Buddha's Problem

Gentle Reader may recall that it is my position that there are two general forms of philosophical atheism (*) -- materialistic atheism, which we might call "Western" atheism; and anti-materialistic atheism, which we might call "Eastern" atheism, with Buddhism being its exemplar.

Gentle Reader may further recall that it is my position that one may -- and ought to -- reject Buddhism as irrational and absurd, right off the bat, without further consideration or argument against it, as soon as one understands that the core commitment of Buddhism is that "I do not exist" (**). This is not to say that one may not marshal arguments against it, but that one has no moral or rational obligation to do so.

William Vallicella is one example of those who go above and beyond in this regard; this is partly because he likes to play with ideas, but also, in my opinion, because he declines to understand that that the Anatta Doctrine -- the claim-and-axiom that "There are no selves", which is to say, "I do not exist" -- is itself the problem with, and self-refutation of, that form of God-denial. To put that last another way, and as I have said before, I don't believe Vallicella really wants answers so much as he wants to play at asking questions.

But, the foregoing is a tanget to the point of this post, which is an insight into where Buddha went wrong --

William Vallicella: The 'Control Argument' for the Anatta Doctrine

...
Buddha then goes on to argue similarly with respect to the rest of the five aggregates or categories of personality-constituents (khandhas, Sanskrit: skandhas), namely, feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), consciousness (vinnana), and mental formations (sankharas). All are claimed to be not-self. Thus we are told that feeling afflicts us and is not amenable to our control, whence it is inferred that feeling is not one's self, not one's own inner substance. The tacit premise of this enthymematic argument is that one's self would have to be something over which one would have complete control. The tacit premise is that the self is something wholly active and spontaneous and self-regulating. And it is clear that something wholly active will not suffer: to suffer is precisely to be afflicted by something external over which one has no control. To suffer is to be passive. An agent in excelsis is an impassible agent. (In the West, impassibility became one of the divine attributes.) ...

Buddha's mistake is two-fold:
1) As Aristotle did (i.e. "An agent in excelsis is an impassible agent. (In the West, impassibility became one of the divine attributes.)"), Buddha incorrectly reasoned that God -- to be God -- *must be* impassive in all regards. However, such a proposition is not actually a deliverance of reason (***), but is, rather, the expression of an unrecognized cultural assumption: that to love another is to be vulnerabe in the sense of being weak-and-incomplete (****).
2) He did the materialistic-atheists one better: whereas the materialistic-atheist begins with the hidden-proposition that "If I cannot be God, if I cannot be the Self-Existent, then there is no God", Buddha began with the hidden-proposition that "If I cannot be God, if I cannot be the Self-Existent, then *I* do not exist.

God-denial is *always* built upon the desire to be God. And, one way or another, God-denial always involves the denial that one's own self exists: with Buddhism, the denial of one's own existence is up-front; with materialist-atheism, the denial of one's own existence is a logical consequence (and one that most self-proclaimed atheists take great pains to avoid understanding as such).

And, sure enough, Vallicella gets to the same observation about Buddha and Buddism:

...
The gist of the control argument is this. There is no evidence of a self since nothing with which we are acquainted is immutable, and nothing with which we are acquainted is something over which we have complete control.

But this raises an obvious question: Isn't the standard for selfhood being set unattainably high? The argument is tantamount to saying that if I am not God or a god, then I am not a self. Arguably[Ilíon: sure, arguably; but the argument is incorrect], God to be God must be impassible; but must a self to be a self be impassible?

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(*) I wrote "philosophical atheism" because it is my further contention that there are passing few self-proclaimed atheists who *really* believe the atheism they espouse, for they are, to a man, wholly uninterested in knowing/understanding the logical implications of the proposition that "God is NOT" ... while, at the same time, vast multitudes of those who do "believe in God", as they like to say, and who despise the self-proclaimed atheists, are functional atheists, for they likewise are uninterested in the logical implications of the proposition that "God IS"; that is to say, most self-proclaimed non-atheists are not only uninterested in knowing God, but also in knowing about God.

(**) One way or another, *all* atheisms will either begin with, or end with, the assertion that "I do not exist"; that is, *all* atheisms are irrational and absurd, and are to be rejected on that ground.

(***) That is, such a proposition is not actually a truth about God that we may learn via "natural theology", irrespective of, or independently of, God's self-revelation to us in history (i.e. the Bible) and in the person of the Christ.

(****) "Natural theology" -- reason -- teaches us that God, being "the ground of all being", is not and cannot be incomplete. Combining this truth with the incorrect (cultural) belief that to be 'vulnerable' is ipso facto to be weak-and-incomplete leads logically to the false belief that God is and must be impassive. To put it another way, the "God of the philosophers" is but an expression of the machismo fear of being seen by other men as being 'weak'.