In which I offer a refutation of Russell’s teapot argument as an expression of weak atheism and proffer in its place the one true Strong Atheism.

This is a direct response to Russell’s original essay which can be found here. It has informed a century of British atheists leading all the way to the naive materialism of Dawkins et al. The central point of this article is to criticise the implicit philosophical assumptions of the essay and to establish a more solid atheism in which God is not merely negligibly unlikely but actually necessarily absent from a consistent framework of thought, sensory data, and that on which sensory data is contingent (the ‘real’).

Can we forgive the absolute pacifist who rejected the virtue of fighting the Second World War? Perhaps we can view his stance as logically coherent and a sad loss given its replacement by the vulgar pragmatic ‘game theory’ of Von Neumann and the fools who gave us MAD.

You have to give a man a certain credit for the sheer audacity of writing a book on the History of Western Philosophy. I particularly like the self perceived modesty of including the word ‘Western’. Of course, I only mean to put forward the final conclusive remarks on 5000 years of half the world’s thinkers, I wouldn’t dare be so arrogant as to take the whole of world thought as my subject. I am but a modest chicken. But I don’t wish to dwell on amusing biographical details.

The key aspect of Russell’s thought is that he is a British empiricist. A realist like Stephen Hawking with his contradictory statement that ‘philosophy is dead’. Of course, the true irony of Hawking is that his books are purchased almost entirely by people looking for metaphysics not physics. I remember as a child seeing an A level maths book and finding the indecipherable page of symbols to have an exotic religious appeal. That is what people seek in his bland writing and that is what he rejects within the writing. Thankfully, it is far enough in that most people can happily give up and sleep soundly in the knowledge that someone has figured it all out and that it can be expressed in a single equation. There lies the key fault in the teapot argument. By ignoring the sensible aspect of any metaphysical inquiry Russell imagines that we may simply drag God kicking and screaming in to the physical realm and straightforwardly disprove his existence there. If one cannot accept the existence of any object that is not material, it is straightforward to prove that a necessarily immaterial object cannot exist.

Leaving aside the burden of proof question (on what logical grounds should the nonexistence of the teapot be assumed a priori?) the argument falls down because for the argument by analogy to be valid, the objects in the analogy must be of a similar type. If the reader can accept that god is a similar concept to a teapot are they not already convinced? A key facet of God is that all phenomena are smaller than it. By drawing a comparison with some minor subsection of phenomena you have created a false conception of God which is not a useful construct. Perhaps it might even be easier to believe in a teapot orbiting a planet than one consciousness which created everything that could be considered a part of All. Fundamentally, a teapot, is a sensible concept which everyone can accept. That a teapot has position means that a teapot orbiting a planet is a sensible concept. It is easy to imagine an observation verifying it. Therefore I want to first establish the limits imposed on what conceptions of God would be sensible and what would not be. Then to ask how the sensible definitions might be argued to be either necessary, unnecessary or impossible. Where a sensible definition is one which is not contradictory. Contradictory being a subspace of impossible.

God as necessarily existent

Kant is widely regarded as one of the dullest writers in all philosophy. The boredom associated with ploughing through a hundred six syllable words per sentence is close to that required when humouring children. Nevertheless, even he finds it impossible not to mock the ontological proof: ‘One may as well assume a market trader to have made a profit simply by the fact of writing so in his accounts’. Zing.

The only necessarily existent objects are tautologies. If God is a tautological concept it carries no meaning. Therefore any sensible conception of God can not be necessarily existent.

God as a possible finite object within reality

This is the classic atheist conception of god because it is so easily dismissed. If God were some being who somehow created the universe and resides within the universe but hidden one has a very small enemy to attack. This God can see your thoughts and influence the world due to infinite power but is fundamentally limited by existing within the world. That is this god evolves in time and is not outside time, which leads to the classic paradox ‘how can god both know the future and have the power to change his mind about what will be future events’. This conception of God is the only one successfully attacked by the teapot argument. What is so silly about this argument is that all physical theories treat time as a dimension which may be viewed in its entirety. In all modern physical theories time is treated with a god’s eye view. Therefore to allow ourselves to occupy the position of objective viewer outside time but reject the notion of one viewer of all space and time is simply hubris. Only the naive materialist can think this way.

God as a possible object outside all phenomena but capable of interacting with phenomena.

This conception of God is straightforward within a purely deterministic framework. However again one is then forced to refute God’s full power since full power must encompass the ability to change events. In a full conception of God outside time, as looking at all experience, why then would we accept its ability to change the future but not the past?

God as a fundamentally unknowable and therefore useless concept

Another typical materialist atheist conception is that any unobservable is something Wittgenstein would say ‘we must pass over in silence’. This is probably a misreading of Wittgenstein. Clearly in the Tractatus he is frequently talking about things other than sensory data, namely logical structures of a pure language.

God as necessarily absent

Is this section I will adopt the traditional male conception of God for the reason that I claim the standard ontological framework is based on the male subject and object and the female as object. That is how I move to my claim that in renouncing the conception of any human as purely subject or purely object one must reject all notions of fundamental subject, which is the very essence of God. God is the pure subject with zero object qualities. He can not be acted on only act. One might state the basic traditional hierarchy as: God is the pure object, male is the authentic part object, part subject and the female is the pure object. This is worldview I espouse in my atheist Christianity. Jesus’ femininity is his object form. The thought experiment of Jesus as the manifested object form of God raises the ultimate contradiction in the climax of the absence of a response to ‘Why have you forsaken me?’. Jesus is the theoretical authentic animal who has passed from the false knowledge of his own subjectivity.

Does an equilateral triangle exist?

If we take a strict Euclidean definition of an equilateral triangle, then within real Euclidean space, no such triangle can exist because one can inspect the three points to a finer degree of accuracy until it is revealed unequilateral. Could God be of a similar form? A sensible concept but that can never exist in reality. One may see God as a perfection to be approached but never reached like a converging infinite sum.

Hawking and the multiverse

Stephen Hawking is a long time exponent of the multiverse conception of reality. I bring this up because in recognising it as sensible concept one must reject outright the author’s materialism. If no information about the other multiverses can ever be known then how are they useful concepts. They fail Popper’s definition of science and fall in the realm of pure metaphysical speculation, of what Hawking himself might dismiss as philosophy. His weak atheism is contradictory in that it takes as granted a God’s eye view of reality on which our universe in one part. I have my own views on the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. I am working on my own interpretation which I aim to publish shortly but for now, I will just say that the it is my view that the inherent contradictions in modern physics must be overcome by a revolution in our conception of reality. In short, I believe that the problems at the heart of physics are philosophical problems and not mere absence of observation.

Transcending Bayesian probability into a state of total unbelief from total belief

Taking a Bayesian treatment, we are forced to choose a ‘prior probability’. That is, in trying to treat God as a possible entity which we don’t know exists, we are forced to first adopt a belief about how likely it is that God exists (0, 1 or in between). This only leads in one direction, namely to Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith. I take this to be assuming knowledge that God exists prior to sensory experience. Of course, if one does this then no sensory data can reject the knowledge of God’s existence. the exact same is true of adopting an a priori unbelief. If we take the liklihood as something like 50% (straightforwardly absurd like any other fraction) one needs to make yet more assumptions about the likelihood of all actual phenomena both given God and no God (unknowable). The only concrete thing one can say here is that we can only see God directly if God exists, and even that is problematic if we accept the possibility of sensory fallibility (the one true definite).

The ludicrous conclusion of choice

To summarise, my central argument is that the issue of god is intimately related to the materialism/idealism debate and one must take a different approach within both realms. I argue for an idealist approach to building a coherent atheism based on the impossibility of the pure subject or pure object. Jesus Christ represents the first discussion of the contradictions associated with an all powerful God interacting with the human world, one that ultimately concludes with God himself rejecting his own existence (as a glib aside I’m going to claim this the key difference between Catholics and Protestants, that Catholics accept the absurdity of Christ give themselves total freedom and Protestants consider him an ideal to be achieved through mimicry). Any supernatural power must lose all power in entering the natural. We are left with an idealist atheistic worldview which denies any supernatural power because in interacting with the ontology that God must first destroy the ontology. The true test of this argument would be to consider the implications within the Simulation Hypothesis (we are almost certain living in a simulation in future computers (genuinely serious)) of the author’s of the simulation entering the simulation after the start and interacting with the simulation. Since the simulation progresses from the initial conditions in a predetermined way, the full history of the simulation is encapsulated in the initial conditions and is only conducted in order to reveal itself to the author. This permits a full representation of reality as encoding in the initial conditions if and only if evolution is deterministic. We can therefore say, either we are free or there is pure subject perspective on all history. You should now be aware of the deep logical connections between the central philosophical arguments of materialism vs idealism, free will vs no free will, god vs no god, female vs male as sensible grammatical distinctions etc. I fear on all counts we are left with the unsettling conclusions one way is necessarily true and yet one can only hold a consistent worldview by adopting the belief in the opposite.

I at once want to ask you take this deeply seriously and to treat it like an especially boring and unfunny piece of comic nonsense,

In which I offer some physical insights into the difference between a physicalist and an idealist metaphysical approach.

One of the most striking aspects of Kant’s Critique to the student of physical sciences is a seeming pre-empting of Einstein’s relativity and other twentieth century advances in theory. In particular I refer to the central thesis that our conceptions of time and space preempt and facilitate experience. It is almost certainly true that Einstein was totally unaware of Kant’s work, but nevertheless his advances might seem to rest upon the key idea that 4 dimensional space-time is a framework with which to interpret sensory data and not built upon sensory data from purely logical principles. Otherwise how could he become convinced of un-common-sense new representations.

Consider the following system: A three dimensional Euclidean space-time in which a two dimensional space develops in time. Point particles evolve continuously over time. In any instant velocities are never infinity. Now let us give each particle an ‘internal coordinate’. Each particle can be defined by two spatial coordinates and a further physical property x. The question I am going to ask here is ‘how do physical theories in this universe differ if x is some physical quantity such as mass compared to if it is a third spatial dimension?’. Regardless of whether or not the latter would essentially be a coordinate transformation leading to a mathematically more complicated set of governing equations (dependent on the forces operating in the universe) this must be accepted as a possible representation. For instance consider a classical gravitation simulation with two bodies. One can consider the two bodies as having 4 coordinates which vary in time (3 spacial and one mass). Obviously mass is fundamentally different from the three spacial coordinates (it is constant for a given body/it plays a very different algebraic role in the governing equations). My claim here is that although the current representation of three spacial dimensions is the simplest in terms of the algebraic size of the governing equations, it is not a unique representation.

If you accept the proposed scheme laid out in the previous paragraph, then will you accept it leads to the following broader statement:

“The common sense descriptions of reality built originally upon forces acting on particles in four dimensional space-time is one of a set of greater than one representations.”

And finally if you would accept the arguments laid forth here, could you accept the following possibility:

The common sense representation of the world which precedes and makes possible experience built on sensory data is determined by the evolutionary principle that the models used to represent the world in consciousness are those models which require the smallest brains (in terms of energy expended in production).

If one can accept that that final un-empirical statement (I know of no experimental evidence for it) is a logical possibility then one has moved some way to a rejection of physicalism.

Little weblogvid’ about goin’ out to see my mate Chris Lighthouse.

Regards,

In which I introduce a new theory of comic modes that I call the tendentious imperative.

Video 1. Experiments in Contemporary Comic Modes.

Figure 1. The tendentious imperative (a pornographic image in ink).

Song 1. Bonus Song.

All love,

There is an old story in Hollywood that a young Martin Scorsese (not THE) approached the camera with two feet in the air and with a wry smile added ‘so maybe I DID work upside down’ deliriously. At which point everyone laughed and the rest, as my old film professor used to joke languidly, was Raging De Nero. That may or mayn’t be how it went down but his latest offering (sacrificial) shows he’s still got an infatuation with the rich and fetishism.

The opening shot of his most present proximate offering gives a heavy Leonardo eat a giant watermelon erotically and morph into a wolf. Gee wizz Martin, we didn’t see that one coming. I decided to meet the ‘italian film maker’ in a little (1 cubic metre) upstate New York coffee shack. I’ve brought him a souvenir from St Martin’s college as an ironicalitude. He sniggers and urinates champagne from his erect bottle into my moist flute. The ironicalized eroticism is not lost on the Academy Award Winner James Cameron whose film Titanic set sail in 1997 implicitly. Unfortunately, I suspect this moving picture with coincident sound WON’T unsink when it hits the icebergman from AlcatraZ wryly.

The rather large press theatre (4 parsecs) shook at the laughter when Leo the Wolf spoke of crime, drug use and prostitution dryly an eyely in the housewifi. Sorry Martin, this reviewer suspects Vertigo, Citizen Kane etc WILLn’t bee given a run for true money. And Psycho anyone?

20% one star etc. No quality is normally distributed etc etc. Cumulative with standard deviations. Democracy! Popular opinion. A man I’ll never meet. A film I’ll never saw.

Safe emotional journeys,

I decided to upload my 2011 Edinburgh show Philosophical Investigations. Weirdly, it is some audio recordings I made in my bedsit with photos taken during the live show.

My deepest sympathy,