The purpose of this post is to expand upon, or explain in more detail, something I had written on GAB. Basically, the purpose here is to reiterate my own approach to the 'Argument From Reason' and by it to defend my assertion that *all* 'atheists' and 'agnostics' can thereby be known to be intellectually dishonest.
Recently on GAB, I had said in passing that I consider Alex O'Connor -- a smarmy young Englishman to whom many 'village atheists with an ethernet cable (*)' currently look to be the salvation of their anti-rational belief-system, and whom many internet apologists for Christianity foolishly extol for his current (**) winsome approach to asserting that 'God is not' -- to be intellectually dishonest.
I'm curious. I have watched Alex for sometime. What did you find particularly intellectually dishonest about him?
I responded in two parts, the first specifically about Alex O'Connor, and the second quickly outlining why I consider *all* 'atheists' and 'agnostics' to be intellectually dishonest.
I'll admit that I *haven't* watched/listened to him all that much -- I have an almost physical reaction of repugnance to him. Even in his more recent/current iteration of winsomeness, as compared to his earlier stridency, he strikes me as aiming to be the next occupant of Dawkins' papal throne.It's his more recent/current pose of "I'm just asking questions; I really want to see 'evidence' of God, but I just don't see it" that I mark as *doubly* intellectually dishonest (*) -- he's *not* just asking questions, and he's *not* looking for evidence of God: he's demanding answers which are category errors; he's refusing to acknowledge that you can't "find evidence of God" when you're insisting that God is like Zeus.
(*) His initial pugnacious iteration was also intellectually dishonest, but at least it was straight-forward attack-mode.
My position, though I won't detail it here, is that *all* atheists, including the ones who try to hide behind the 'agnostic' label, are intellectually dishonest (*). The main difference between one atheist and another is how obnoxious or strident one is compared to another.(*) In a nutshell -- IF God is not, that is, IF atheism/materialism is the truth about the nature of reality, THEN there can be no such things as rational beings, there can be no such activity as logical deduction from premise to conclusion, and there can be no such thing as true knowledge -- including the alleged knowledge that "atheism/materialism is the truth about the nature of reality". BUT, there *are* rational beings, and logical reasoning *is* possible, and true knowledge *does* exist and *can* be known.
Atheists and 'agnostics' -- *all of them* -- are intellectually dishonest precisely *because* they persist in their denial of the reality of God even as that denial logically entails the denial of their own natures as rational beings and free wills (**), able to reason logically and to know truth. AND, the cherry on the top is that most of them pose as paragons of reason and logic, and attempt to denigrate Christians as irrational.
(**) It's a misstatement to say that "we have free will", as though it [i.e. the reality of 'free will'] were analogous to having or not having two feet; rather, we *are* free wills.
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Notwithstanding the title of a post I'd made last February ("There Is a Fourth Metaphysic", which title was in response to an attempt to get around the "Problem of Minds" by splitting the single metaphysic of atheism into three distinct metaphysics), there are two, and only two, logically possible metaphysics: that is, the truth about the nature of reality is encompassed, without remainder, either by "theism" or by atheism ... but atheism is anti-rational and indeed self-refuting, as it logically entails the denial of all manner of things we know to be true of ourselves.
Understand, the fatal flaw in atheism isn't due to materialism -- materialism is simply the primary expression of any atheism which acknowledges the reality of a physical/material world. No, the fatal flaw of atheism is that it denies -- necessarily -- the primacy of mind, and thus of free-will, as a causal explanation for events and state-changes in the world, which leaves mechanistic necessity as the *only* causal explanation for events and state-changes in the world.
To make use of an illustration by the Oxford mathematician John Lennox, if you were to ask me, "Why is that kettle of water boiling?", I might explain the boiling of the water by listing a series of facts of mechanical necessity, starting with the the fire under the kettle. Or, I might answer, "Because I want a cup of tea". Now, while the mechanical necessity explanation isn't false, so far as it goes, it is quite incomplete: it doesn't get to the *real* reason that the kettle of water is boiling; namely that I freely initiated the series of mechanistic events and state-changes which resulted in the water boiling.
C S Lewis distinguished these two different (though not contradictory) explanations for the cause of the water boiling as cause-and-effect (the fire under the kettle and subsequent physical state-changes) on the one hand, and ground-and-consequent (my effecting of an act of will to initiate the series of physical state-changes which result in the water boiling) on the other hand.
But, see, the problem for atheism, it's fatal flaw, is that IF atheism is the truth about the nature of reality, THEN my "decision" to initiate that series of mechanistic events and state-changes which resulted in boiling water was itself merely the mechanically necessary result of some prior set of state-changes; that is, under atheism, there are no such things as decisions, as we all intend that term, much less any such thing as free-will.
The two, and only two, logically possible metaphysics --
On the one hand, IF "theism" is the truth about the nature of reality, THEN the primal fact about reality is 'Mind' (***). That is, logically prior to anything else, before there are any states or events or state-changes, there is a mind, there is a rational being, there is a Who who freely chooses to act or not to act, who freely creates all else that is, who intends 'this' but not 'that'.
On the other hand, IF atheism is the truth about the nature of reality, THEN the primal fact about reality is 'Not-Mind'. That is, definitionally: however it is that states, and state-changes, initially came to be, they came to be unintentionally, and thus any and all subsequent events and state changes are, and of necessity must be, the mechanistic result of prior events and state-changes. That is, under atheism, this initial unintentionality pervades all reality and for all time: for 'not-mind' cannot yield, cannot become, 'mind'.
If 'mind' does not exist already at the initial state of the system, then 'mind' cannot be injected into the system at some later stage of events. For, whence comes this 'mind' to inject into the system? On the one hand, if 'mind' was always "just there, somewhere", waiting in the wings, so to speak, to be injected into the system when "needed" as an explanatory force, then one is just playing disingenuous word-games: one is denying the fundamental tenet of atheism while dishonestly asserting that one is not denying it. But on the other hand, if one asserts than 'mind' just "arises" within the system itself from 'not-mind', then one is *also* just playing disingenuous word-games: but in this case, one is asserting that 'mind' and 'not-mind' are the same thing.
Here is the issue: the existence of mechanistically necessary state-changes is compatible with "theism", but the free-and-intentional initiation of novel events and state-changes is utterly incompatible with atheism.
Thus (as I said above), to assert that atheism is the truth about the nature of reality is simultaneously to assert the denial of all manner of things which one knows to be true of oneself, including, but not limited to: the freedom of one's will; one's ability to engage in logical reasoning; one's ability to discover truth and know that it is truth; the ability to discover that one has erred in one's reasoning and to correct the error and to know that one has indeed corrected the error.
To deny that God is is ultimately to deny that one's own self is. To put it in the form of a bumper-sticker: You are the proof that God is.
And this is why I contend that *all* 'atheists' and 'agnostics' are intellectually dishonest. And I include in that assessment even the likes of Patricia Churchland, who does with one side of her mouth deny the reality of free-will, while with the other side trying to convince people to believe the proposition that they are not free-wills.
(*) 'village atheist with an ethernet cable' is a phrase I have long used to denote and deride the sort of 'atheist' one typically encounters on the internet.
(**) Until just a couple of years ago, Alex O'Connor was as deliberately obnoxious as Richard Darwkins or Stephen Fry, or Christopher Hitchens.
(***) Some 'atheists' try to evade this problem by appealing to some sort of woo-woo, such as 'Panpsychism'. But, as I explain time and again, there is no such thing a 'Mind' unless there is at least one actually existing mind.
