Atheism and the Metaphysics of Chance

The world we experience is characterized by individuality, novelty, and change. The world is contingent. It can even be said that the most persistent empirical experience we have is that the world is contingent and constantly changing; everything is on the move.

If we combine such a picture with an atheistic view, we see that the atheist is committed to a metaphysics of Chance. Chance reigns supreme. Absolutely anything can happen. The world is contingent, so there are a lot of things that are possible. Absolutely anything can be birthed from the womb of Chance.

To avoid this, the atheist will most likely posit the existence of laws of nature. Firstly, due to Hume's problem of induction, he cannot know from particular experiences that there's a uniformity of nature. The atheist does not have universal experience. Even if he could have such experience, he can never know what nature MUST be like. Laws of nature, to an atheist, are - at best - descriptive. They're neither necessary nor prescriptive. For all he knows, the laws of nature themselves may be constantly changing just like the rest of the world.

Since the world is contingent, the atheist cannot disallow the possibility of uncaused events - novelties - that violate what he perceives as "laws of nature". Atheism cannot say that "freak" events don't happen since it ontologically permits contingent chance to affect reality. Unlike the Christian system, in the atheist system there's no God who providentially controls and orders the physical world. As such, anything can happen. Chance becomes ultimate.  

What follows from this then? When a worldview ontologically allows for Chance to govern history, facts cease to be facts in the true sense of the word. Since every event is possible, then nobody knows what may happen. Probability loses all significance. No one event is more likely to happen than any other. No hypothesis would have more relevance to the facts than any other hypothesis. Did the force of gravity cause the ball to fall down when released? Perchance it did. Was it invisible monkeys? Perchance it was. One can no longer argue from the facts. Facts become meaningless if atheism  is true.

When it is pointed out to the atheist that his worldview commits him to a metaphysics of pure contingency and Chance, he will appeal to laws of nature. He'd say "no, not everything is possible since there are laws of nature that regulate things".

But even "laws of nature" pose problems for the atheist. First of all, it isn't clear what exactly laws of nature are. What does it mean for something to be a law of nature?  That aside, even positing laws of nature does not do the job for the atheist.

For the atheist to escape pure contingency in his metaphysics, the laws of nature have to impose some kind of necessity on the world. But laws of nature, whatever they are, are contingent. It seems obvious that they are not necessarily true. There are possible worlds in which they are false. So the laws of nature, in order to do the job the atheist needs them to, must be both necessary and contingent. But how can something be both necessary and contingent? Laws of nature need to have a distinct type of necessity - one that's not as strict as logical necessity. The atheist, given his metaphysics, cannot account for such things. There's no way to impose necessity on the contingent world.

Unlike the Christian who believes in a God who is in sovereign control of the world and who brings to pass every event in history according to his counsel such that the "laws of nature" are necessary but still contingent on God, the atheist has no way to avoid pure contingency in his metaphysics. As such, he cannot account for the uniformity of nature, the success of science, probability, and the facts become meaningless rubbish.

This is one illustration of the futility of an unbelieving view of reality. For more illustrations, see The Folly of Unbelief here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Failure of Classical Apologetics

Classical apologetics attempts to rationally defend the Christian faith by employing, in most cases, the traditional proofs for God's existence. Offering proofs such as the cosmological, teleological, ontological and moral are the first in a two-step approach to establishing Christianity. The second being offering arguments from fulfilled  prophecy, miracles, resurrection, etc. Classical apologists aim to first establish that this is a theistic universe and then appeal to the arguments mentioned in the second step to distinguish Christianity from other forms of theism. In my estimation, such an approach to apologetics proves inadequate and unsatisfactory for reasons I will spell out shortly. I will divide these reasons into two categories - theological and philosophical. Theological Since the conclusion of the classical approach is that Christianity is probably true or is the most probable amongst others, the unbeliever is always left with an excuse to reject the existence of Go
Read more

Brute Facts Are Mute Facts: A Van Tilian Transcendental Argument

Recent discussions on the Internet have led me to believe that there is a need to write this post. Here I will be clarifying, formalizing, and defending an argument which I believe is central to Van Til’s thought. To my knowledge, there is no such clarification and formalization of the argument available and so in writing this article, I hope to bring something fresh to the Van Tilian’s arsenal of arguments. Van Til’s Doctrine of Analogy Central to Van Til’s thought is the doctrine of analogy. Van Til made a distinction between reasoning that is univocal and reasoning which is analogical . Greg Bahnsen describes univocal reasoning in this way: “ Univocal” reasoning does not honor the Creator-creature distinction, but assumes that God and man approach knowing in the same way and under essentially the same conditions. It refuses to “think God’s thoughts after Him” (cf. chap. 4.5 above) and asserts its intellectual autonomy. 1 However, for Van Til, human knowledge must be analogical. Tha
Read more

Why Atheists Can’t Know That 2 Apples + 2 Apples = 4 Apples...

The title of this article may be a bit misleading. There are obviously very capable and very knowledgeable mathematicians who are atheists. Such people do not only know that two apples plus two apples equals four apples, they can also provide elaborate proofs of the various mathematical theorems that undergird such a truth. This post is not meant as an attack on the intellect of atheists but rather as an attack on atheism as a philosophical system . A more accurate title would be “ Why Atheists Can’t Know that 2 Apples + 2 Apples = 4 Apples If They Were Being Consistent With Their Philosophical System ”. I know, not very catchy! But what is it about atheism as a philosophical system that precludes knowledge of a truth so basic and fundamental that even children know it? The short answer is that atheism commits one to an autonomous epistemology—an epistemology that rejects the necessity of divine revelation. Believing that two apples plus two apples equals four apples is easy enough. Th
Read more