Can you know atheist, if God does not exist?

This is a response to an article by Jason Dulle.

You Can't Know Atheism is True Unless God Exists

It tries to make the argument that without God to create us, we could not have the ability to reason. It is an argument CS Lewis also tried, but to my mind it fails badly.

The nature of wholly material entities is that they function according to predictable patterns as determined by natural laws.

This is simply not true. At the quantum level, it is all random. See here for example, which discusses using the unpredictable nature of quantum mechanics to generate truly random numbers.

For example, consider the boiling of water. ... We might also consider a chain of dominos.

Chaos theory tells us this is not true either. Complex systems can behave in strange and surprising ways. That the author can think of some analogies where the consequences are predictable is hardly proof that that must always be the case.

This is just shoddy thinking, and all to common among those wanting to shore up their faith, rather than discover truth.

If human beings are wholly material entities, having no immaterial aspect to their being (i.e. a soul), we are affected by the same deterministic cause and effect relationship all other wholly material things are affected by. In the same way water cannot decide to not boil, and dominos cannot decide to not fall, mankind cannot decide to think or do anything other than what physical precursors have determined for us. Every one of our thoughts and acts would be mere reactions to prior events--some invisible domino falling on us if you will. These thoughts and acts would not simply follow the cause, but would necessarily follow. Free will deliberation and independent thought are impossible in a wholly material world.

He is talking here about libertarian free will. On the other hand compatibilism does allow for both free will and determinism.

The author kind of admits this:

Naturalists will be the first to agree with this assessment. They recognize that free will and philosophic naturalism do not mix. Naturalist thinker, John Searle, wrote, "Our conception of physical reality simply does not allow for radical freedom."2 He admitted that there is no hope of reconciling libertarian freedom with naturalism when he wrote, "In order for us to have radical freedom, it looks as if we would have to postulate that inside each of us was a self that was capable of interfering with the causal order of nature. That is, it looks as if we would have to contain some entity that was capable of making molecules swerve from their paths. I don't know if such a view is even intelligible, but it's certainly not consistent with what we know about how the world works from physics."

However, the fact that he does not make clear the distinction makes me suspect he is conflating the two. He points out libertarian free will does not work with philosophic naturalism, but then concludes no free will is possible at all. Either he is not as well-read on the topic as he might be, or he is deliberately trying to mislead.

Only the existence of an immaterial soul can provide us with the free will necessary to employ reason to arrive at true, justified beliefs about the world. The soul--being immaterial in nature--transcends the physical realm, allowing us to transcend the determinism inherent to physical reality. When faced with prior physical forces acting on our physical stuff, we are not forced to react in a manner determined by those factors. Through the soul we are enabled to step back from the cause and effect cycle to adjudicate, deliberate, and then decide what we will believe or do. We can adjudicate between competing views based on the merits of the views themselves, independent of prior physical forces.

The justification here seems strained to say the least.

Why do we need free will to employ reason? If we see an apple fall, why should that not lead - inevitably and deterministically, in the right set of conditions - to discovering gravity?

And how does having a soul help in the process? His argument seems to be that if we have a soul then we are free to conclude the sky is pink! After all, we are not constrained by physical reality, so can think whatever we like! Seems to me this is a hinderance.

He says with a soul "we are enabled to step back from the cause and effect cycle to adjudicate"; why does consciousness not allow us to do that? Is it because the soul is mystical and unknown and so we can make up any BS about it? I strongly suspect it is. I see no practical difference here between a consciousness that supervenes on the physical brain and a soul that uses the brain as its channel with the physical world.

The soul allows us to be an unmoved, first-mover; "an agent that can act without sufficient causal conditions necessitating that the agent act--the agent is the absolute source of its own actions. … Only first-movers are the sources of action, not instrumental movers that merely receive motion passively and pass that on to the next member in a causal chain."

This is interesting, as the first mover argument for God says only God is an unmoved first mover. Thanks to the author for refuting that!

As it happens, radioactive decay is an example of an atom suddenly, randomly falling apart, which seems to contradict his claim.

What we see here is a man desperate to support his faith, and so clutching at straws, rather than actually thinking. If he was to start thinking, he might lose his faith.