Atheism Anathematized
Reading the Anathemas for the Service of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, I came across this:
To those who deny the existence of God, and assert that the world is self-existing, and that all things in it occur by chance, and not by the providence of God, Anathema!
I believe that the contents of this Anathema could serve as the building blocks of a cogent transcendental argument against non-theism. First, let us consider the following proposition:
I. The world is self-existent.
Philosopher Bertrand Russell defended (1) on the grounds that “There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all.” However, if by ‘world’ Russell means the physical universe (quarks, atoms and all that), then I can certainly see how someone might come to the conclusion that it had a beginning. Consider the following two questions:
A. How old is the physical universe?
B. How much time elapsed before the present moment?
On the face of it, I see three possible answers: mystery, some finite nonzero interval of time, or an actually infinite interval of time. Part of the reason that it does not seem that the physical universe is the type of thing whose existence is self-explanatory is that our traditional notions of causality and rationality do not permit of such infinite regresses. I cannot be in the “middle” of a story that has no beginning anymore than I can come to a conclusion based on a chain of reasoning where the gap between premises & conclusion is an actual infinite. In fact, in George Smith’s Atheism: The Case Against God, he writes:
“it is logically impossible to have an infinite regress of concepts; there must be a fundamental underpinning, a foundation set to the context.” [p. 138]
If it’s simply self-evident that there cannot be “an infinite regress of concepts,” then why is it not self-evident that the physical universe cannot be self-existent? Why deny the logical possibility of an infinite regress with respect to rationality but not with respect to causality? Let’s move on to the second proposition:
II. All things occur in the world by chance.
By ‘things’ is meant events (states of affairs that were not and come to be) and by ‘chance’ the absence of an answer to the three basic why-questions: how?, from what? and for what? Unsurprisingly, this is exactly the view we find advocated by many anti-rationalist philosophers following Hume:
The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, and Davidson suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat everything - our language, our conscience, our community - as a product of time and chance.”
“The very idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature – one which the physicist or the poet may have glimpsed – is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation, the work of someone who had something in mind, who Himself spoke some language in which He described His own project. Only if we have some such picture in mind, some picture of the universe as either itself a person or as created by a person can we make sense of the idea that the world has an “intrinsic nature.”
(Excerpts from Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 21-22 )
Richard Rorty fails to take his thesis far enough because if *everything* is the product of time and chance, then this also includes (1) his coming to the conclusion that it is so, (2) the events which led to the formation of his reasoning faculties and (3) whatever reality that he is applying his reason to. In short, the consistent empiricist has no possible reason to assume the correspondence of subjective reason (the rational mind) with objective reason (the rational structure of reality), the causal priority of one over the other or the truth of any proposition whatsoever. Only if subjective reason (the rational mind & its components) was *created* to grasp objective reason (the rational structure of reality) and the events which led to its emergence the providential work of pre-existent Mind can the truth-conduciveness of its operations be assumed.
