professor of biology and geology with the SUNY system, he now works as a science writer and linguist for a scientific publishing organization in Ohio.

Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by American Atheists.