Atheist existentialists -- what arguments?

[lpetrich]

Like Jean-Paul Sartre. Do they have any arguments against the existence of deities?

Or is it all "How terrible, terrible, terrible that there is no god to give us marching orders?" Almost as if they are very angry with that entity for not existing.

 

[WAB]

Like Jean-Paul Sartre. Do they have any arguments against the existence of deities?

Or is it all "How terrible, terrible, terrible that there is no god to give us marching orders?" Almost as if they are very angry with that entity for not existing.

Sartre certainly lamented the absence of God, and he didn't seem too keen on freedom either: i.e: "condemned to be free." - which probably explains his approval of Stalin's Soviet Union, which he visited. He also had a very short work called, "The Hole", wherein I marked several passages that appeared virtually misogynistic to me.

ETA: Rustled up my book containing The Hole, found this, which I had marked with exclamation points (my code for bad!):

The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which "gapes open".

ETA again: Just discovered that Sartre's companion for a long time was a feminist, Simone de Beauvoir - so maybe there's something in the Whole of The Hole that I missed (I read it twenty-five years ago).

Then there's Kierkegaard, regarded as an existentialist, who was extremely devout, but was also extremely depressed, and depressing. Ever tried to plough your way through "The Sickness Unto Death"?

 

[Juma]

Why not ask someone that knows anything about the subject?
As for example Kate Kirkpatrick: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/theforum/sartre-does-god/
Read the linked article in its entirety. Its good.

 

[DBT]

The absence of evidence for the existence of something, where evidence should be found, is evidence against existence. Perhaps we have just not found the evidence for the existence of deities. Perhaps it is hidden. Perhaps deities do not want us to know of their existence....yet the absence of evidence cannot justify a conviction in their existence, so a belief in the existence of a God or gods is not a justified belief.

 

[Juma]

The absence of evidence for the existence of something, where evidence should be found, is evidence against existence. Perhaps we have just not found the evidence for the existence of deities. Perhaps it is hidden. Perhaps deities do not want us to know of their existence....yet the absence of evidence cannot justify a conviction in their existence, so a belief in the existence of a God or gods is not a justified belief.

How is this post related to existentialism?

 

[DBT]

The absence of evidence for the existence of something, where evidence should be found, is evidence against existence. Perhaps we have just not found the evidence for the existence of deities. Perhaps it is hidden. Perhaps deities do not want us to know of their existence....yet the absence of evidence cannot justify a conviction in their existence, so a belief in the existence of a God or gods is not a justified belief.

How is this post related to existentialism?

It's related to justification of belief. Presumably existentialists use some form of justification? If not, my comment is irrelevant.

 

[lpetrich]

Why not ask someone that knows anything about the subject?
As for example Kate Kirkpatrick: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/theforum/sartre-does-god/
Read the linked article in its entirety. Its good.

Here is a bit of it:

All the same, the biography of Sartre’s atheism is far from clear cut: in Words alone he tells three different stories about its origins. In Being and Nothingness he describes himself as having had a ‘mystic crisis’ in his teens; and in his autobiography he refers to the ‘absence’ of God rather than God’s non-existence. In the same work he also refers to God as an ‘old flame’ and to atheism as a ‘cruel, long-term business’.

Philosophically, Sartre’s argument for atheism was not very satisfying—even for him. He gave a short argument against God’s existence in Being and Nothingness. But he confessed to Simone de Beauvoir that this argument was not the basis of his own atheism; rather, this atheism was something more direct, an intuition of the absence of God.

In "A New Mystic" (1943), he wrote about Friedrich Nietzsche's famous statement that "God is dead":

We should not understand by that that He does not exist, nor even that he now no longer exists. He is dead: he used to speak to us and he has fallen silent, we now touch only his corpse.

That is so bizarre that I don't know what to make of it.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Like Jean-Paul Sartre. Do they have any arguments against the existence of deities?

Or is it all "How terrible, terrible, terrible that there is no god to give us marching orders?" Almost as if they are very angry with that entity for not existing.

Well, if one is annoyed by the absence of any reason for the universe, then it's understandable that they'd fixate on a target for that annoyance and the purported entity who's supposed to be giving that reason is as good as any. The fact that the target for one's annoyance isn't real is simply because it's more satisfying to have a target instead of just a vague and general sense of angst over the matter.

It's like how if you fall off of a tall building, your last thought may be how you're somewhat pissed off at Superman for being fictional because then your situation would only be one of mild inconvenience and you'd have a cool story to tell at cocktail parties.