Does David Ramsay Steele’s Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy confirm aspects of the Square of Religious Opposition discussed in a previous post? [1] In this one I’ll defend an affirmative answer.
This square is an aid to thinking about worldviews according to the epistemic authority they presuppose (if not acknowledge) and what it governs, that is, their principles of transcendence and imminence, unity and diversity.
The Square of Religious Opposition
|
Christian |
Non-Christian |
|
| Transcendence:
1. Absoluteness 2. Control 3. Universals 4. Unity 5. Law |
Quadrant II: God’s Has Revealed Himself Concretely in His Word and Works (Christian “rationalism”)
|
Quadrant I: The Human Mind Can Know Everything—Reality Is Exhaustively Cognizable (Antitheistic rationalism)
|
| Immanence:
1. Relativity 2. Freedom 3. Particulars 4. Diversity 5. Randomness |
Quadrant III: God Is the Sovereign Creator (Christian “irrationalism” — which makes human reasoning possible) |
Quadrant IV: The Human Mind Is Limited—Nobody Can Know for Sure (Antitheistic irrationalism) |
Each of Steele’s many arguments calls for an apologetic response from a specialist.[2] The table of contents lists many topics and rhetorical tacks.[3] None of them holds up, however, if nothing is holding Steele up. And nothing does.
To show this, I’ve chosen one section of Steele’s book, “God Must Be Subject to Natural Law.” In those few lines he gives the game away, the game being the sport he believes he’s making of Christian theism. But first a few matters by way of background.
According to Steele, either one believes in the God of the Bible (hereafter “God”) or one doesn’t. He happens not to, and so he declares himself an atheist. Thinking no reason for believing is sound, he ends his book by speculating about sociological and psychological causes for the persistence of the allegedly groundless belief. Thus, “atheism explained.” I will not survey his survey.
It is, in any case, incomplete. Steele claims to have started his explanatory enterprise by eliminating “extreme positions”[4] before considering less radical ones. He never, however, deals with arguably the most extreme of them all, namely, that human knowledge of God is innate and requires no justification. The very condition of justification is in need of none. If there is a debate, it is over identifying that condition.
Human beings can unethically suppress that innate knowledge, however, and profess atheism, which is what Steele does. The biblical worldview holds that every human being capable of forming beliefs (a) knows that God exists and (b) is responsible for that knowledge (John 1:19, Romans 1:18). [5] His or her profession of atheism is irrelevant to this issue as is the profession of theism.
Steele writes from within an undeclared worldview, one that rules out the Bible’s in advance. That’s unfortunate, for it’s the only one that makes possible the critique and theoretical justification he’s engaged in. It’s the only one revealed by perfect intelligence (Psalm 147:5, אֵ֣ין מִסְפָּֽר׃, ayin mispar). In the same world cognitive norms comport with absolute moral values, numbers, logical laws, natural regularity, and interpersonal communication and many other otherwise incommensurable realities. They cohere in the Biblical worldview at the center of which is a sovereign creator-God. I can show that they cannot cohere in Steele’s.
The basic critical question is not, as many atheists hold, “How does invoking God explain anything?,” the way, say, the shifting of tectonic plates explains an earthquake. But God’s existence is not the explanans of an hypothesis about matters of contingent fact.
The basic critical question is, rather, something along these lines: “What must the world be like for there to be intersubjective communication and reasoning among intelligent (pattern-grasping) and rationally exigent (at least sometimes!) beings with reliable, but fallible, memories, with a grasp of numbers as well as beauty, for there to be mutual criticism according to shared rational norms?”
Steele shows no awareness of the worldview approach to his topic. The names of Cornelius Van Til and Greg L. Bahnsen[6] are missing from the index as are their works from the bibliography. The dialectically adroit and scholarly author of From Marx to Mises has no excuse for this omission.[7]
He takes for granted his own undeclared, undefended worldview and then trades on his readers’ tacit subscription thereto. He catalogues critiques of theistic belief without reflecting on what kind of world makes possible critique itself, the discernment of logical incompatibility, the weighing of evidence, intersubjective communication, in a world that harbors no surds.
The Van Tilian justification of belief in the God of the Bible lies in the acceptance of the worldview upon which rational belief-holding itself depends. To be clear, a worldview is not the cause of belief: I don’t believe in God because my metaphilosophy affirms the epistemological primacy of the Bible. God created me to believe in Him spontaneously, but a certain metaphilosophy has provided for me the rational grounds of justification (which, if I’m asked for one, I ought to have at the ready. 1 Peter 3:15).
* * * * *
The editorial director of Open Court Publishing Company since 1985, Steele was born in Edinburgh in 1944, raised in Birmingham, and graduated University of Hull with a degree in sociology. He’s a fellow of the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and one of Critical Review’s contributing editors.
According to Steele’s Wikipedia entry, in “1970, he became aware of the historical debate over economic calculation, and between 1970 and 1973 underwent an intellectual conversion from SPGB [Socialist Party of Great Britain] Marxism to libertarianism. He later co-founded the Libertarian Alliance and in 1982 would be identified with one of the two factions that resulted in the split of the group.”[8]
Steele and I are kindred spirits, at least politically. We had a friend in common, the late scholastic philosopher and Rothbardian James A. Sadowsky, S.J. (1923-2012). I was disappointed to see Jim’s blurb on the back cover of Atheism Explained. Granted, his was merely a comparative judgment: “. . . a much better defense of atheism than the recent works by [Richard] Dawkins and [Christopher] Hitchens,” the faint praise that damns, if there ever was such a thing. It reminded me, however, that Sadowsky never wrestled with the worldview approach to Christian apologetics during the three decades I knew him. That’s probably because I didn’t have a handle on it until after his passing in 2012 and couldn’t press the argument upon him. I regret that failure.
Sadowsky read ancestors of my critique of George Smith’s philosophy 
as expressed in Smith’s Atheism: The Case against God, which Sadowsky didn’t think worth refuting. I restricted my critique (published in 2019 as Atheism Analyzed: The Implosion of George Smith’s “Case against God) to pointing out inconsistencies in Smith, without further asserting that only the biblical worldview makes sense of critique, even of explanation itself. Yes, contradictions and inconsistencies violate our norms of thinking, but in what world does that matter? At the time I didn’t offer the answer I’m advancing on this blog.
* * * * *
The impression one gets from Atheism Explained is that the arguments for God’s existence are instances of not only false but shoddy advertising (commercial, political, or ecclesiastical), unworthy of assent. Steele’s posture (like virtually every other author in the atheist genre) is that of a wary shopper who blogs about stores to avoid.
How human beings are related to each other, however, and to God, and to the world is not a question for sociology, psychology, history, or any other empirical or logical enquiry. It’s a worldview question, and worldviews are subject to a different kind of evaluation than, say, an automobile, foreign policy, or house of worship. (See the links appended to this posts.)
One’s worldview is a network of nonnegotiable beliefs that permit—or forbid—one to entertain possibilities about God, humanity, and the world. Those beliefs comport with each other, or they do not. Making audible and then amplifying what is tacit in one’s operative worldview, however, making patent what is latent, is not like debating first-order objections to the implications of theistic belief—which is what Steele is mostly up to in Atheism Explained.
Mostly. In the section we’re going to examine, Steele commits an act of metaphysical theorizing that invites the questions we want to ask about his nonnegotiable beliefs.
“Theists,” Steele writes,
claim that God’s omnipotence means that he is prior to all natural laws. Law of nature are all determined by God, who could have chosen entirely different laws. . . . [T]here must be . . . fundamental laws, to which God is subject. (228)
And by “laws,” Steele doesn’t mean equations that generalize the conclusions of physicists, e.g., E = mc2. He means truths that transcend the fleeting empirical world.
Natural laws are fundamental aspects of reality, the way things are at the most general level. But God cannot exist in the first place unless realty is a certain way and not some other way. . . .
If the God of classical theism exists, then it must be the case that everything that God wills comes about. This statement, if true, is a natural law independent of God’s will. . . . God cannot make it true that everything he wills comes about. This is a pre-existing natural regularity to which God has to submit. And it’s an impersonal regularity.
To this he appends this note:
To say that this law is “a pre-existing natural regularity” is not to say that this regularity existed before God did. If God has always existed for infinite time, or if God exists outside time, it remains necessary that this law must exist if God is to exist. This natural regularity is logically prior to God’s existence (there could be no God without it) not necessarily prior to God’s existence in time (292 n. 82).
Returning to the main text, Steele concludes:
Therefore, there just is no escape from the view that impersonal law is fundamental to the universe, whether there’s a God or not” (228-229).
This expresses, if anything does, Steele’s absolute (Quadrant I), which transcends not only any state of the universe (or “metaverse”), but also any god that might exist, including the God of the Bible. The cosmos could be other than it is, God could be other than He is, but there is something impersonal in back of everything which cannot be other than it is.
Let’s call this transcendental “law” X. Steele doesn’t tell us much about X. He doesn’t say what his (or our) relationship to X is or, indeed, what X’s ontological status is or how it governs any particular person, place, or thing. He never tells the reader how he came to know X. (I presume he’s at least implying a knowledge claim that X exists or is real.)
Steele oddly dubs X—”a pre-existing natural regularity” that is “logically prior to God”—natural. I suppose that’s because he doesn’t “like” the term “supernatural” (247). I fail to see how X escapes that category. But if his dislike betrays his presupposition of naturalism, the belief that the universe observed by physicists is all that exists, then his labeling makes some sense. Physicists allegedly formulate “laws of nature” that allegedly “can never be broken” (59).
But then Steele reminds us of the probabilistic “laws” we’ve allegedly been epistemically bound to accept since the dawn of quantum theory, which imply that “all the most fundamental processes are not deterministic at all. They are subject to chance” (191).
But X cannot be subject to chance: we were told it’s an absolute condition of there being any nature with “laws” and “regularities.” What is subject to chance occupies Quadrant IV, Steele’s realm of immanence, particularity, freedom, the “irrational,” if you will, which frustrates the rationalist’s dream of exhaustive system:
Therefore [Steele concludes], there just is no escape from the view that impersonal law is fundamental to the universe, whether there’s a God or not” (228-229).
But . . .
The results of experiments have now convinced physicists that there is nothing “behind” the chance outcomes. Chance is fundamental. Randomness is an objective fact about the universe, and is not due to the limitations of our knowledge. Even many of the laws of nature we think we have discovered are nothing more than statistical generalizations of random behavior. Physics tells us that things are happening all the time without any cause.
Why, then, pay attention to it? Is it because it issues from the (undefended) “scientific method” in a world governed by both X and chance (an allegedly “objective fact” behind which there is, we are told, nothing, not even X)?
Steele does not dissent from this consensus, but neither can he reassure us that this “discovery” does not undermine confidence in the results of “experiments.”[9] (And why must we take the quantum level, rather than the world of perceptible bodies, as foundational?) Why we should epistemically sign off on “experimental” results in a universe that is, at bottom, the result of chance and randomness is a question Steele neither asks nor answers. He is curiously incurious about it.
Applying this to the issue of moral responsibility, Steele sees
all processes, physical and mental, as probabilistic, not deterministic. . . . 1. Human actions are the outcome of human choices, and 2. The choice made is not the inevitable result of earlier states of affairs. Perhaps something more is needed for free will, but if so, I’m not sure what.
The other shoe drops into Quadrant IV: both impersonal supernatural law and chance govern the metaverse! Can we make morally responsible decisions in Steele’s world or not? Steele throws up his hands. No one can know for sure, Steele says, but he’s sure Christian theists are wrong!
* * * * *
“Vast evil shows there’s no God,” is the title of one of Steele’s chapters. But how can Steele even frame a problem of evil without borrowing from the biblical worldview he rejects? For whence the absolute good that something must offend so that something might qualify, not as merely distasteful, but evil? According to that worldview, God has a morally sufficient reason for creating a world in which He knew his creatures would rebel against, thereby creating evil, but is under no obligation to divulge that reason to Steele or anyone else. Our experience of evil may provoke a psychological objection to the existence of God, perhaps a claim of felt implausibility, but not a logical objection.
I leave Steele’s other arguments to the specialists in apologetics, e.g., the McDowells’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict.[10] That is, if Steele has a question about the authorship or interpretation of a book of the Bible, let him take it up with a Christian apologist who specializes in biblical texts like Michael Kruger.[11] Does he, like Dawkins, think Darwin tipped the evidentiary scales in favor of atheism? If so, then his argument is with writers like Michael Denton, Stephen Meyer, and Michael Behe.[12]
Steele seems to prefer to throw everything against the wall to see what sticks.
Whatever the problems with George Smith’s Atheism, at least he put his metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical cards on the table. They are essentially Randian Objectivist cards. By contrast, Atheism Explained never shows the reader, at least not directly, what its author’s philosophy is, his theories of existence, knowledge, and goodness, and show us they cohere. Had he done so, we could see whether they’re more capable of challenging the biblical worldview than Smith’s was.
But this would still evade the issue of the kind of world necessary for explanation itself. The author of Atheism Explained leaves it a mystery.
Notes
[1] David Ramsay Steele, Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, 2008. In this essay, numbers in parentheses refer to this book’s pages.
[2] For example, if God cannot determine every decimal place of pi, then God cannot know everything (91-93). If one can show that God can, however, or perhaps that the charge that He cannot is poorly formed, Steele won’t become a theist, but simply move on any of his hundred or so other charges. And so on. Life is short.
[3] One Kind of God—and a Few Alternatives; Religion Can Do Without God; Paley’s Challenge to Atheism and Darwin’s Answer; The Objections to Darwinism; Did Someone Set the Dial?; Does God Explain Why Anything Exists?; Can We Prove God Exists by Pure Logic?; Do We Get Our Morals from God?; Can We Know God Directly?; Faith Doesn’t Have a Prayer; The Holy Bible Isn’t Wholly Reliable?; Did God Compose the Quran?; How to Prove a Negative; Vast Evil Shows There Is No God; Can Human Free Will Explain Why God Allows Vast Evil?; Can God Be a Person?; What God Can’t Do and What God Can’t Know; Is There a Spirit World?; Atheism Is Irresistible; Disillusioned and Happy.
[4] “My general procedure is to begin with extreme positions, then move on to more moderate positions, unless these have already incidentally been refuted in in considering the extreme positions” (xii).
[5] “Every newborn baby is an atheist. An atheist is a person without any belief in God,” are the first two sentences of Chapter 1 (3). We charitably presume Steele meant “a person mature enough to form beliefs but doesn’t believe in God,” so that his definition doesn’t inadvertently cover third-term fetuses.
[6] The Great Debate: Does God Exist? Dr. Greg Bahnsen versus Dr. Gordon Stein, University of California, Irvine, February 11, 1985; here’s the transcript. This demonstration of the Van Tilian insight would be a good place for Steele to remedy his neglect. Search <Bahnsen> and <Van Til> on this site for pertinent posts.
[7] David Ramsay Steele, From Marx to Mises: Post Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation, Open Court, 1999. This is the best book on Ludwig von Mises’s argument from the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism to the latter’s unrealizability.
[8] “David Ramsay Steele,” Wikipedia, , accessed July 2, 2021. Steele’s faction included the late Chris Tame (1949-2006) and Sean Gabb, a correspondent of mine. In 2009 the LA published “Is Anarchy a Cause of War? Some Questions for David Ray Griffin,” whose text has been republished as Appendix D of my Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic, 2019.
[9] For reasons to question Received Opinion about quantum theory, see the writings of mathematician, physicist, and Thomist philosopher of science Wolfgang Smith (b. 1930), Physics and Vertical Causation: The End of Quantum Reality, Angelico Press, 2019, and The Vertical Ascent: From Particles to the Tripartite Cosmos and Beyond, Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation, 2021.
[10] See my previous post, “Evidence That Demands a Worldview,” January 16, 2019.
[11] See Michael J. Kruger [with Andreas Köstenberger], The Heresy of Orthodoxy, Crossway, 2010; Canon Revisited, Crossway, 2012; and The Question of Canon, IVP Academic, 2013.
[12] See Michael Denton, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, Discovery Institute, 2016, and The Miracle of the Cell, Discovery Institute Press, 2020; Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, HarperOne, 2013, and The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, HarperOne, 2021; and Michael Behe, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution, HarperOne, 2019, and A Mousetrap for Darwin: Michael J. Behe Answers His Critics, Discovery Institute Press, 2020.
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