Atheism and the Burden of Refuting the Preposterous

Farcical debates about the status of stating the obvious

Do atheists and theists have the same burden of proof in supporting their respective negative and positive claims about God?

I’d like to remind us of some factors that are often overlooked in discussions of this question, not the least of which is that theistic religions are preposterous.

Motivating the Burden of Proof Issue

To begin with, though, I suspect that the underlying reason why atheists have bothered to argue that the burdens of proof are not equal in this special case of arguing about such an ultimate matter is that, in the context of Christianity, the atheist has reason to think that Christians will be inclined to distort the principles of epistemology to impose their religion on others.

After all, in the twenty-first century, Christians and perhaps Muslims are in the position of having to search for means of relieving modernity’s pressure on their religions. (I say, “perhaps Muslims,” because Muslims aren’t as evangelical as the Christian busybodies who care so much about what everyone on the planet thinks about their religion’s founder.)

By contrast, atheists have nothing to fear from theistic arguments. In practice, monotheistic religions are sustained by:

• tribal cohesiveness (as in Judaism and Islam)
• totalitarian medieval regimes, which is to say the threat of force (as in the histories of Christianity and Islam)
• and by the indoctrination of children (as in all three of those religions).

Take “modernity” to be a shorthand but admittedly clumsy way of referring to the historic revolutions in Renaissance Europe, which led to the spread of individualism, science, capitalism, and democracy. In that case, modernity eliminated the second support system (totalitarian Christendom) in Europe and its colonies, though it hasn’t yet done so in the Muslim world.

But Christian totalitarianism was so active for centuries that it spread Christianity to many ethnicities in Europe and the Americas. Thus, Christians can’t count on tribal cohesion (the first support system), which is to say that the Church can’t appeal implicitly to the social instinct in shaming dissenters for failing the tribe.

As a result, the primary way Christianity sustains itself is by the third tactic, the indoctrination of youngsters, which is of course the primary, bedrock tactic used by all the world’s religions. Regardless of the Christian society, Christian parents tend to raise their children as Christians, exploiting children’s naivety, gullibility, suggestibility, and subservience to their parents to incept them with Christian theism.

The philosophical case for the truth of Christianity is only a specious rationalization of the remnant of that powerful social mechanism. In a sense, it doesn’t matter whether Christianity is true or false since the religion will persist if once-indoctrinated Christian parents keep recycling the religion and imposing it on their children.

To be sure, in the ancient and medieval worlds, Christian meddlers marshalled a plethora of historical claims and philosophical “proofs” to justify their draconian political measures. But those have all fallen by the wayside because of philosophical and scientific advances in the modern period.

The point is that atheists can happily adopt an equal burden of proof in their debates with Christians. There’s nothing to fear there from the atheistic standpoint. Still, there’s an ethical objection to doing so, which is that atheists have reason to distrust the intentions of Christians (and perhaps of Muslims too).

Have a look, for example, at dominion theology, at the attempt to Christianize the secular United States by underhanded means, such as by creating Christian academic institutions that dole out bogus degrees and by insinuating the graduates into positions of professional authority to enable them to govern covertly based on their right-wing, Americanized “Christian” rationalizations.

Similarly, hard-pressed by the modern revolutions which deprived Christianity and all forms of anthropocentrism of their previous authority, Christians may twist epistemology into a pretzel to make it seem as though the ongoing conflict between atheism and theism weren’t one-sided in atheism’s favour. Christians may insist that the atheist has more of a burden than she really does, to give the atheist more work than is called for by way of buying theists time to avoid the embarrassment that modernity has in store for them.

Falsehoods and Preposterous Gibberish

Now, if we’re talking about the burden of proof in this context, we’re really asking whether theism is preposterous. That’s the underlying point of Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot analogy. If Stevie says there’s a teapot orbiting the sun near Mars, and Lucy denies there’s any such thing, Lucy doesn’t have to go through the possible evidence, taking time to closely examine Stevie’s claim, checking the historical records, consulting structural engineers on whether a teapot could remain intact in outer space, and so on.

There’s no rational expectation that Lucy must give Stevie’s claim even the time of day. Why not? Because Stevie’s claim is preposterous. It’s enough for Lucy to scoff and to chide Stevie for taking such foolishness seriously. Assuming Stevie isn’t insane, and he persists and even condescends to Lucy for not sharing his belief about the teapot, Lucy’s burden isn’t epistemic but comedic: her obligation will be to satirize the situation, to mock the waywardness of Stevie’s outlook and perhaps to sever ties with Stevie, surmising as she might that Stevie is somehow trying to defraud her.

The same proposition can be preposterous in one culture or in one historical period but taken for granted as bedrock truth in another. Such is the variety of cultures or the awkwardness of progress. But once a proposition is identified as flagrant balderdash, the proposition isn’t refuted so much as it’s dismissed. The preposterous claim doesn’t rise to the level of being worthy of refutation, to paraphrase Spock.

What, then, is the difference between trying to show that a belief is wrong, and dismissing the belief as ludicrous? The difference is that some false ideas are nevertheless contenders for being true while others aren’t. The contenders are somewhere in the realm of probability, and because someone might be wrong in rejecting a live possibility, the negater has work to do in justifying that rejection.

Other claims, though, are just nonsensical. Strictly speaking, they’re not even false, but are meaningless or at least so poorly formed that the question no longer tends to interest a neutral observer (as opposed to someone who’s been indoctrinated into taking the idea seriously from a young age). This was the kernel of truth in positivism, although the positivists took their conflict with theology too far, in applying the same skepticism towards philosophy, thus undercutting positivism as a philosophy and revealing that the positivists effectively worshipped science.

Contrary to positivists, the point shouldn’t be that all meaningful claims must be scientifically testable. But all claims that deserve scrutiny should at least be reasonable, not preposterous. The ideas that a single, vaguely masculine deity created the universe from nothing as a playpen to nourish the souls of his followers, and that this deity will punish everyone for their “sins” unless they accept his bizarre plan to rectify the situation — which plan involves trusting in the power of an ancient resurrection of the only begotten Son of God (the hybrid offspring of a deity and of a human, like the progeny of Zeus) — are preposterous.

Preposterous, I say! As in these ideas aren’t rational contenders in the context of modernity. What gives them the appearance of being contenders is the indoctrination of children that puts blinders on most Christian adults. What you do, then, when you confront something preposterous, like the Christian creed or the possibility of a teapot floating around Mars is you dismiss it. You don’t think much about it. At least, you don’t do so unless the world happens to be so dark and absurd that hundreds of millions of people take the preposterous notions seriously, in which case you might want to do some of the dirty work of investigating and explaining how people can be so misled.

Of course, to say that theism is preposterous will strike theists as question-begging. If a belief seems ludicrous to you, you must assume there’s no shred of convincing evidence in its favour, but that’s just what’s at issue in the theism-atheism debate.

Yet there’s no circularity here since the work to back up the presumption against theism has already been done. We can sum up that work with that single handy word, “modernity.” In calling theistic religions “preposterous,” the atheist is saying roughly that they’re premodern. All the explorations, discoveries, and advancements from ancient Greek philosophy to the Protestant Reformation to the Enlightenment discourses and the later scientific models of the universe’s inhuman scale are what support the atheist’s scoffing at the theist’s naïve endorsement of myths as literal truths. Modernity is what reset the default attitude to atheism and to secular humanism.

The theist might maintain on some technical grounds that this reset hasn’t refuted theism, but what she can’t do is deny that politically and sociologically, what historians call “modernity” amounted to a transition from Christian theocracy to secular societies. But that’s all that’s needed to discount theism as a live option. In secular societies, for viable political, economic, scientific, and philosophical purposes, theism makes no sense. It’s a nonstarter. These religions are studied for historical and literary interest, not as sane things to believe or to practice — again, unless you’re among the legions that have been brought up in those premodern ways of life.

The Political Use of Theistic Absurdity

It’s also worth reminding ourselves that theistic religions are often explicitly self-defined as preposterous. The preposterousness is the whole point since the believer is tasked with exercising faith in the worthiness of an ethos to overcome the apparent absurdity of the doctrines and rituals that sell and perpetuate that ethos.

“It is certain because it is impossible,” said Tertullian about the resurrection of Jesus, a line which has been paraphrased by the meme, “I believe because it’s absurd.”

This kind of religious faith in the absurd accords with the evolutionary handicap principle. Sometimes, you want to broadcast some of your qualities in the clearest possible terms, avoiding any hint of ambiguity. The male peacock’s tailfeathers are extravagant because they signal the bird’s fitness: the male peacock is so fit that he can survive even with this laughable, self-imposed disadvantage.

Similarly, the religious person demonstrates her unwavering fidelity to the religious group, surrendering her critical faculties and her autonomy, and showing that she’d be willing to say or to do almost anything for the cause, including humiliating herself by talking theistic nonsense in public without appearing to be in on the joke.

In formal logic, you can prove anything on the basis of a contradiction, by reductio ad absurdum. Informally, then, as George Orwell pointed out in Nineteen Eighty-Four, you can convince a follower to do anything once you’ve conned that person into committing herself to an absurdity. God and miracles are sterling examples of such socially useful absurdities.

Here, therefore, is another source of the persistence of religion which has nothing to do with the alleged rationality of religious beliefs. On the contrary, theistic religions are useful to cynical elites because they’re monumentally irrational. The preposterousness of theism is a feature, not a bug.

The Strangeness of Stating the Obvious

What, then, is the epistemic status of atheism in secular societies? Is atheism a positive, substantive viewpoint or is it a small thing that’s been blown out of proportion?

Just compare atheism to the dismissal of the celestial teapot scenario, or to the scoffing at wacky paranormal claims about fairies, ghosts, psychic powers, and so on. Are there clubs that puff up their dismissal of those entities and that celebrate these denials? No, there aren’t. True, there are skeptic societies and discussion groups, but these operate mainly at the metalevel of having to deal with the social influence of the more farfetched paranormal claims. These skeptics don’t think so much about fairies and ghosts because they’re concerned mainly with disposing of the ignorance, lazy errors, and frauds that infect many people’s thinking.

There are ghosthunters, for example, who take the time to investigate these paranormal claims. And indeed, scientists should be openminded about empirical possibilities. But folkloric ghosts aren’t live possibilities. The very concept is as absurd as Paul’s talk of “spiritual bodies,” in the New Testament. What there are are hallucinations, faulty memories, cognitive biases, and so on, not entities that are just substantial enough to be informally glimpsed, but not so substantial that they could ever be decisively tested. Either light reflects off a ghost or it doesn’t, and either gravity weighs a ghost down or it doesn’t.

The concept of ghosts is like the fiction of zombies. These are problematic concepts because they originate from creative accumulations of folklore. Indeed, these concepts operate in shared fictional worlds like Star Wars or Marvel Comics, subject to competing narratives and the idiosyncrasies of the authors that sustain the legends. So there should be no expectation that the concept of a zombie or of a Jedi or a superhero makes sense, because that concept would have to straddle the thousands of interpretations of how supernatural beings would work. For example, are zombies slow or fast-moving? Take your pick as the customer who’s always right.

Stories of ghosts, zombies, and superheroes are better thought of as confusing, multilayered reflections on what it means to be a person. These fictions are symbols of the phenomenal realities of consciousness and death (ghosts and spirits), of capitalism and consumerism (zombies), and of social classes and Nietzschean, transhuman themes (superheroes). You’re not supposed to treat these characters literally. They’re part of folklores that express primary emotions and that tap into the zeitgeist and the existential conditions of human life.

It’s the same with gods and religions, of course. Consequently, atheism should be as empty as a-zombieism. Theism would be like zombiesm, like an ideology that spreads the conviction that human zombies are real. There’s no such ideology (putting aside the pop cultural theme that zombies are metaphorically real, being symbols of unenlightened consumers, for example). And because there’s no such vast, galling confusion about the zombie concept, there’s no need for any systematic denial of zombieism.

Alas, theistic religions made it through the cognitive barricades. There are still such confusions largely because of the persistence of religious parents’ exploitation of their children’s innocence; hence, those who oppose the preposterous must stand tall in this instance and state the obvious, which is that the emperor’s wearing no clothes.

In an ideal world, there would be no need for atheism because there would be no theistic dishonour. You wouldn’t have to ignore the preposterous or overlook the sad fact that bizarre notions have entered many people’s minds, because ideally no one would have bungled the pursuit of truth with such abandon.

Atheism is therefore just as much of an interstitial doctrine as is any awkward statement of the obvious. What kind of statement is it when your opponent’s intransigence and cultish mentality reduce you to having to assure him that up is up and down is down and black isn’t white? Is that a positive or a negative assurance? A substantive denial or only a tautology?

Or what kind of humiliating politics is it when American liberals must deal with Republican trolling, outlandish conspiracy theories, and big, Goebbelsian lies? How can any political act be valid and compelling in a country in which faith in democracy and in the rule of law is lost and the whole society is in free fall?

Blaming atheists for the confusing epistemic status of their negation is like blaming someone who denies that Superman is real, for the half-heartedness of that denial. How much effort can you put into denying the preposterous when every second spent doing so taxes your faith in human nature and reminds you of life’s absurdity?

Exactly how much evidence and argumentation are needed to establish the obvious when someone has the gall to deny it no matter what you do? When someone is prepared to believe in the preposterous, to demonstrate her allegiance to her in-group or to troll outsiders, what contrary evidence will convince her to stop embarrassing herself? What’s the point of formulating a counterargument when you’re dealing with a millennia-old travesty that’s clearly now immune to reason?

If theism is a self-reinforcing delusion, the rejection of that delusion should be like backing away from a ranting, mentally ill person on a street corner. You don’t spend hours explaining to that unfortunate person why his or her rants are in error. Doing so would be like a human speaking to a Martian, when the two mindsets and languages are incommensurable. No, you note the urine-soaked clothes, the alcohol on the breath, and the insanity of the tirade, and you let it be as part of nature’s grotesque menagerie.

Likewise, there’s no real philosophical need to treat premodern worldviews as viable options anymore. The need is mainly political or aesthetic. It’s a question of social engineering or city planning, or it’s a matter of enforcing good taste and a sense of honour in the face of our common existential predicament.