Expert: Austin Cline - 3/4/2007

Question
Hi,

Liked your article on existentialism at about.com. I have two questions:

1. David Quinn, in a debate with Richard Dawkins, states that    "You must have an uncaused cause for anything to exist at all".

Is this a principle known to/agreed upon by existential philosophers?

2. Dawkins agrees that neither scientists nor theologists have the answers to the origins of matter. He suggests that Quinn has no right to make the assumption that God must have created matter just because science can't explain it at the moment.

However science seems to be interested in investigating "How" matter came into being but not "Why" it did so.

Atheists do not seem to provide any answers. Instead they try to proove that God does not exist by pointing out the incoherence of the attributes ascribed to God by theologians.

Atheists seem to be missing a point. By proving theists are wrong they don't necessarily prove that they are right God may still exist but with different attribtues to thosse described by religions.

Question: Can you direct me to any author that addresses the question of why things exist from an atheist point of view?

Answer
1. No, I don't believe that this is agreed to by all existentialist philosophers - though it might be. It's not a scientific principle, at any rate.

2. Scientifically, "how" is "why." The two only diverge when we get to people with motivations. Explaining how a tornado destroyed a house is the same as explaining why the house is a wreck now; explaining how a person was murdered is not the same as explaining why the murderer killed. Thus, separating the two already presumes the presence of God and is thus invalid.

Atheism is simply the absence of belief in gods and not a philosophy designed to provide "answers" to anything. For that, you have to look to atheistic belief systems, philosophies, religions, etc. Science does work to provide answers to the relevant questions and, moreover, has done far more to answer such questions in the past two centuries than all religions in the past millennia.

It's true that there may be a god other than the attributes used by theists today. The same may be true of fairies, elves, and gnomes. Is there any good reason to believe in them? No - and the same is true of gods. Merely saying "it's possible some other sort of god exists" does not justify theism. Without sound reasons for belief, disbelief is automatically justified.

"Can you direct me to any author that addresses the question of why things exist from an atheist point of view?"

The most serious and detailed explanations are only accessible to people with serious knowledge of physics. Some of this, however, has been distilled down for the average reader in "God: The Failed Hypothesis".

http://atheism.about.com/od/bookreviews/fr/GodFailed.htm