McCloskey's Atheism Essay: Objections and Counter-Arguments

Introduction

In his essay "On Being an Atheist," H.J. McCloskey offers a multi-layered criticism of belief in God and, more specifically, of Christian beliefs regarding God's nature. McCloskey addresses several frequently cited, complementary yet distinct philosophical arguments that Christian believers have advanced over the centuries. This paper will first discuss McCloskey's arguments and evidence and then present potential objections to each.

Arguing for God from Proof: The Ontological Argument

McCloskey first argues that an objective, ontological "proof" of the divine is impossible. One cannot rationally prove the existence of God the way one can prove that 2+2 equals four. Because the existence of God cannot be proved, it also cannot be disproved — a consequence of the positivist assumptions underlying the scientific method, which holds that if something cannot be conclusively falsified by scientific methodology, it also cannot be proven true. McCloskey even concedes that no believer actually comes to believe in God based upon such proofs.¹ Elaborate philosophical arguments may be constructed to justify belief after the fact, but the emotive need for God comes first; proofs are developed later as religious philosophy. Rationalization that follows unsubstantiated belief is not scientific.

However, it could be argued that McCloskey, to some extent, answers his own objection: he is applying a scientific standard of truth — one applicable to the human, material, finite world — to the divine. The fact that some people have mistakenly applied a standard of scientific proof, created by limited human consciousness, to God is not itself an argument against God's existence; it is merely a poor application of human logic to divine reality. The fact that we cannot prove in a scientific fashion that God does not exist does not mean that he is not real. This is analogous to claiming that God does not exist because he does not perform miracles on a daily basis: we may wish he would, but his failure to do so does not establish his non-existence.

The Cosmological Argument

Regarding the argument that there must be a God as creator of the universe, McCloskey raises the familiar question: "Who then created God?" In such conceptualizations, God is the first mover — the creator whose power influences the whole of existence for the rest of eternity.² Yet McCloskey argues that the first cause cannot be explained by appealing to a necessary, self-existing being. Because there is, in his view, no single first cause of the universe, there can be no single omnipotent divine being who originated all things and continues to govern creation.

However, God is not necessarily conceptualized as a "contingent" being; rather, God is something that has always existed.³ Furthermore, God's existence as the cause of the world does not itself require a finite beginning and end. The opening of the Bible describes the creation of what we call the world, not the creation of God. On the ultimate, divine level of existence, not everything necessarily requires a prior cause. Once again, McCloskey appears to superimpose a human understanding of causation onto a divine reality that is infinite and not necessarily bound by causal determinants.

Conclusion

However, this claim appears to be the most dubious of all McCloskey's arguments against God. Even on a subjective level, people find comfort in very different things. During times of great stress, many people become more rather than less religious, and a number of great liberation movements have been explicitly religious in character — abolitionism in the nineteenth century being a notable example. While McCloskey asserts that he personally finds atheism comforting when confronting suffering — because no divine being exists to be held responsible for it — this comfort in meaninglessness is clearly not shared by all. William Lane Craig, as argued in his essay "The Absurdity of Life Without God," finds the idea of an arbitrary and insignificant existence far more horrifying than the existence of evil within a God-created world.

McCloskey is hardly the first individual to grapple with the challenge of finding comfort in a world that contains despair. The Book of Job most directly addresses this issue, portraying Job wrestling with the loss of his good fortune. Job's resolution is not to accept his misfortunes as punishment — which he explicitly denies — nor to curse God as his false friends urge, but rather to accept his suffering as an inevitable manifestation of God's unquestioned power, a power that human beings cannot challenge or fully comprehend. The debate over theism may highlight the current, finite limits of human knowledge regarding what constitutes a possible world or a logically possible free being with a soul; but this does not "answer" the problem of God, given that God, by definition, exists outside the boundaries of our capacity to understand the ultimate logic of creation.