Tag: logic

“The fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God'” (Psalms 14:1) This is one of the Bible verses that the religious will quote as a supposed refutation of atheism. It tries to make a case for belief in God with what seems at first like logic. The statement is brought in to help construct the syllogism that:

1. Only fools don’t believe in God
2. You are (or at least want to be seen as) not a fool
3. You should believe in God

To show how this one works to trick us into the desired conclusion, let’s look at what it really says and what apologists try to torture it into saying. Here’s what we can correctly infer from the verse, if we take it at face value: At least one person who is a fool says there is no God. (He says this to himself because he knows how dangerous it is to declaim in Bronze Age Palestine; maybe he’s not such a fool after all.) If we think about it in terms of sets, it means that the intersection of the set of fools and the set of people who say there is no God is not empty. What it doesn’t mean is that the set of unbelievers is a subset of the set of fools; yet to support the argument, that is what the religious speaker has to imply. With the first statement of the syllogism shown false, the entire thing collapses. (Ironically, the actual plain meaning of the verse is almost certainly true. There has to be a fool somewhere who is also an unbeliever.)

This may be excusable; people who don’t think hard about the imprecise way common language expresses logical concepts really do have a tough time with this. The mistake may be an honest one, and we should assume good will as long as possible.

As atheists we will be challenged all the time by the religious, with arguments of approximately this level of quality. We need to be on our game.

One final note. The most famous cautionary example of why you need to be very careful with syllogisms,

• Aristotle is an animal.
• Cats are animals.
• Aristotle is a cat.

This is #8 of a series covering the top ten goofy things religious people say to atheists.
Earlier:

This is another of the useless things religious people (not only Christians) like to say to atheists.  And I don’t mean “useless” in the sarcastic, pejorative sense.  It’s simply without purpose.  There is no benefit anyone can gain from hearing it, no action anyone can take on it.

In absolutely every story I have heard of God revealing himself to someone, the experience described is absolutely compatible with two competing explanations: Divine Revelation, or mild hallucination.  OK, maybe not-so-mild in some of the more outlandish stories.  But often enough, the evidence of the godly is as scant as, “I had a warm happy feeling in my heart.”

A principle I follow in evaluating the world around me is, when two competing explanations satisfactorily fit the available evidence, choose the one that requires fewer unsupported assumptions.  This is my personal version of Occam’s Razor.  So when I hear these personal testimony stories I look at the evidence.  I will take the tellers at their word that they really did have a warm feeling, and accept that as a fact.  But their leap to explain that as a divine revelation leaves me standing still.  I’m always, in these cases, going to go with: “You arrived at an emotional state where you expected a warm feeling, and lo, you had a warm feeling.  That entire process is very easy to understand as taking place entirely between your ears.”

I do many things, and have many experiences that leave me with a warm feeling.  Not one of them has additional attributes that are only consistent with an omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being who wrote a really ambiguous book about how I should live and wants me to stone LGBTQ people but also gets really pissed if I eat crab cakes.

This #2 of a series covering the top ten goofy things religious people say to atheists.
Earlier: