Atheist Forum

https://www.academia.edu/55661218/White ... eviewed_by

I believe the structural-systemic philosophy has made the existence of God a proven fact. Atheists could simply elect to read the book and understand that they were merely misinformed about God's existence, but in spite of the facts at hand, they continue to deny the existence of God. Therefore, I am going to postulate some reasons why:

1. Lack of education and misinformation - Many atheists are likely just regurgitating by rote what they were taught and indoctrinated to believe in school based on outdated curricula, rather than think for themselves - and don't want to question their authority figures or what they were taught, or consider the possibility that some of their teachers were even lying for reasons I will get to later. So some simple psychology is at play here.

2. Emotional reasons. Since the existence of God is proven fact, atheists have to consider the possibility that their lack of belief in God and their actions in this life will have consequences for them in the afterlife. Many atheists, especially if they're involved in unethical conduct, simply don't want to do this, and will use all the mental gymnastics they have at their disposal to avoid acknowledging the existence of God. They've been doing this for ages, such as appealing to a lack of (scientific) evidence (or rather, what they were told was a lack of scientific evidence. It certainly wasn't evidence they had gathered themselves), often based on ignorance or misinformation of what evidence actually is or how evidence works to begin with (so, again, a lack of education is the problem here). Simply not wanting to admit one was wrong may be a stronger motivator than any actual evidence.

But now that the structural systemic philosophy has provided them the evidence they need, will they just accept it, acknowledge that God exists, and they were wrong, and move on? Or will they continue to deny it because they want to and don't want to have to be held accountable to their creator?

You haven't proven anything.

You can't just start with saying something is a proven without doing anything. You're not Donald Trump. Sit down.

Interesting how your reason 1, is the very foundation of all religious beliefs. Reason 2 is childish. No soup for you.

Atheists could simply elect to read the book and understand that they were merely misinformed about God's existence

Sooo...fun fact, atheists generally are more knowledgeable about religion than theists. The rather obvious explaination is that atheists who were formerly religious went through a process of scrutiny of their own religion, which requires an order of magnitude more effort and knowledge than someone who passively believes what they were taught to believe or merely copies and pastes from an apologetics website.

So no, simply throwing a Bible at an atheist is not going to work, lol. Just curious, but do you think that many Christians would immediately convert to Islam if you put the Quran in front of them?

Many atheists are likely just regurgitating by rote what they were taught and indoctrinated to believe in school based on outdated curricula, rather than think for themselves - and don't want to question their authority figures or what they were taught, or consider the possibility that some of their teachers were even lying

Projecting so hard you could put the Batman logo in front of it to make the Bat Signal lol.

Between the two of us, which one is more likely to regularly go to a special building where people are taught what to think with the explicit instruction that it should be taken on faith and that dissent is disobedience that will be gravely punished with eternal torture?

These "philobros" crack me up. Just reinforces how after thousands of years there is still zero evidence for anything supernatural.

Your argument fails on three independent grounds:

It begs the question. Your central premise that structural-systemic philosophy has "proven" God's existence is asserted but never demonstrated. Everything else in your post depends on this unsupported foundation. You haven't given anyone a reason to accept the premise. You've just told them they should already accept it.

It commits Bulverism. C.S. Lewis's term for the move you're making: rather than first establishing that atheists are wrong, you skip ahead to explaining why they're wrong (ignorance, indoctrination, emotional avoidance, fear of accountability). This substitutes character attack for argument. You have to show someone is mistaken before diagnosing why they're mistaken, otherwise you're just psychoanalyzing people for disagreeing with you.

The reasoning generalizes fatally. The same form, Position X is proven; dissenters reject it due to ignorance or bad faith, would equally validate flat-earthism, geocentrism, or any contested claim you care to name. A method that can prove contradictory conclusions isn't a method. It's a rhetorical template. Whatever conclusion you reach this way, someone else can reach the opposite using the identical structure. This shows the structure itself doesn’t track truth.

Now the more interesting problem. The source you cited, Alan White's Toward a Philosophical Theory of Everything, building on Lorenz Puntel's structural-systematic philosophy, doesn't support your argument the way you think it does. The author of the paper you linked, Strunk, explicitly denies that White offers a final, totalizing philosophy, and certainly not a proven fact.

White doesn't claim "proven fact." He explicitly describes his work as offering "the best currently available systematic philosophy", a comparative, modest claim about how SSP stacks up against alternatives. You've elevated that into categorical proof. Your own cited authority contradicts the strength of your claim.

The methodology is coherentist mutual support, not deductive proof. White's theistic claims gain plausibility through systematic fit with other claims he defends, moral realism, objective beauty, libertarian free will, rather than each being independently demonstrated. Claims propping each other up as a package is precisely the argumentative structure where reasonable disagreement is most expected, because rejecting any one of the conjoined claims gives principled grounds to reject the package.

White's position is acknowledged as a minority view in contemporary philosophy. It is disputed by educated, credentialed professional philosophers. These people are demonstrably not products of rote schooling. Many of them substantially reject these conclusions. This alone defeats your psychological diagnosis. If disagreement with SSP came from ignorance or indoctrination, the people most familiar with the framework would be the most convinced. They aren't.

If you want to make a serious version of this argument, the path is actually right there in the source: drop "proven fact," engage what White actually argues about being and truth, acknowledge it's a minority position you find compelling, and address the specific objections critics raise. That's a defensible philosophical position. What you've written isn't an argument that atheists need to answer. It's a closed loop that only works for people who already agree with the conclusion.

It would be a good idea to define what you are trying to prove. Is this the god of Exodus 33:20 where it says no one can see God's face and live, or the god of Exodus 33:11 and Genesis 32:30 that people see "face to face". Or maybe god is "Yahweh", the 2nd string Canaanite storm/war god who received dominion over Israel from top god El and had a female consort named Asherah?