Ateismo, agnosticismo e irreligiosidade: um agnostico indiano-americano-- S. T. Joshi

Pessoalmente, não me defino como ateu, ainda que no passado tenha tido essa pretensão. As religiões são manifestações culturais das sociedades humanas que existem desde tempos recuados e que continuarão existindo por força da natureza do ser humano: como não temos todas as explicações científicas sobre o sentido da vida, e da nossa própria existência, as pessoas necessitam apelar a crenças sem muita fundamentação lógica, e sem qualquer embasamento empírico, para se sentirem um pouco mais confortadas, mais seguras psicologicamente.
Religiões podem ser boas coisas, no plano individual, e no plano social. Elas também evoluem, e já ultrapassamos há muito tempo aquelas religiões absolutamente cruéis com os seres humanos -- exigindo sacrifícios humanos, por exemplo, ou baseadas numa versão elementar da lei do talião, do olho por olho -- para religiões mais tolerantes, mais compassivas, enfim, mais humanas.
Algumas o foram desde as origens, como o judaísmo, por exemplo -- em que pese a lei do talião, justamente, mas que não é mais aplicada há muito tempo, e não acredito que venha a ser -- que representou um enorme progresso para o seu povo, e explica, em grande medida o imenso contributo positivo que os judeus ofereceram à humanidade -- em criações, inovações, descobertas, melhorias de todos os tipos, evidenciadas nos prêmios Nobel -- em total desproporção com a participação insignificante da população judia no conjunto da humanidade.
O cristianismo, e também o budismo, representaram imensos progressos para a vida dos povos, com suas mensagens humanistas, de respeito pela vida, de fraternidade, de amor ao próximo (descontando as fases guerreiras do cristianismo, não pela doutrina, mas pela ação de alguns fundamentalistas).
Eu não diria o mesmo do islamismo, ainda que seus seguidores insistam em afirmar seu caráter pacífico, o que absolutamente não é verdade. Uma religião que consolidou a opressão da mulher -- que já existia -- não pode ser positiva para metade da humanidade.
Mas, sem fundamentalismos, considero a maior parte das religiões coisas boas, pois não temos nada melhor para colocar no lugar. A ciência ainda é um terreno reservado para uma proporção ínfima dos seres humanos, e não traz certos confortos espirituais -- ao contrário, incita dúvidas e angústias -- que as pessoas necessitam.
Por isso considero contraproducente esse ativismo ateístico de certos cientistas -- Richard Dawkins, por exemplo -- ou de certos jornalistas, como o finado Christopher Hitchens.
E por isso mesmo, não me considero um ateu, mas simplesmente um irreligioso. Não me peçam para definir. Apenas digo que para mim não existe um problema religioso, apenas um objeto de estudo, como vários outros.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Spreading the Word on the Power of Atheism

The New York Times, MARCH 14, 2014

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SEATTLE — The atheist writer S. T. Joshi, 55, born in India, raised in Indiana and now living in Seattle, has written or edited more than 200 books, including a novel of detective fiction, a bibliography of writings about Gore Vidal and numerous works about H. L. Mencken.

He edits four periodicals, including Lovecraft Annual, the major review of scholarship about the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft; The American Rationalist, a journal for unbelievers; and The Weird Fiction Review, which is what it sounds like. He once spent years scanning into his computer — and typing what could not be scanned — every word ever written by Ambrose Bierce, about six million total.

And this month Mr. Joshi got a call from a friend who works for Barnes & Noble, asking if he could edit a new edition of “The King in Yellow,” the 1895 collection of supernatural stories by Robert W. Chambers. It seems that the book was a major inspiration for “True Detective,” the popular HBO series. “I am one of maybe three people in the world who knows anything about Robert W. Chambers,” Mr. Joshi said, by way of explanation. His new edition will be out in April.

One of the strange, wonderful facts about many atheists is their eccentricity and intellectual omnivorousness. Christopher Hitchens, author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (2007), was a literary critic, a journalist in several war zones and a biographer of George Orwell. Sam Harris, who wrote “The End of Faith” (2004), also writes about free will and about lying; his next book promises to expand on his case for psychedelic drugs. Several professional magicians, like James Randi and the illusionists Penn and Teller, work to promote atheism on the side.

Perhaps because many academic philosophers take atheism to be a given, the only common-sense position, it is left to these quirky, freelance amateurs, with their large cabinets of obsessions, to make the public case against God. And none of them seems to be as quirky, or as obsessive, as Mr. Joshi. On Thursday, he held forth at his kitchen table about the ingredients that went into his own intellectual stew. It began, he said, with his father, an economist.

“My father insisted that I and my sisters not be indoctrinated into any religion at any age,” Mr. Joshi said, as his three cats padded quietly about. “We were allowed to investigate the matter for ourselves if we felt like it. My mother to this day is a devout Hindu — believes in reincarnation, the whole bit — but has never forced that down anybody’s throat. You might say I was a passive atheist through my teenage years.”

As a teenager, Mr. Joshi discovered Lovecraft, the American author who died young and largely unknown in 1937, but who was beginning to win a posthumous fame. “Initially I discovered him as a great writer of horror stores,” Mr. Joshi said. “But it turns out Lovecraft wrote thousands of letters, to friends and whoever, in which he expressed a forthright and vigorous atheism.”

Mr. Joshi began to read those letters, widely available for the first time. “He never published much on the subject, and he had no reputation in his day anyway, had no influence,” Mr. Joshi said. “But these letters started getting published in the 1960s, and I read them even in high school.”

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Mr. Joshi attended Brown University for its collection of Lovecraft papers, and he majored in classics — the better to understand Lovecraft, who adored Latin. Reading classics exposed Mr. Joshi to thinkers like Epicurus, whose teachings about the finality of death continue to inspire contemporary atheists. After graduation, Mr. Joshi worked at Chelsea House, a small publisher then in New York, but in 1995, with some financial help from his mother, he set out as a freelance writer. He moved to Seattle to be with his wife at the time, and he now lives with his fiancée, whom he met online, on Match.com. They plan to marry in July.

Mr. Joshi does not teach, and he rarely lectures. For money, he writes. He keeps to a rigorous schedule, working every day from about 9 to 5, scheduling periodic breaks for refreshment. “I am sort of a tea addict,” he said. “I structure my day by cups of tea. If you don’t enforce that kind of discipline as a freelancer, you won’t get anything done.”

In 2000, after years writing about and editing Lovecraft and other “weird fiction,” Mr. Joshi published “Atheism: A Reader.” It was his first book with Prometheus, the major free-thought publisher, and it began a fruitful relationship that has led to many more books, including what is probably the best resource on agnosticism, the belief that one cannot know if there is a God or not.

It was his editors at Prometheus who suggested “The Agnostic Reader” (2007). At first, Mr. Joshi was skeptical — even as he said yes to the contract. “I was not certain what material was out there,” he said. “I may have had a prejudice against agnosticism as a body of thought: sort of a fence-sitting theory, where you can’t make up your mind one way or another.”

But when he read up on agnosticism, he liked what he found: “You go back to T. H. Huxley, who coined the term, what he said — and I came to believe he is right — is that agnosticism asserts not only that he himself didn’t know if there was a God or not, but that nobody could know. Fundamentally, I think he’s right about that.”

Mr. Joshi said that he did not see any natural crossover between his fiction interests and his writings. But a quick perusal of “The Agnostic Reader” makes the case for some durable linkage. Among the authors Mr. Joshi pulled together were Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction author; Leslie Stephen, George Eliot’s biographer (and Virginia Woolf’s father); and a Joshi favorite, Mencken.

The Mencken excerpt that Joshi chose quotes a letter from a young Jewish man toying with unbelief, who wishes to know what he should do. “I advise him to give his new skepticism six months’ trial,” Mencken writes. “If, at the end of that time, he finds that its effects upon him are still indistinguishable from those of a bad case of cholera morbus, I advise him to go to the nearest Orthodox rabbi, tell his troubles, pay his fine (if fines are levied in such cases), and reconcile himself to the faith of his fathers.”

Which, of course, is precisely what Mr. Joshi, as the young son of an atheist economist, did for himself.

mark.e.oppenheimer@gmail.com; twitter: markopp1

A version of this article appears in print on March 15, 2014, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Spreading the Word on the Power of Atheism. 

Teismo e ateismo: o equivoco logico fundamental de um filosofo - NYT

Este filósofo comete um erro fundamental, mas muito comum nesse tipo de debate.

O teismo é tão amplamente disseminado na humanidade, que este filósofo crente (pois ele é um crente, antes de ser teísta) coloca todos os não crentes num mesmo saco indistinto e os chama de ateístas, ou seja pretende defini-los de forma apriorística e arbitrária, aliás totalmente indevida para um filósofo, sob uma noção que subsume a condição normalmente aceita dos crentes em um deus qualquer, e aqueles só podem ser referenciados por essa negação, como se alguém devesse necessariamente se posicionar positivamente sobre o que é uma crença, não um argumento racional (como deveria ser a posição e a postura fundamental de um filósofo).

Por essa e outras razões, eu não me defino como ateu, pois seria uma contradição nos termos, e sim como um não crente, ou um irreligioso.

Não me cabe "provar" uma coisa absurda, que é a não existência de deus, e sim cabe aos crentes racionais provar os fundamentos empíricos de sua fé.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

THE STONE FEBRUARY 9, 2014

Is Atheism Irrational?

By GARY GUTTING

This is the first in a series of interviews about religion that I will conduct for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, and the author, most recently, of “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.”

Gary Gutting: A recent survey by PhilPapers, the online philosophy index, says that 62 percent of philosophers are atheists (with another 11 percent “inclined” to the view). Do you think the philosophical literature provides critiques of theism strong enough to warrant their views? Or do you think philosophers’ atheism is due to factors other than rational analysis?

Alvin Plantinga: If 62 percent of philosophers are atheists, then the proportion of atheists among philosophers is much greater than (indeed, is nearly twice as great as) the proportion of atheists among academics generally. (I take atheism to be the belief that there is no such person as the God of the theistic religions.) Do philosophers know something here that these other academics don’t know? What could it be? Philosophers, as opposed to other academics, are often professionally concerned with the theistic arguments — arguments for the existence of God. My guess is that a considerable majority of philosophers, both believers and unbelievers, reject these arguments as unsound.

Still, that’s not nearly sufficient for atheism. In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence.

The failure of arguments for God would be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism.

G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that there’s a teapot in orbit around the sun. Why prefer your comparison to Russell’s?

A.P.: Russell’s idea, I take it, is we don’t really have any evidence against teapotism, but we don’t need any; the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and is enough to support a-teapotism. We don’t need any positive evidence against it to be justified in a-teapotism; and perhaps the same is true of theism.

I disagree: Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism. For example, as far as we know, the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit. Furthermore, if some country had done so, it would have been all over the news; we would certainly have heard about it. But we haven’t. And so on. There is plenty of evidence against teapotism. So if, à la Russell, theism is like teapotism, the atheist, to be justified, would (like the a-teapotist) have to have powerful evidence against theism.

G.G.: But isn’t there also plenty of evidence against theism — above all, the amount of evil in a world allegedly made by an all-good, all-powerful God?

A.P.: The so-called “problem of evil” would presumably be the strongest (and maybe the only) evidence against theism. It does indeed have some strength; it makes sense to think that the probability of theism, given the existence of all the suffering and evil our world contains, is fairly low. But of course there are also arguments for theism. Indeed, there are at least a couple of dozen good theistic arguments. So the atheist would have to try to synthesize and balance the probabilities. This isn’t at all easy to do, but it’s pretty obvious that the result wouldn’t anywhere nearly support straight-out atheism as opposed to agnosticism.

G.G.: But when you say “good theistic arguments,” you don’t mean arguments that are decisive — for example, good enough to convince any rational person who understands them.

A.P.: I should make clear first that I don’t think arguments are needed for rational belief in God. In this regard belief in God is like belief in other minds, or belief in the past. Belief in God is grounded in experience, or in the sensus divinitatis, John Calvin’s term for an inborn inclination to form beliefs about God in a wide variety of circumstances.

Nevertheless, I think there are a large number — maybe a couple of dozen — of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get.

G.G.: Could you give an example of such an argument?

AP: One presently rather popular argument: fine-tuning. Scientists tell us that there are many properties our universe displays such that if they were even slightly different from what they are in fact, life, or at least our kind of life, would not be possible. The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. For example, if the force of the Big Bang had been different by one part in 10 to the 60th, life of our sort would not have been possible. The same goes for the ratio of the gravitational force to the force driving the expansion of the universe: If it had been even slightly different, our kind of life would not have been possible. In fact the universe seems to be fine-tuned, not just for life, but for intelligent life. This fine-tuning is vastly more likely given theism than given atheism.

G.G.: But even if this fine-tuning argument (or some similar argument) convinces someone that God exists, doesn’t it fall far short of what at least Christian theism asserts, namely the existence of an all-perfect God? Since the world isn’t perfect, why would we need a perfect being to explain the world or any feature of it?

A.P.: I suppose your thinking is that it is suffering and sin that make this world less than perfect. But then your question makes sense only if the best possible worlds contain no sin or suffering. And is that true? Maybe the best worlds contain free creatures some of whom sometimes do what is wrong. Indeed, maybe the best worlds contain a scenario very like the Christian story.

Think about it: The first being of the universe, perfect in goodness, power and knowledge, creates free creatures. These free creatures turn their backs on him, rebel against him and get involved in sin and evil. Rather than treat them as some ancient potentate might — e.g., having them boiled in oil — God responds by sending his son into the world to suffer and die so that human beings might once more be in a right relationship to God. God himself undergoes the enormous suffering involved in seeing his son mocked, ridiculed, beaten and crucified. And all this for the sake of these sinful creatures.

I’d say a world in which this story is true would be a truly magnificent possible world. It would be so good that no world could be appreciably better. But then the best worlds contain sin and suffering.

G.G.: O.K., but in any case, isn’t the theist on thin ice in suggesting the need for God as an explanation of the universe? There’s always the possibility that we’ll find a scientific account that explains what we claimed only God could explain. After all, that’s what happened when Darwin developed his theory of evolution. In fact, isn’t a major support for atheism the very fact that we no longer need God to explain the world?

A.P.: Some atheists seem to think that a sufficient reason for atheism is the fact (as they say) that we no longer need God to explain natural phenomena — lightning and thunder for example. We now have science.

As a justification of atheism, this is pretty lame. We no longer need the moon to explain or account for lunacy; it hardly follows that belief in the nonexistence of the moon (a-moonism?) is justified. A-moonism on this ground would be sensible only if the sole ground for belief in the existence of the moon was its explanatory power with respect to lunacy. (And even so, the justified attitude would be agnosticism with respect to the moon, not a-moonism.) The same thing goes with belief in God: Atheism on this sort of basis would be justified only if the explanatory power of theism were the only reason for belief in God. And even then, agnosticism would be the justified attitude, not atheism.

G.G.: So, what are the further grounds for believing in God, the reasons that make atheism unjustified?

A.P.: The most important ground of belief is probably not philosophical argument but religious experience. Many people of very many different cultures have thought themselves in experiential touch with a being worthy of worship. They believe that there is such a person, but not because of the explanatory prowess of such belief. Or maybe there is something like Calvin’ssensus divinitatis. Indeed, if theism is true, then very likely there is something like the sensus divinitatis. So claiming that the only sensible ground for belief in God is the explanatory quality of such belief is substantially equivalent to assuming atheism.

G.G.: If, then, there isn’t evidence to support atheism, why do you think so many philosophers — presumably highly rational people — are atheists?

Some people simply don’t want there to be a God. It would pose a serious limitation for human autonomy.

AP: I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t have any special knowledge here. Still, there are some possible explanations. Thomas Nagel, a terrific philosopher and an unusually perceptive atheist, says he simply doesn’t want there to be any such person as God. And it isn’t hard to see why. For one thing, there would be what some would think was an intolerable invasion of privacy: God would know my every thought long before I thought it. For another, my actions and even my thoughts would be a constant subject of judgment and evaluation.

Basically, these come down to the serious limitation of human autonomy posed by theism. This desire for autonomy can reach very substantial proportions, as with the German philosopher Heidegger, who, according to Richard Rorty, felt guilty for living in a universe he had not himself created. Now there’s a tender conscience! But even a less monumental desire for autonomy can perhaps also motivate atheism.

GG: Especially among today’s atheists, materialism seems to be a primary motive. They think there’s nothing beyond the material entities open to scientific inquiry, so there there’s no place for immaterial beings such as God.

AP: Well, if there are only material entities, then atheism certainly follows. But there is a really serious problem for materialism: It can’t be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe that humans are the product of evolution.

GG: Why is that?

 AP: I can’t give a complete statement of the argument here — for that see Chapter 10 of “Where the Conflict Really Lies.” But, roughly, here’s why. First, if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.

But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief thatProust is more subtle than L’Amour.

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GG: So is your suggestion that a neurophysiological structure can’t be a belief? That a belief has to be somehow immaterial?

AP: That may be, but it’s not my point here. I’m interested in the fact that beliefs cause (or at least partly cause) actions. For example, my belief that there is a beer in the fridge (together with my desire to have a beer) can cause me to heave myself out of my comfortable armchair and lumber over to the fridge.

But here’s the important point: It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.

GG: Why do you say that?

AP: Because if this belief — this structure — had a totally different content (even, say, if it was a belief that there is no beer in the fridge) but had the same neurophysiological properties, it would still have caused that same action of going to the fridge. This means that the content of the belief isn’t a cause of the behavior. As far as causing the behavior goes, the content of the belief doesn’t matter.

GG: That does seem to be a hard conclusion to accept. But won’t evolution get the materialist out of this difficulty? For our species to have survived, presumably many, if not most, of our beliefs must be true — otherwise, we wouldn’t be functional in a dangerous world.

Materialism can’t be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe in evolution.

AP: Evolution will have resulted in our having beliefs that are adaptive; that is, beliefs that cause adaptive actions. But as we’ve seen, if materialism is true, the belief does not cause the adaptive action by way of its content: It causes that action by way of its neurophysiological properties. Hence it doesn’t matter what the content of the belief is, and it doesn’t matter whether that content is true or false. All that’s required is that the belief have the right neurophysiological properties. If it’s also true, that’s fine; but if false, that’s equally fine.

Evolution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.

GG: So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.

AP: Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

But to believe that is to fall into a total skepticism, which leaves you with no reason to accept any of your beliefs (including your beliefs in materialism and evolution!). The only sensible course is to give up the claim leading to this conclusion: that both materialism and evolution are true. Maybe you can hold one or the other, but not both.

So if you’re an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.

This interview was conducted by email and edited.

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Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960″ and writes regularly for The Stone.