Critiques of Religious Belief: Atheism and Agnosticism

Overview

Recall questions on the varieties of atheism and agnosticism, Dawkins' scientific case against God and his account of religion and morality, Westphal on the atheists of suspicion Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, postmodern approaches, and the probability debate.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Outline the main varieties of atheism.

   Model answer

   Positive or strong atheism asserts that there is no God and so takes on the job of arguing for that claim. Negative or weak atheism is simply the absence of belief, holding that no case for God has been made and leaving the burden of proof with the theist. Antitheism goes further and argues that religion is harmful whether or not it is true. Some add a further position on which the claim is not false but meaningless, so nothing is actually being denied.

2. 2

   What are the main varieties of agnosticism, and is agnosticism merely fence-sitting?

   Model answer

   Huxley coined the term for a principle rather than a mood: do not claim to know what you cannot show. Temporary agnosticism holds that the question is open and the evidence not yet in. Permanent agnosticism holds it unanswerable in principle, because a being outside space and time is not the kind of thing evidence could reach. On the first it is a working position, on the second a considered conclusion, and neither amounts to indecision.

3. 3

   Why does R Dawkins insist that God is a scientific question?

   Model answer

   Because he takes the claim that a supernatural intelligence made the universe and intervenes in it to be a claim about what exists, and therefore open in principle to investigation like any other. He rejects the suggestion that science and religion occupy separate territories, arguing that religions constantly make claims about events in the world - creation, miracles, answered prayer - and would cite evidence eagerly if any were found. Treating the question as off-limits, he says, is a privilege extended to no other hypothesis.

4. 4

   Explain Dawkins' central argument against the existence of God.

   Model answer

   That God cannot be the explanation of design, because a mind capable of designing a universe would have to be at least as complex and improbable as the universe it is invoked to explain, so the problem is not solved but moved up a level. Improbable things must be explained by something simpler, and natural selection is the only known process that builds complexity out of simplicity in small cumulative steps. On his account, invoking a designer is not a poor answer to the question but a refusal to answer it.

5. 5

   If religion is false, why is it everywhere?

   Model answer

   Dawkins argues that a belief need have no benefit of its own to spread. Children are strongly disposed to believe what adults tell them, which is useful for survival and has the side effect of installing whatever is handed down; religion is a by-product of that disposition. He also treats religious ideas as replicating units that persist because they are good at persisting - promising rewards, threatening punishment, discouraging examination - rather than because they are true. Faith, defined as belief held without and often against evidence, is what makes such ideas resistant to correction.

6. 6

   What does Dawkins say about religion and morality?

   Model answer

   That morality does not come from religion and is not improved by it. He points to the broad moral consensus that shifts across a society over decades - on slavery, on the treatment of women, on race - and argues that it moves independently of scripture, with believers revising their reading to keep pace. He argues that moral impulses have an evolutionary basis in kinship, reciprocity and reputation. And he presses hard on religiously motivated harm, and on the practice of labelling children with their parents' religion before they can assess it.

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