Chapter 16 – Atheism and Real Action
Series 203: the key implication of real action
Another distinction between action and reaction: legal competency hearings; a man may be excused from criminal culpability if his behaviors can be explained as the equivalent of an unintentional sneeze (even if vastly more complex); mere automatic reaction to the environment is commonly used to explain away beliefs; few (if any) atheists would explain their atheism as being only and purely the result of automatic response to their environment; (extra example: I have heard atheists explaining away religious belief as being only or primarily the result of too large a God Module in the brain, but I have never heard an atheist explain his own rejection of religious belief as being only or primarily the result of too small a GM!–not while expecting anyone to take his atheism seriously); a presumed and commonly accepted distinction between action and reaction (whatever words we use to describe the distinction) is irreducibly and irreplaceably fundamental to the acceptability of a formal argument–including arguments about religious and/or philosophical truth; any attempt to propose further positions (either as hypotheses or conclusions) should be discarded if they contradict this position; but action entails addition to, instigation in, and freedom (in some fashion) from the web of reactive causation; atheism, as a chief branch of philosophy distinctive from “not-atheism”, either provides for this ability, or it does not; if it does not even in principle allow for this ability, it should be considered false and deducted from the option list; atheists themselves apply this same principle all the time, at a much later stage; if, for instance, a supernatural God does not exist, then no amount of clever historical argument or hypothesis-testing could ever possibly correctly conclude that Jesus of Nazareth was supernaturally resurrected by that God–any conclusion we reached that seemed to suggest otherwise, no matter how strong it might look, can and logically should be reliably dismissed as an error, even if the error has not yet been specifically detected; by the same token, and even more prior in argumentation, if atheism does not in principle allow for rational action, then it should be discounted as a possibility; apparent evidence to the contrary might be intuitively gauged by us as strong enough to warrant rechecking the original logical grounding, in order to ensure a mistake had not been made in the preparatory philosophical conclusion; but apparent evidence to the contrary would not be enough by itself to legitimately overthrow the prior deducted possibility-filter; atheism entails that the Independent Fact, upon which all other facts are based, does not act, does not initiate events, does not choose to do or not to do events; it may behave, but those behaviors are ultimately random and not intentionally guided in any way; if atheism is true, then the IF is utterly reactive as a system; but arguments to atheism require presuming the arguers can at least partially act; if atheism is true, reactions must be capable of producing actions; but if it is nonsensical for reactions to produce actions, then either none of us can actually act, or else the IF is itself capable of action; in the former case, all our arguments must be indefinitely mooted in a formal limbo (including any arguments in favor of atheism); atheism might still be true if none of us can act, but we would be in no position to cogently propose or defend it; the quality of all that category of behavior would be an illusion; but if the IF is capable of action, atheism must be false and some kind of not-atheism true; neither is agnosticism a rationally responsible option: it cannot be rationally defended if rational defenses are intrinsically impossible, and presuming rational defenses are possible (the Golden Presumption) points toward a truth or falsity of basic reality; the implications could be ignored (as a technically rational choice), but that would be acting to deny responsibility where responsibility is already acknowledged to exist; if the proposition ‘reactions produce actions’ is nonsense, then either atheism is false, or we might as well treat it as false because it can never, in any legitimate way, get going even as a live proposition (much less as a possibly cogently defended one); atheism could still be sheerly asserted; but a sheer assertion is not a reliable conclusion upon which to form a subsequent belief; two categories of defense may be attempted against this deduction.
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