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297 c h a p t e r 1 4 Closing the Case Seven Proofs and a Skeptical Conclusion 1. The Force of the Proofs: An Opening Worry In the previous five chapters I developed seven new arguments (or forms of argument) for atheism. My main aim in this final chapter of Part 3 is to show the role that can be played by my seven arguments in justifying at least skepticism about theism given various assumptions theists might make—and thus in justifying, for all theists, a position on this most popular form of religious belief that is in accord with my earlier findings concerning ultimism. But let us begin by seeing whether more than this might credibly be claimed for them, and, if so, how much more. After all, the job of those arguments, ostensibly, was to prove theism false and so to justify disbelief of theism. How do they fare when cast in that role? Not very well, many will say. Indeed, quite a tempting response at this stage will be that, given the larger argumentative context of this book, and particularly my capacity skepticism, according to which we may not yet be in a position to discern “basic truths concerning the existence or nature of the Ultimate,” any claim as to the provability of atheism I might make would be self-defeating: because of the nature of my arguments in Part 1 and Part 2, I am in no position to think of my arguments in Part 3 as successful proofs. Let us consider this worry more closely.1 1 A related worry can be dealt with more quickly. If the arguments I have offered are indeed successful as proofs, have I shown too much? That is, does the falsity of not just theism but also of ultimism follow? The answer is no. For the religious idea we are working with in the latter case is much more general and does not involve the specific personal notions and axiological concepts from familiar personal contexts of behavior and interaction that seem capable of generating disproofs in the narrower context. Now it might be thought that claims about evil in particular would be transferable to the more general context, 298 The Modes Illustrated and Vindicated Notice first that the availability of a proof of the sort in question would not entail that we had discovered a “basic truth about the existence and nature of the Ultimate.” This point was already made in my Prolegomena (p. 101), where I observed that to discern the absence of a being (here, a personal God) that, were it to exist, would instantiate an ultimate reality is not to discern the absence of such a reality, and thus to discover a basic truth about it, unless there is no other way for such a reality to be instantiated . For the critic to maintain her criticism in light of this point would require rather parochial thinking—the assumption that the class of candidates for ultimacy has but one member, namely, traditional theism. A related point is that in discussing traditional theism we are “closer to home,” dealing with notions that are far from incomprehensible. For the basic idea of a personal God, as traditionally understood, is derived from what we know of ourselves—and from human qualities that we do understand even at the present stage of our development. All my claims about how such a God could be revealed to us or would be empathetically disposed toward us are unaffected by the awareness that many other conceptions of the Divine remain to be explored. Further, some of my arguments make use of insights that draw on recent developments, for example in psychology and feminist thought, and so their claims need to be considered as contenders for the status of propositions quite “clear” in themselves but only now becoming clear to us. Let me develop the central issue here a little more deeply. My earlier arguments never claimed that in just any instance of reasoning, problems resulting from (say) the possibility of unrecognized counterarguments should be expected to intrude. It was acknowledged in Chapter 1 that there are commonly available grounds sufficient to justify belief, and that grounds supporting the necessity of a proposition and certain powerful kinds of inductive grounds are among them. (It was simply denied that grounds supporting the affirmation or the denial of ultimism are among them.) And in Part 2 we saw how the deliverances of...

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