Truth is bound up with knowledge. Furthermore, knowledge requires that a true belief have warrant—or something that turns a true belief into knowledge.
To have an accidentally true belief is not knowledge. To have a lucky hunch that turns out to be true is not knowledge. Or let us say you conclude that it is by looking at a clock in a store window; it turns out that you are correct, but only coincidentally : in actuality, the clock is not working! The belief that it is in this case does not count as knowledge either. Indeed, no one but God could live up to it! One major reason for that is this: you cannot know with percent certainty that knowledge requires percent certainty.
Furthermore, we can truly know lots of things that do not rise to this level of absolute confidence. For example, you know that a world independent of your mind exists—even though it is logically possible it is just an illusion— maya , as the Advaita Vedanta Hindu would call it. Does this mean you cannot really know that the external world exists? The fact is, we know a lot of things with confidence, even if not with complete certainty.
Indeed, there would be precious little we could know if we followed that demanding standard. The believer can have plenty of good reasons for belief in God—even if not absolute, mathematically certain ones. For example, we are aware of the existence of consciousness, free will or a presumed personal responsibility, personhood, rationality, duties, and human value—not to mention the beginning, fine-tuning, and beauties of the universe.
These are hardly surprising if a good, personal, conscious, rational, creative, powerful, and wise God exists. However, these phenomena are quite startling or shocking if they are the result of deterministic, valueless, non-conscious, unguided, non-rational material processes.
We have every reason to think a naturalistic world would not yield these phenomena—though not so with theism—and many naturalists themselves register surprise and even astonishment that such features should appear in a materialistic, deterministic universe. A number of years ago, I was speaking at an open forum at Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts. This brings us to our second set of terms to clarify— theism, atheism, and agnosticism —and we should also tackle the question of who bears the burden of proof in the face of these conflicting views.
No doubt about it, the theist makes a truth claim in asserting that God exists —a maximally great, worship-worthy being. So the theist, who makes a claim to know something , should bear a burden of proof. How is this belief justified? But does this mean that the atheist and agnostic are not making a claim?
This would be an incorrect assumption. Let us consider the atheist for a moment. Michael Scriven, a self-proclaimed atheist philosopher, has actually mislabeled himself. The first is that he has incorrectly defined atheism. Both bear the burden of proof since both make claims. So what is the difference? Much of the aesthetic value of the animal kingdom may also depend on its being the result of a long evolutionary process driven by mechanisms like natural selection.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved. Unfortunately, such a process, if it is to produce sentient life, may also entail much suffering and countless early deaths.
It is arguably far more plausible that in such a scenario the value of preventing horrendous suffering would, from a moral point of view, far outweigh the value of regularity, sublimity, and narrative. If so, then a morally perfect God would not trade the former for the latter though a deity motivated primarily by aesthetic reasons no doubt would.
To summarize, nearly everyone agrees that the world contains both goods and evils. Pleasure and pain, love and hate, achievement and failure, flourishing and languishing, and virtue and vice all exist in great abundance. In spite of that, some see signs of cosmic teleology. Those who defend the version of the decisive evidence argument stated above need not deny the teleology.
Mulgan and Murphy and in particular when it is interpreted as directed towards aesthetic ends instead of towards moral ends. In this section, an argument for the falsity of a more ambitious form of agnosticism will be examined. Because the sort of agnosticism addressed in this section is more ambitious than the sort defended by Le Poidevin, it is conceivable that both arguments succeed in establishing their conclusions. This form of agnosticism is more ambitious because knowledge is stronger in the logical sense than rational permissibility: it can be rationally permissible to believe propositions that are not known to be true, but a proposition cannot be known to be true by someone who is not rationally permitted to believe it.
Another difference concerns the object of the two forms of agnosticism. In this section, the target is omni-theism versus the local atheistic position that omni-theism is false. The previous section focused on two arguments for the conclusion that this form of local atheism is very probably true. In this section, the question is whether or not that conclusion, if established, could ground a successful argument against strong agnosticism. This leaves premise 2 , the premise that, if atheism is very probably true, then atheistic belief is rationally permissible.
One might attempt to defend this premise by claiming that the probabilities in premise 2 are rational credences and hence the truth of the so-called Lockean thesis Foley justifies 2 :. The Lockean thesis, however, is itself in need of justification.
Fortunately, though, nothing so strong as the Lockean thesis is needed to defend premise 2. Also, the defender of 2 need not equate, as the Lockean thesis does, the attitude of belief with having a high credence. Even this more modest thesis, however, is controversial, because adopting it commits one to the position that rational i. In other words, it commits one to the position that it is possible for each of a number of beliefs to be rational even though the additional belief that those beliefs are all true is not rational.
To see why this is so, imagine that a million lottery tickets have been sold. Each player purchased only a single ticket, and exactly one of the players is certain to win. Now imagine further that an informed observer has a distinct belief about each of the million individual players that that particular player will lose. According to thesis T , each of those million beliefs is rational. Since, however, it is certain that someone will win, it is also rational for the observer to believe that some player will win.
It is not rational, however, to have contradictory beliefs, so it is not rational for the observer to believe that no player will win. This implies, however, that rational belief is not closed under conjunction, for the proposition that no player will win just is the conjunction of all of the propositions that say of some individual player that they will lose.
Defenders of premise 2 will claim, very plausibly, that the implication of T that rational belief is not closed under conjunction is completely innocuous.
Others e. They contributed in a variety of ways to making this entry much better than it would otherwise have been. The author is also grateful to Jeanine Diller and Jeffrey Lowder for helpful comments on a preliminary draft of this entry. Atheism and Agnosticism First published Wed Aug 2, Global Atheism Versus Local Atheisms 4. An Argument for Agnosticism 5.
An Argument for Global Atheism? Two Arguments for Local Atheism 6. Such an atheist might be sympathetic to the following sentiments: It is an insult to God to believe in God. Strawson By contrast, anti-God atheists like Thomas Nagel — find the whole idea of a God offensive and hence not only believe but also hope very much that no such being exists.
Consider, for example, this passage written by the agnostic, Anthony Kenny 84—85 : I do not myself know of any argument for the existence of God which I find convincing; in all of them I think I can find flaws. Global Atheism Versus Local Atheisms Jeanine Diller points out that, just as most theists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God exists, most atheists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God does not exist. It follows from 1 and 2 that 3 There is no firm basis upon which to judge that theism or atheism is more probable than the other.
It follows from 3 that 4 Agnosticism is true: neither theism nor atheism is known to be true. It follows from 1 and 2 that 3 There is good reason to believe that God does not exist. It follows from 1 and 2 that 3 Source physicalism is many times more probable than omni-theism. It follows from 3 that 4 Omni-theism is very probably false. It follows from 4 that 5 Atheism understood here as the denial of omni-theism is very probably true.
It follows from 1 , 2 , and 3 that 4 Aesthetic deism is many times more probable than omni-theism. It follows from 4 that 5 Omni-theism is very probably false. It follows from 5 that 6 Atheism understood here as the denial of omni-theism is very probably true.
It follows from 1 and 2 that 3 Atheistic belief is rationally permissible. It follows from 3 and 4 that 5 Strong agnosticism about omni-theism is false. Bishop, John C. Bullivant, Stephen and Michael Ruse eds. French, Peter A. Wettstein eds. Root ed. Schellenberg eds. Schellenberg, J. Wielenberg, Erik J. Academic Tools How to cite this entry. Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.
Related Entries belief, ethics of belief, formal representations of evil: problem of fideism God, arguments for the existence of: moral arguments God: concepts of hiddenness of God monotheism omnipotence panentheism pantheism physicalism pragmatic arguments and belief in God process theism religion: and science religion: epistemology of. These themes extend from the work of early thinkers — like Anaximander and Anaximenes, who tried to explain why phenomena such as thunder and earthquakes actually had nothing to do with the gods — through to famous writers like Euripides, whose plays openly criticised divine causality.
Perhaps the most famous group of atheists in the ancient world, the Epicureans, argued that there was no such thing as predestination and rejected the idea that the gods had any control over human life. Such rulings left no room for disbelief. Whitmarsh stresses that his study is not designed to prove, or disprove, the truth of atheism itself. Battling The Gods is published by Faber and Faber.
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4. For image use please see separate credits above. The study suggests that not all Greeks recognised the gods, and that atheism was fairly acceptable in ancient polytheistic societies. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Our selection of the week's biggest Cambridge research news and features sent directly to your inbox.
Enter your email address, confirm you're happy to receive our emails and then select 'Subscribe'. I wish to receive a weekly Cambridge research news summary by email. The University of Cambridge will use your email address to send you our weekly research news email. They should read it because Hart marshals powerful historical evidence and philosophical argument to suggest that atheists — if they want to attack the opposition's strongest case — badly need to up their game.
The God attacked by most modern atheists, Hart argues, is a sort of superhero, a "cosmic craftsman" — the technical term is "demiurge" — whose defining quality is that he's by far the most powerful being in the universe, or perhaps outside the universe though it's never quite clear what that might mean. The superhero God can do anything he likes to the universe, including creating it to begin with. Demolishing this God is pretty straightforward: all you need to do is point to the lack of scientific evidence for his existence, and the fact that we don't need to postulate him in order to explain how the universe works.
Some people really do believe in this version of God: supporters of 'intelligent design' , for example — for whom Hart reserves plenty of scorn — and other contemporary Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, too. But throughout the history of monotheism, Hart insists, a very different version of God has prevailed. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality.
God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all. God, in short, isn't one very impressive thing among many things that might or might not exist; "not just some especially resplendent object among all the objects illuminated by the light of being," as Hart puts it.
Rather, God is "the light of being itself", the answer to the question of why there's existence to begin with. In other words, that wisecrack about how atheists merely believe in one less god than theists do, though it makes a funny line in a Tim Minchin song , is just a category error. Monotheism's God isn't like one of the Greek gods, except that he happens to have no god friends.
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