The hidden premise

Alvin Plantinga

In previous posts in this blog I have mentioned that atheists sometimes try to justify their beliefs by using hidden premises in their reasoning, the most important of which is this:

God does not exist

At the end of their line of thought, they usually conclude that God does not exist, or some equivalent statement. As the starting premise is hidden, they probably don’t notice that they have incurred in circularity, one of the best-known fallacies since ancient times, which tries to prove the truth of a statement, by assuming from the beginning that the same statement is true.

In the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx writes this:

This state, this society, produce religion, a perverted world’s consciousness, because they are a perverted world… Religion… is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. [Marx’s emphasis]

In his book Warranted Christian Belief, Alvin Plantinga summarizes thus Marx’s position:

Marx suggests that religion arises from perverted world consciousness—perverted from a correct, or right, or natural condition. Religion involves a cognitive dysfunction, a disorder or perversion that is apparently brought about, somehow, by an unhealthy and perverted social order. Religious belief, according to Marx, is a result of cognitive dysfunction, of a lack of mental and emotional health. The believer is therefore in an etymological sense insane. Because of a dysfunctional, perverse social environment, the believer’s cognitive equipment isn’t working properly. If his cognitive equipment were working properly… [h]e would instead face the world and our place in it with the clear-eyed apprehension that we are alone, and that any comfort and help we get will have to be of our own devising.

Plantinga makes explicit Marx’s hidden premise (God does not exist), when he points out that this is the reason why Marx affirms that we ought to understand that we are alone.

In The Future of an illusion, Sigmund Freud writes this:

[Religious beliefs] are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies on the strength of those wishes… Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual mis-demeanour.

In the same book, Plantinga summarizes thus Freud’s ideas about religion:

Freud doesn’t necessarily think religious belief is produced by cognitive faculties that are malfunctioning. Religious belief—specifically belief in God—is, indeed, produced by wish-fulfillment; it is the product of illusion; still, illusion and wish-fulfillment have their functions. In this case, their function is to enable us to get along in this cold and heartless world into which we find ourselves thrown. How then is this a criticism of religious belief? Freud speaks elsewhere of a “reality principle.” Beliefs produced by wish-fulfillment aren’t oriented toward reality; their function is not to produce true belief, but belief with some other property (psychological comfort, for example) …

We see here again the same hidden premise, when Freud points out that the function of religion is not to produce true beliefs, subtly and fallaciously suggesting that they must be false.

The difference between Marx and Freud, according to Plantinga, is that Marx thinks that religious faith comes from dysfunctional cognitive processes, while Freud believes that they are normal, but that their objective is not the search for truth, but wish fulfillment. In both cases, they are trying to find naturalistic explanations for religious beliefs. But of course, even if such naturalistic explanations were found, that would not say anything about the truth or falsity of the beliefs. In Plantinga's words:

To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing… to discredit it… Suppose it could be demonstrated that a certain kind of complex neural stimulation could produce theistic belief. This would have no tendency to discredit religious belief—just as memory is not discredited by the fact that one can produce memory beliefs by stimulating the right part of the brain. Clearly, it is possible both that there is an explanation in terms of natural processes of religious belief (perhaps a brain physiological account of what happens when someone holds religious beliefs), and that these beliefs have a perfectly respectable epistemic status. (In other words, that they are true).

G.K. Chesterton

Since it is impossible for human reason to prove that God does not exist, resorting to the hidden premise is a subtle and tricky way of trying to do it. I have said above that I think many atheists do this without noticing, but they should be more careful not to fall so often into classical fallacies, because the simple introduction of the opposite premise (God exists) totally invalidates their reasoning. Here we can quote Chesterton:

The modern world is full with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they don't even know that they are dogmas. (Heretics, ch. 20, 1905)

It would be better if both sides made their starting premises explicit and accept that we don’t agree, without wasting time in unnecessary and useless discussions.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca