Atheistic philosopher Ken Taylor is puzzled that smart people can still believe in God in a technological age. The fact that we live in the modern world should, folks like Taylor think, preclude belief in pre-modern superstitions, as if belief is made obsolete by the development of air conditioning and DVD players.
Anyway, Taylor says this:
One should want to believe in the existence of god only if one is confident that such belief is capable of being ratified by either reasoned argument or direct experience.
Actually, no. One should want to believe in the existence of God because God is a necessary condition for there to be meaning, morality, justice, and dignity in life. God is also a ground for man's hope that there is life beyond corporeal death. Thus one might well be inclined to hope that there is a God and, finding no good arguments that dash that hope and several good reasons to think there is a God, is rational if he allows that hope to evolve into a belief.
At the very least, an atheist can, I think, argue the theist to a stand-still with counterarguments. If you start out neutral with respect to god and try to reason your way to his existence by appeal to any of the traditional philosophical arguments, you just aren't going to get all the way to positive belief, in my humble opinion.
But why start out neutral? Lots of people start out believing that God exists. They have reasons for their belief and no serious reason not to believe. So why shouldn't they continue to believe? A man might believe that his wife loves him although he can't prove it, but the inability to gain proof is no reason to asdopt a stance of neutrality. Why, if a person is convinced that God exists, should they somehow try to stifle that belief? Isn't that irrational?
The very worst that can be said for them [arguments for God's existence] is that they are all demonstrably invalid and incapable of compelling rational belief in the existence of god.
This is not true, either. The classical arguments for the existence of God fall short of being proofs, not because they are invalid, but because one is not logically compelled to accept some of the premises of the argument. For example, elementary forms of the Cosmological argument might run like this:
- 1. Every event has a cause
- 2. No event causes itself
- 3. The coming to be of the world is an event
- 4. Therefore, the coming to be of the world has a cause outside of itself.
This argument is perfectly valid, but it's not philosophically compelling for two reasons: First, it's possible to deny the first premise, and, second, even if the first premise is granted, the argument doesn't lead to the existence of the God of theism. It simply leads to some nebulous cause of the initial cosmic explosion.
Nevertheless, that is not nothing. The believer could hold that the first premise is reasonable, even if it can't be proven, and therefore conclude that the argument does suggest the strong possibility of the existence of a transcendent creative agent.
The problem with this approach, as I see it, is that if you take yourself to be positing god merely in order to endow one's life with meaning and you do so with no rational basis for really and truly believing that god exists, then you seem to be engaging in a kind of pretense.
The trouble with Taylor's statement is that by "rational basis" he means deductive proof. If deductive proof were the only rational basis we had for our believings then there would be very few things we'd believe. Among the things we would not be able to believe if we required certainty for our beliefs is that believing in God without proof is a "pretense". There is, after all, no proof for that strange claim.