The Presumption of Atheism (Antony Flew)

An explication of Antony Flew's arguments in his paper "The Presumption of Atheism" as well as objections and responses.

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Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and more!

Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and more!

[achraf]

i lost "god", followed science, which led me back to "the god"

[glenliesegang]

Goedel's theorem demonstrates the rules of mathematical reasoning cannot generate all the branches of mathematics.

[munstrumridcully]

As I see it, atheism is an unnecessary term. The presumption of atheism is, IMO, the epistemic position that *any* position is unwarranted until sufficiently justified. What is sufficient justification? I believe this is mostly subjective, but I do think pragmatic skepticism combined with evidentialism provides the best results, ie, leads to subjectively better, or more desired, outcomes.

[karlagutierrez]

Great video!, Also I’ve been watching your series on logic, and it is very helpful! I had one question though. Is it possible to use truth trees when using deontic logic?

Thanks :3

[hoagie]

There is a problem with negative atheism. What does one do when confronted with a choice upon which God's existence is relevant? Pascal's Wager is a famous example. But in a more mundane situation, if I know an urn is filled with 100 balls, coloured either black or red, should I choose a lottery where I get £1 if a 6 comes up on a die, or a lottery where I get £1 if a random ball drawn from the urn is black? In both Pascal's Wager and the urn, the decision requires one to elaborate on their lack of belief. It does not necessarily imply one must assert a positive belief, but one must do something. Perhaps one should take, for the purposes of deciding, the (procedural) positive belief compatible with one's evidence which maximises entropy (under some definition of entropy). In the urn case, one might decide that out of the set of possible hypotheses for the distribution of colours, one should assign equal weight to each hypothesis, yielding an effective subjective probability of 1/2 for red and 1/2 for black. In Pascal's Wager, this is much harder as the number of possible hypotheses, and the nature of these hypotheses and their implications on how you should conduct yourself, are uncountably infinite. One might argue the following: say you get a utility of 0 for living normally without praying, - e(g) for exerting the effort to pray for some god g, and that when you die you get utility x(g | h) if you prayed for g, assuming god h is true, and utility - y(g | h) if you did not pray. So your total lifetime utility given h is x(g | h) - e(g) if you pray for g, and - y(g | h) if you do not. Assume e(g) > 0. Then you could argue that for any g, h, there exists h' such that x(g | h) = - x(g | h'), y(g | h) = - y(g | h'). If you don't have any reason to believe any of these h more than another h', you may conclude that the expected benefit after death of praying for any g is always 0, so you may as well just minimise effort by not praying. But my point is not that this is the correct way to approach this problem, but rather that negative atheists must find some way to convert their lack of belief into decisions.

[Ferdinand]

I am not sure I get it. To me an atheist is someone that isn't convinced that there is a god. From your video I understand that Flew is a negative atheist which is the same definition I use for just atheist. But you also say he is a deist... So I am not getting something. I also missed the reason why Flew converted and why he is convinced of deism.
Doesn't this all come down to there is no direct evidence and there is no circumstantial evidence so what are we even talking about? (I think it is the result of how our brains work)

[The.Word.Way.]

The definition used by Stanford and other top unis, and the A. Greek philosophers do not / DID not use.
''A person who lacks belief in God''. A-the-ism --- the A means not - eg a negation, the denial of God [the] exustence


'A lack of belief in God' It comes from Flew's compatriots and taken up/made popular by the New Atheists -- only ONE of the founders being a philosopher - Dennett - with a doctorate in phil.
Eg, Dsd C. Hitchens had a 3rd class under grad. degree in politics

[--chris--]

P2 "The theist is arguing for a proposition" is what has been called into question in the past few decades in the epistemology of religion by religious philosophers (Plantinga, Alston, etc.). You respond to Plantinga that his position concerns private or partial (i.e., not impartial, not public, not objective) justification and therefore theistic belief cannot "enter the public sphere." But the whole point of Plantinga's philosophy is that properly basic beliefs are commonly accepted despite the lack of objective justification; so why not theistic belief? So the fact that only private justification is available for it is not a problem for theistic belief anymore than it is a problem for belief in other minds, the principle of noncontradiction, that you exist, etc. So your objection to Plantinga doesn't begin to address the force of his argument. If so, P2 should continue to be reasonably doubted based on Plantinga and reformed epistemology in general.

[subliminallime]

I'd say the default state of being is not knowing what 'God' is or what 'exist' means. By the time we learn what those things are & understand the phrase 'God exists' and develop some sort of method to evaluate the proposition, we're no longer tabula rasa, so the "default state" wouldn't really be relevant anyway.

[PaulTheSkeptic]

So as it's looking now, Flew was a life long atheist and died an atheist. I can understand you saying this in 2016 but in a New York Times interview with Flew he admitted, after some prodding, that he had not written the book. Roy Varghese wrote it and they released it with Flew's name on it.

[holz_name]

I find this "nuanced" stance rather absurd. We don't use any nuance in any other category of life, you either believe something or you don't, and the default position is always non belief, and we should change to belief if presented with good reasons to do so.
The position of agnosticism is nonsensical, you either believe that X is true, or you don't. There is no middle ground. If you are undecided if a particular God exists, you disbelieve that this God exists, you are an atheist. Why is Antony Flew conflating here belief and knowledge? Also, you have always a particular idea of a proposition. You can't have not a particular idea in your mind. Flew is confusing of having a particular idea with a precise and well formulated definition. If you say "circle" I will form a particular idea in my mind about a circle, but I can't present you with the mathematical definition of a circle right away. The same with anything, including god.
The belief that God doesn't exists and a lack of belief of God's existence is just one and the same.
I agree with the rest of Flew, but this nuanced definition and the term agnostics are rather pointless and absurd.

[chrissidiras]

Neither position in the start of the video are default positions (aka a) god exists, b) god does not exist). The default position should be 'I don't believe god exists, and I don't believe god does not exist.

[edthoreum]

if this concept of God is kapputt via the debunking of both the cosmological & ontological arguments ( not to forget Kant's 12 categories and going beyond them which leads to transcendental dialectics -dogma), why this atheist argument?, , , , or perhaps philosophy needs this never ending concept of the God in order to be relevant? oh, I see, this is good for debates,
ok, great, thanks!

[DeconvertedMan]

nether. the issue does not arise without the idea of god being a thing. without it you couldnt think it was or was not- what is in the box? no idea not enough info. its not that ii believer there is or isnt something is in the box or not. only when I am told what could be in the box can i start to make a choice on if or if not i think it is or is not in the box

[Hesiod]

If you don't know, you should not believe.

[honahwikeepa]

Atheist reject the notion of absolutes despite communicating in absolutes.

[munstrumridcully]

I'm certain you know this, but just for clarification, the problem of evil doesn't argue god is impossible, only that a god which is omnipotent and omnibenevolent is impossible because of evil or suffering in the actual world, which causes an apparent contradiction.

[fredflintstone]

No, the default position on any claim is "I don't know"
If your default on God is "I don't know" then you by definition an atheist in that position has no burden of proof.
If you are claiming all atheists assert that no God exists, then you are engaging in a straw man argument.

[redsparks]

Great video. The dictionary defines atheism as a lack of belief or disbelief. Therefore if one is asserting there is no God then one is going beyond the dictionary definition of atheism. Anyway you may like this diagram that deal with this. Go to deviantart.com and look up an artist called LBAMagic and in his gallery search for the diagram called Gad is safe (for now).

[kerryfarmer]

I do not accept the BoP argument.
• The BoP argument has no place in science or mathematics.
• Anyone can propose anything. Anyone can discuss the proposal. Anyone can suggest amendments to the proposal. Anyone can prove or disprove the proposal.
• The original proposer has no obligation to prove anything.
• There are some famous maths proposals (eg Fermat’s Last Theorem) which seemed to be true and which were not proved for 300 years - they were still useful and challenging.
• There are a number of current theoretical physics conjectures which are interesting and being discussed. No one says 'if you said it, you have to prove it'. Nonsense.
So Theists and Atheists (of which I am one) - the BoP argument is not useful