I appreciate your efforts and your interest in my writings, but I must point out there’s a problem with your attempt to have it both ways here. You say your response is just your reflection on the theme rather than a direct response to me. That’s fine and it’s what I did with my “Atheism and the Burden of Refuting the Preposterous” article, which was inspired by one of Prudence’s articles. But if you’re going to go that way, you should have left my name out of it and perhaps just called my attention to your article. That’s what I did in my “Preposterous” article. That way, the looseness of the connection won’t lead you to misrepresent what the other person is saying. You’re giving yourself permission to be half in and half out, which is a precarious place to be.
You say, for example, “Cain’s position is that, since the non-existence of ‘God’ is far more likely than the opposite, then believers have a greater burden of proof.” That’s not even close to a fair representation of what I’ve written. You don’t establish the epistemic burden of proof by just assuming that one side is unlikely to be correct. That puts the cart before the horse. The burden of proof would have to be already in effect in the judgment of probabilities. So no, I don’t make any such error. What I try to show in my discussion of the fake religion of Trillionairity, for example, is that the burden of proof is relative to background beliefs and to the social context. In our case, the context is defined largely by secular modernity. That’s what would tip the scales in the atheist’s favour.
I don’t know if that’s a strawman or just an innocent mistake on your part, but my preliminary point here is that this is what can result from your half-in, half-out stance. My advice (for whatever it’s worth) is to reply directly to someone, doing the scholarly work of quoting and even steelmanning the opponent’s arguments, or else to do so in a genuinely loose, inspired way, leaving the other person’s name out of it so there’s no chance of misrepresentation. Just my two cents.
With that out of the way, I’ll address the substance of your argument. You seem to want to pack naturalism and even cosmicism into atheism, but there’s no need to do so. We have separate words for a reason. Now, you could argue that atheism, the denial that a personal deity exists, entails some positive philosophical claims, but that could be a tall order. Not all atheists are cosmicists, pessimists, or even naturalists.
Still, I think there are some useful generalizations that can be made about what other beliefs atheists tend to share. Indeed, I have two upcoming articles that criticize atheist commitments to reason and to the ideal of progress.
In any case, I think the thrust of your article is a stretch. Yes, atheism negates the view that there’s a God, so we need to define “God.” The God in question is both the theist’s and the deist’s, since it’s any personal creator of the universe. I think you err, though, in equating deism with belief in an “impersonal” God. There are metaphysical and characterological aspects of personhood. The latter distinguishes deism from theism, but the former unites the two. The deist’s God would be person in that he would exist as a person. As for his character, the deist’s God would be aloof while the theist’s would be generous and more interested in us.
The divinities of the Eastern religions are more mystical and impersonal in the metaphysical sense, not just the characterological one. The ultimate being in those religions is more abstract and force-like rather than being alive and intelligent. That kind of metaphysically impersonal first cause doesn’t obviously conflict with atheism.
But yeah, I don’t think it makes sense to say atheism entails that “consciousness and intelligence are anomalies or aberrations in nature.” I happen to be an atheistic naturalist, and I use both words because their meanings are different. And I also happen to think there are some pessimistic, cosmicist implications of naturalism, and I stress that consciousness and intelligence are anomalies in nature because I’m interested in the existential impact of history and of our emergence from nonlife. These are all separate questions from whether theistic or deistic religions make sense anymore.
I’d agree that there’s a burden of proof in establishing philosophical naturalism and reductive explanations of consciousness. But even if all atheists were naturalists, the question of whether God exists differs from that of whether everything is natural in the sense of being within our scientific comprehension and our (theoretical) capacity to control with technology. So there’s no need for the burden of proof to be the same in both cases.
If you’re interested, though, I have indeed tackled the hard problem of consciousness. See “The Limbo from the Labyrinth: Consciousness and the Brain,” and the less relevant follow-up article, “Consciousness and Rankings in the Labyrinth” (links below). I also made some earlier, more speculative attempts at a solution, in “How Horror begets Mind from Matter” and “Qualia, Artificiality, and Fractals: A Solution to the Hard Problem.” I also have numerous older cognitive science articles from my exchange with R. Scott Bakker, the eliminativist fantasy author. Note that I focussed on the philosophy of mind when I was in graduate school.
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2015/01/how-horror-begets-mind-from-matter.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2014/10/qualia-artificiality-and-fractals.html
