henry quirk wrote:Evidence...eeeevvvviiiidddeeennnncccceeee.
Here are Mr. Tallis's reasons, as you've no doubt observed:
According to the religions in which I was brought up (though not, of course to all religions), God unites in His Person a risibly odd combination of properties...and he continues.
In this paragraph, as you can see if you check, he essentially he argues that if God is involved in really big things, he can't figure out how He could be also involved in small ones. Not only that, but he doesn't like "finger wagging priests" (although Mr. Tallis himself has already dismissed the idea of religious hypocrites as a good reason for atheism: see earlier). Then he makes a rather indirect allusion to Judaism -- the idea of a God who slays many on behalf of others, or something...it's hard to interpret him there. And he ends with the claim " [this conception], is an ontological monstrosity – like a chimera uniting the front end of a whale with the back end of a microbe."
But the "monstrosity" is clearly one of Tallis's own making. For one thing, there is no obvious sense in which a God could not be interested in things both big and small. None to be upset with priests, if the Name in which they speak is not legitimately being invoked. No reason to object to "slaying" if the Being in question is the Creator, and most importantly, no moral grounds on which Dr. Tallis can even object, since by his Atheism, no objective moral standard exists either.
He continues,
"A quick glance at the metaphysical claims associated with the 100 or so religions on offer at the present time shows that they are in profound and often bitter conflict. But unless you have been indoctrinated from birth into a particular religion you are forced to make a seemingly random choice in the Shopping Mall of Theological Ideas. If in the spirit of humility you seek what they have in common, very little of substance remains..."
But surely there's a very obvious rejoinder to this. Firstly, the presence of many opinions is completely uninformative as to matters of truth. There have been many opinions about the size of the universe: that doesn't mean that there's no universe, or that the universe has no size.
But secondly, what's to stop one of the answers being right, and all the others being wrong? That's exactly what happens in maths: there are an infinite number of wrong answers to 2 + 2. That doesn't mean that 4 is among the wrong answers. In any matter of fact, the same applies: no number of bad or wrong answers entails the non-existence of a right one.
He persists:
... the highest common factor between Christianity, Paganism, Hinduism, Jainism and all the other theisms is pretty small, and what little remains is incoherent.
But what basis does he offer us for thinking there should be reconcilable answers? Why would we think the truth must surely be found in the zone of overlap between errors? For example, is it the fault of science that it does not contain sufficient alchemy, or that it fails to respect the findings of phrenology? Surely not: those are errant and pseudo-scientific, so should not be taken into our assessment of real science. Rather, they should be eliminated. So why should all the errant religions be subsumed into our assessment of whatever is true about religion?
And some are surely errant, since they make mutually-contradictory and mutually exclusive claims. The Law of Non-Contradiction gives us that...we need no bigotry or prejudgment to know it's got to be true. We don't even need to decide WHICH religion could be true in order to know it: we just have to know logic.
But Mr. Tallis concludes,
To be a sincere agnostic you would have to be able to entertain the notion of a God who is infinite but has specific characteristics; unbounded, but distinct in some sense from His creation; who is a Being that has not been brought into being...
Well, no, , actually. To be an agnostic, all one would have to do is admit "I don't know how this works out." That's easy enough. But why would we regard the above descriptors as anything more than superficially paradoxical? For example, why cannot an "infinite" being also have "specific" characteristics? For example, if Materialists hold that everything is made up of "matter" and energy, is that not also infinite in amount but specific in nature? Where's the problem?
...who is omniscient, omnipotent and good and yet so constrained as to be unable or unwilling to create a world without evil;...
This is the old "Problem of Evil," of course. And it's as old as the Book of Job. Admitting that it is a challenge for any of us to process, it has been ably addressed many times...but Mr. Tallis must not read those books, I guess. I would refer him to Plantinga or Lewis, if for no other reason than to see that Theists are both aware of the problem and yet don't think it's the show-stopper he imagines.
...who is intelligent and yet has little in common with intelligent beings as we understand them...
This doesn't even rise to the level of surprising. After all, if we posit an intelligent Creator, why would it be surprising if some of His creation were also endowed with a (lesser) intelligence? That would actually seem quite reasonable.
... this unthinkability of the deity. But agnosticism requires one to keep in play the notion of a square circle. Not, I would think, worth the effort
Here he just makes a category error: he compares an intrinsic contradiction "square circle" with a concept he simply finds personally difficult to understand. It's like he's faulting the Deity for being insufficiently small for a mere human mind...like blaming the Pacific Ocean for being too large to drink, then going on to claim it cannot possibly exist therefore.
The universe is inexpressible and immeasurable. Is that a reason for thinking it doesn't exist?
Well, that's it. That's what he's got in the article. The rest, the earlier portion, is just outlining some of the arguments he finds poor...and I would argue he's quite right about those he rejects. But I'm disappointed with his arguments against God and even against Agnosticism. They're not very strong, not very compelling, and pretty easily dispatched. It would be a shame if such superficial objections kept him thinking that thinking more deeply about the issue were, as he says, "not...worth the effort."
The upshot: you're right. He's not using evidence. And he's not even using particularly compelling reason. And I'm sorry to see that, because I quite like a lot of what he writes. Even this article is quite clear-thinking and fair on the rejection of bad Atheist arguments. I have to commend him for that. But he's not strong at the end; and as you say, brings no evidence to bear.
It's almost certainly true of anyone who says it.