MrWonderful wrote:
In his book Illogical Atheism, former militant atheist, Bo Jinn incisively lays down the failure of atheism to provide a grounding for reason:
“Scientific facts cannot justify reason. It is reason [that] justifies science. But, then, what justifies reason? The reliability of reason, just as the existence of morality and beauty is simply taken for granted by the atheist on purely pragmatic grounds. There is no sufficient ontic referent for their actual existence. Truth/value judgments can be supported by empirical facts, but at the very last instance they will always require a judgment from a personal agent. And unless that judgment is made on the basis of an objective standard of truth, then the judgment is therefore meaningless.”
“…As we speak, there are atheists the world over insisting that atheism is a conclusion which intelligent people come to on the basis of reason. But, if atheism is true, then human reasoning has no validity at all, because valid reasoning implies a standard of truth that can be reasoned toward and a sufficient reason for believing that human reasoning works in the first place.”
“…Theism reasons to and from an objective standard of ultimate truth grounded in an absolute mind (God) which gives validity to rational beliefs, and atheism reasons to and from a completely subjective standard that cannot give validity to any belief (ourselves). We cannot reason to the conclusion that our reasoning is valid, since it is as circular as the proposition B → B”
[In answer to the eternal snark by atheists, "Which God," the God of Christianity, the largest organized group on earth, the God of the Holy Bible, the best selling, most read book ever published, the Nature's God, referenced in America's Declaration of Independence, the God to which George Washington and our Founding Fathers prayed. "God bless this Honorable Court." - The opening prayer for every session of the Supreme Court. That God.]
A hundred years ago, all the so called proofs for a deity were refuted. Academic theologians had to start saying things like "Leap of Faith".
You author is an idiot, sorry. The burden is always on the assertion; and the assertion under question is the existence of deities. And Santa...
There is neither argument nor evidence for the existence of deities.
You mentioned pragmatism. My thinking is analogous to the school known as Contemporary American Pragmatism.
Anyway, scientists say morality is rooted in our biology. That's one of the recurring themes in life, science replacing myth with fact.
Your pal said "The reliability of reason, just as the existence of morality and beauty is simply taken for granted by the atheist on purely pragmatic grounds." It's not purely pragmatic grounds, biology, custom and culture combine to do most of the work. Part of that culture is the work on law and ethics that people have been doing for centuries. There is really quite a lot of it.
Your pal also said "Theism reasons to and from an objective standard of ultimate truth". There is no ultimate truth. He assumes his conclusion, and not just in that spot.
"Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area... The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy” – a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm