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Is Atheism A Logical Position And Theism An Emotional Position?

 I disagree. Theism or any form of belief in God is based on the idea that the world and finite human beings lack genuine existence, and their existence in a relevant sense about which they may differ is derived from a higher source, which is the ground of all existence. This ground of all existence is God, and its existence is self-explanatory.

Atheism denies this because the search for grounds leads us to an infinite regress, because there is nothing whose existence is self-explanatory, so everything that is, is conditioned by something else, and that by something else and so forth. This comes down to - anything that is finite is through another finite entity and does not require the other of finitude, the infinite to explain the finite.

Whichever position is correct, there is no reason to think that one is logical and the other is purely emotional. Even Kant, who criticized proofs of God, conceded that Reason, due to its intrinsic nature, cannot relinquish the search for the ultimate grounding of the world without ceasing to be rational. As a matter of fact, from the atheist position, it is difficult to demonstrate the very possibility of reason. If we apply the measure of reason to reason itself, then to prove the validity of one proposition, we would require another and so forth. Still, in this series, the validity of even one proposition would not be possible since the proof of validity has been postponed to infinity. If, on the other hand, we affirm one proposition without proof, then its opposite should equally be possible. This can be seen as the epistemological version of the metaphysical problem of whether or not there is any self-explanatory ground.

Secondly, it is not the case that atheism is devoid of an emotional outlook on the world altogether. The existence or non-existence of God is not a question about a piece of furniture in a room, which does not make a substantial difference to the way we perceive the world.

I believe what happened was that the Enlightenment period revised our initial conception of reason in a way that drew an impassable chasm between philosophy and poetry, whose reconciliation was an essential feature of the older conception of Reason. The latter is a teleological concept over against the calculative mechanical conception of reason that the Enlightenment popularised, and which was conceded by religion because it increasingly came to see reason as its enemy to its own detriment. The situation this has put us in is nicely summarized by the philosopher Stanley Rosen:

“By detaching "reasonable" from "good," the friends of reason made it impossible to assert the goodness of reason. Indeed, they made it all the more easy for the enemies of reason to assert the evil of reason. If reason is conceived exclusively on the model of mathematics, and if mathematics is itself understood in terms of Newtonian rather than Pythagorean science, then the impossibility of asserting the goodness of reason is the extreme instance of the manifest evil of reason. Reason (we are told) objectifies, reifies, alienates; it debases or destroys the genuinely human. It obscures the significance of human existence by superimposing the rigid, inhuman, and, in the last analysis, man-made categories of a mathematized ontology. Man has become alienated from his own authentic or creative existence by the erroneous projection of the supersensible world of Platonic Ideas, of an arithmological domain of beings, and so of an autonomous technology, which, as the authentic contemporary historical manifestation of "rationalism," will destroy us or enslave us to machines. Reason is a machine or machinelike; ultimately, a stultifying poem or human creation. Little wonder that so many are today searching for edifying poems in the regions of the nonsensical and the insane.”

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