What is he talking about?

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

Faced with the fundamental question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing. But the question presents a fundamental mystery that has bedeviled (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle to Aquinas. Recently scientists have tried to answer it with theories of "multiverses" and "vacuums filled with quantum potentialities," none of which strikes me as persuasive. (For a review of the centrality, and insolubility so far, of the something-from-nothing question, I recommend this podcast interview with Jim Holt, who is writing a book on the subject.)

-Ron Rosenbaum, "An Agnostic Manifesto,",
Slate, June 28, 2010

'Kaaaaaaaaaay....

I don't even know what he's talking about. No, wait: I do. It's just that what Rosenbaum is talking about is stupid. Profoundly stupid in that special profoundly stupid way an erudite person can be when he has no idea how stupid he's being.

Allow me to answer Mr. Rosenbaum's question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" the only way I know how:

I don't know, why the fuck not?

I am, as you know, an atheist. Have been for, I dunno, decades now. I am an atheist because I have no evidence satisfactory to myself that a deity exists and because I agree with Laplace and not Lagrange. I can think of no way in which postulating the existence of the divine as a solution to unanswered or unanswerable questions resolves more questions than it raises, and therefore I discard it, ptui!

But can I say there's no deity? No, of course not--no more than I can say a good many other things for which I have no evidence and no particular reason to believe don't exist. To that extent, you can describe my position as a form of agnosticism although I've sometimes bristled at the term for it's connotations of "undecided" or "uncommitted." To say that I don't know whether or not there's God is a logical position, not a position of uncertainty.

But what of Rosenbaum's oh-so-important question? Back to that--

He's being absurd. I don't know that there are many atheists, if any, who feel that science will answer all questions someday and indeed I suspect atheists are as likely as anybody else to get into epistemological debates. Indeed, Rosenbaum's accusation that atheists share a faith that science will eventually answer all questions fails to account for the fact that there is a branch of science that addresses precisely the issue of limitations on knowledge and specific instances in which what is knowable about objects is destroyed or in which what is knowable is inherently limited; to have faith that scientists will eventually know everything, in other words, would be a paradox since science has already identified situations in which things cannot be known.

And is the particular philosophical question Rosenbaum asks important as opposed to interesting? I think it's interesting to think of reasons there might be something other than nothing, but as a pragmatic matter we are, apparently, here and things do exist as opposed to not-exist or we wouldn't be having this conversation. But important?

As I think around this, it's obvious that the question is important insofar as if you could know the answer with some certainty, it might have implications for life, the universe and everything, but insofar as you probably can't know, it's merely an interesting question to get drunk over until somebody cracks wise about The Great Green Arkleseizure.

Let me put this another way: if you could prove that God created the universe, then it would mean there was a God and that could be very important if God continued to have anything to do with daily affairs. But since you can't prove God created the universe you're stuck with saying it would be nice to know why things exist but you still have to get up in the morning and go to work either way, unless nothing actually exists but then you'll probably be fired from your imaginary job when your imaginary boss gets angry that you pretended to sleep in.

And then there's this, and it's a good bit of why I agree with Laplace: supposing one suggests that God created the universe, who or what created God? It's a juvenile question, except that if you're arguing God's the Prime Mover, you're arguing that things can exist without creators and therefore it's hard to see what the divine hypothesis adds other than a mysterious extra moving part; and if you're not arguing that God is a Prime Mover, then who or what created God's creator, etc.? It's easier to suppose that the universe created itself or simply happened. Furthermore, one might point out that a God who created the universe and then absented Itself is probably less meaningful than a "deity" that came into existence on the first Tuesday after the universe auto-started but then behaved as a good parent, proffering moral instruction and preventing the occasional extinction--not that there's any evidence, in my view, of such a being, merely that a proactive non-Creator deity would at least be useful unlike whatever kind of creature Rosenbaum might be suggesting to explain why there's something and not nothing, if he's suggesting anything at all.

Rosenbaum says at one point:

In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" I can't wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.

I imagine he might regard "Why the fuck not?" as an evasion; if so, he'd be an asshole. I mean, seriously, trying to claim that this is the question that somehow dismantles disbelief in the existence of gods is really a dickhead move from a usually-thoughtful writer when you really get right down to it.

I can't move on without one more point about how asinine Rosenbaum's piece is. See, Rosenbaum goes on to present a list of problems he and Australian scientist John Wilkins have with the so-called "New Atheists," among them:

[Atheism] tries to co-opt Agnosticism as a form of "weak" Atheism. I think people have the right to self-identify as they choose, and I am neither an atheist nor a faith-booster, both charges having been made by atheists (sometimes the same atheists).

Of course, if you're going to write a three-page essay about atheism and agnosticism, it might help to familiarize yourself with the terms of the discussion. Referring to agnosticism as a form of "weak atheism" is not a matter of "co-opting" agnosticism, but rather a matter of trying to classify it and work it into an epistemological framework--an effort, actually, you might think someone like Rosenbaum would sympathize with if he wasn't trolling. (And what can I say here, except that obviously I've taken a bite of the chum he scooped over the side.)

Rosenbaum's cluelessness is perhaps summarized near the end of the piece when he writes:

Wilkins' suggestion is that there are really two claims agnosticism is concerned with is important: Whether God exists or not is one. Whether we can know the answer is another. Agnosticism is not for the simple-minded and is not as congenial as atheism and theism are.

The courage to admit we don't know and may never know what we don't know is more difficult than saying, sure, we know.

The "two claims" Rosenbaum cites aren't novel questions of epistemology that have just come up in reaction to the so-called "New Atheists" recent prominence; the question of whether God exists and the question of whether we can know is almost certainly as old as theology and in the context of agnosticism goes back at least as far as Thomas Huxley coining the word. I can't really begin to imagine why Rosenbaum wants to trot it out now as a profundity, unless he's perhaps attempting to use the cosmic as misdirection, hoping his reader is so unaware and clueless as to notice the paucity of ideas there, much less originality of the few to be found.