This is why I claim that atheism is an established scientific result. One of the strongest lines of evidence is, indeed, that we have successfully reduced minds and shown the notion of an irreducible mind to be incoherent. Mind as an irreducible simple is basic to all monotheistic religions. Demonstrating something once thought coherent to be incoherent is, of course, one of the strongest lines of evidence in science. Other avenues through which atheism has been established by science include conservation in physics, chemistry and biology (which led directly to materialism), evolution, and the development of plausible sociological accounts of religion. I would argue that atheism is as well established as Plate Tectonics and Natural Selection. What I think is telling is that most contemporary approaches to religious apologetics implicitly recognize that science has established atheism.
The theist has three avenues of response. The first is to attack specific parts of science. This is what Fundamentalist Christians do. The second, by far the most popular, is to attack the very possibility of scientific knowledge. This is what nearly all “liberal” religious believers who claim there is no conflict between science and religion do. They generally adopt a skeptical epistemology, holding that no knowledge claim can be true, or instrumentalism about science, holding that scientific claims are nonfactual, or a quasi-Kantian constructivist metaphysics wherein “true” reality is forever out of reach. The weird thing is that this position, which essentially rejects all of science, is considered more “sophisticated” and acceptable than the Fundamentalist position which rejects only select parts of science but remains realist about the rest. The third approach is to adopt some sort of nonfactualism about religious claims; essentially to hold that your religious practice is merely tradition. I think this nearly exhausts contemporary positions on religious apologetics and is therefore evidence that people implicitly accept that science has established atheism.
This is why I claim that atheism is an established scientific result. One of the strongest lines of evidence is, indeed, that we have successfully reduced minds and shown the notion of an irreducible mind to be incoherent. Mind as an irreducible simple is basic to all monotheistic religions. Demonstrating something once thought coherent to be incoherent is, of course, one of the strongest lines of evidence in science. Other avenues through which atheism has been established by science include conservation in physics, chemistry and biology (which led directly to materialism), evolution, and the development of plausible sociological accounts of religion. I would argue that atheism is as well established as Plate Tectonics and Natural Selection. What I think is telling is that most contemporary approaches to religious apologetics implicitly recognize that science has established atheism.
The theist has three avenues of response. The first is to attack specific parts of science. This is what Fundamentalist Christians do. The second, by far the most popular, is to attack the very possibility of scientific knowledge. This is what nearly all “liberal” religious believers who claim there is no conflict between science and religion do. They generally adopt a skeptical epistemology, holding that no knowledge claim can be true, or instrumentalism about science, holding that scientific claims are nonfactual, or a quasi-Kantian constructivist metaphysics wherein “true” reality is forever out of reach. The weird thing is that this position, which essentially rejects all of science, is considered more “sophisticated” and acceptable than the Fundamentalist position which rejects only select parts of science but remains realist about the rest. The third approach is to adopt some sort of nonfactualism about religious claims; essentially to hold that your religious practice is merely tradition. I think this nearly exhausts contemporary positions on religious apologetics and is therefore evidence that people implicitly accept that science has established atheism.
If we have succefully reduced minds, that only shows that the claim that minds are irreducible is false, not that it is incoherent,