Why strict atheism is unscientific

http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2012/11/27/why_strict_atheism_is_unscientific_106413.html

by bradleysmith • 13 years ago

11 24 13 years ago

maaarghk2• 13 years ago

Nonsense. The scientific method says that the burden of proof lies on those who make extraordinary claims, not those who do not believe said claims. And that is all.

To clarify a bit further, see quote: "You can't prove that God exists!" they accuse (correctly). Yet, hypocritically, strict atheists are guilty of the exact same crime: belief without evidence. This is nonsense. It is not belief without evidence, it is disbelief due to the lack of evidence. An embarrassingly basic strawman argument.

Zikes2• 13 years ago

See also: the strict unbelievers of the invisible, ethereal, and completely silent unicorn I keep in my garage.

onion2k3• 13 years ago

I let that out months ago. I'm surprised you didn't notice.

Millennium• 13 years ago

The concept of the burden of proof is a legal concept, not a scientific one. Science only cares about what can or cannot be falsified, without making any sort of preliminary value judgments like "extraordinary claims."

maaarghk2• 13 years ago

Claims of any nature, then. If I release a paper saying I have any kind of theory then the scientific method requires that I (or someone else who is sympathetic to my claim) provide a valid theoretical or experimental proof that my theory is valid. If I do not fulfil that expectation then it is fair to decide that my belief was not based on any proper reason, and you can choose to think it is nonsense as you wish. You do not need to waste your time proving that it is nonsense.

bradleysmith2• 13 years ago

I think the Sagan quote replies most adequately:

Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed".

I think the point of the article isn't that atheism is unscientific; confident, undoubted atheism is unscientific. absolutely certain atheism is unscientific.

atheism is not a fact, it is a belief. The assumption that there is no god is quite similar to the assumption that there is one.

Daniel_Newby• 13 years ago

This argument is based on a logic error. If a miracle implies God exists, it does not follow that the lack of a miracle implies that God does not exist. (The proper converse of logical implication is the nonexistence of God implies the lack of a miracle.)

So a careful scientists concludes merely that he has no basis for an opinion about the existence of God.

P.S. I believe in God because the neutrino helicity problem is a miracle. :-)

MetaCosm• 13 years ago

Absolute drivel. It is a useless frame of reference in which one would have to sit on the fence on every mythical creature ever mentioned.

"possibilianism" would cover leprechauns equally as well as god. It would cover santa right along with god. Unicorns as well, the flying spaghetti monster, etc. It is beyond useless.

EDIT: Author also thinks "faith" should be taught in public schools. http://biologos.org/blog/science-religion-can-coexist-in-sch...

badman_ting• 13 years ago

Beware, this hole goes deep. I'm currently traveling and spending my nights listening to Zizek talk about the ideology represented by our actions, since we all think we're a bunch of hard-reality-observing scientist-minded smartypantses who disavow anything unfalsifiable. I mean, I've known this about atheists and atheism for a long time, but as I say, the hole is deep.

onion2k3• 13 years ago

Hard atheism, believing that god definitely doesn't exist, is different to the rational position because it's a belief in the lack of evidence. It's stating that there definitely isn't a god. Rationally, you can't prove a negative. You can't prove there is no god because an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact there isn't any evidence of gods might be because we've not found it yet. Rationally, in scientific terms, you should lean towards agnosticism (with a large pinch of skepticism).

However... the politically sensible position to take in these sorts of discussions is ignosticism - the idea that you can't know because you're ignorant of what the terms are. Unless you can define what god is you can't state whether or not there is evidence for his/she/its existence. Most religious people don't like defining their god, so they leave you alone. :)

dionidium2• 13 years ago

I will say strongly that I do not believe there is an invisible, 70-foot-tall, green monster standing right behind me right now. I can't prove a negative, you're right about that, but since I have exactly zero evidence for this thing's existence, I'm going to take a shortcut and say it doesn't exist.

One can be forgiven for not having stumbled across these arguments before. We all had to read them for the first time at some point. But I'll just say that this is well-travelled territory.

onion2k3• 13 years ago

That shortcut is why, for thousands of years, humans believed in things like the 4 elements, a flat earth, geocentricism, and so on. Taking the path that "feels right" despite a lack of evidence is wholly unscientific, and, occasionally, will prove wrong. So beware of that monster. :)

The fact is there is no reason to state god does or doesn't exist. There are more important things to think about. Things that actually make a difference.

gonvaled• 13 years ago

In front of you there is a glass of water. You see it, you can touch it, you can drink it. You know it is there. You believe it is there.

You are wrong! In fact, the water does not exist, the glass does not exist. You do not exist.

Could this be? No, you say, I have proof that the water exists: "I can drink it". Not really. You think you can drink it. But you are not there. The water is not there. Maybe you are in the matrix.

Just like that, any kind of rational discussion is impossible. "Hard water believing", believing that the water exists just because you think you can drink it, is not rational - after all, it could not exist.

Should science work like this? Should science explain, when stating any theory, that it could be that all stated facts are maybe not real? Obviously not. Science only cares about falsifiable theories: theories which can be disproved. The rest, from the point of view of science, does not exist.

From the point of view of science, the water exists and god does not exist. Neither do the golden unicorn, or the green monster. God believers, and water deniers, when using those believes in the realm science, are making science a disservice, since they are allowing for non-rational conversation - and thus destroying any kind of rational discourse.

dionidium2• 13 years ago

I'm tempted to address some of the points in the article individually, but, really, the whole thing misses the mark. I'm an atheist in the same way that I try not to make claims about anything without evidence and this is such a common misunderstanding that we have invisible pink unicorns and orbiting teapots on standby to rebut it.

jdietrich• 13 years ago

This line of argument wasn't very interesting 50 years ago and it certainly isn't of interest today. Frankly, I have no idea why this link is on the front page of HN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

cbhl• 13 years ago

I feel like I've seen this somewhere before...

http://xkcd.com/900/

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

This entire article is an argument to moderation, which is a well-known fallacy. The truth must always be in the middle ground, right? No.

"Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration."

-- Stan Kelly-Bootle

Second: "belief in a higher power" is a very vague statement and in no way implies worship of a creator deity, and even less: religion. Lumping in religion with theism (a mere component of religion, not even a necessary one) is grossly wrong. We are all subject to higher powers every day that we exercise little control over, be they forces of nature or what have you. That does not mean they are divine, sapient or anything of the sort.

Thirdly, atheism comes in various degrees: strong/weak, explicit/implicit, gnostic/agnostic. The article presents a false trinity: "There's only two extremes and a middle ground!" No.

Finally, I despise when theists try to incorporate Einstein as one of their own. The Einsteinian God has absolutely nothing to do with theistic notions of a creator God. Rather, Einstein was a pantheist whose God was a metaphor for nature, reality and knowledge. He was not a believer in creation or divinity. This article tries to equivocate his statements, as many other religious demagogues have done before.

Sharpen your arguments.

bradleysmith2• 13 years ago

Firstly, is moderation in your belief of your understanding of the origins of the universe a well-known fallacy? Also the focus on moderation in the article was in describing 'possibilianism', a middle-of-the-road example belief.

Second: belief in a higher power, as answered on a Pew Research poll, seems to directly imply deism as a belief. I agree that it isn't 'religion' which has a set of dogmas & behaviors, or even deism worship, but I don't think someone that believes gravity is a higher power would answer yes to this question on a poll. It has a fair bit of connotation that implies a particular belief.

Thirdly, I agree, it's an unfair comparison, and a bit of a ham-fisted article. I submitted because it was the most clearly written on the topic I could find.

Fourthly, If Einstein was a pantheist, he was theist. Theism is the belief that at least one deity exists.

he was also a known apologist for religion, oft quoted for writing in the NYT Magazine "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind". Why would a scientifically minded religious ilk NOT try to incorporate such rhetoric as their own? and, why does that upset you?

Einstein seemed to have a respect for religion's acceptance that human understanding is flawed. a quote from Isaacson's biography:

"You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being"

I am not religious, nor particularly spiritual, but I do believe that a respect for religion is a positive thing. I find wisdom in attitudes that try to include the value that religion brings to the human condition as opposed to damning it for 'making shit up' scientifically. I'm well acquainted with religion's uglier and more ignorant sides (grew up in Saudi Arabia, family in West Texas), but I agree with Einstein (Nassim Taleb also writes some interesting stuff on this) that I would prefer an attitude that accepts the weakness of our understanding.

I appreciate your comment, I submitted the article for discussion and I got it.

cristianpascu• 13 years ago

Atheism is a matter of ontology/metaphysics and not science. Science, too, is a matter of ontology, in that it says that there are electrons and they have such and such properties.

But atheism, while accepting the results of science (what science says there is), it goes a bit further. And the keyword in understanding how and why and where does atheism goes further is the word 'evidence'.

Many times you'll here people saying "There is no evidence!" for that or that matter. However, in understanding what kind of evidence do we expect to see (etymologically, evidence holds the reference to what is seen), we need to have a clear idea of what is there to be seen.

Atheism expects and denies that there is evidence of a God. A super-natural being, a person, conscious, free, and able to do whatever they may wish to do. And this is where atheism CAN NOT apply any of the methods available in science. Science has been able to understand nature (its laws and ontology) because what happens in nature, happens in virtue of law. That is, all the time. Repeatedly. Experimentally verifiable.

The actions of a person are not like that. Be it a God, a bird, a fish or a bug. The intentional behavior of a conscious being can not fall under the umbrella of exact, objective science. Unless there is some sort of determination which resembles a (statistical) law. Which, by definition, it's not the case for God.

So, yes, atheism and religions are not scientific. Which is not to say they may not be true. One of them all.

circlefavshape• 13 years ago

Could there actually be someone in the world who cares that their atheism is not "scientific"? If there were, would that person also worry that their taste in music, their love for their wife, their hatred for roasted peanuts and their sexual quirks were similarly unscientific?

Who wrote this stupid article? Mr. Spock?

glenra• 13 years ago

Yhe simplest definition of "atheist" is one who lacks a belief in God. If you don't actively possess a belief that god exists, you're an atheist. Atheists confidently disbelieve in god in exactly the same way that they disbelieve in Santa Claus - the mere fact that humans tell stories about some mythical creature doesn't mean that creature exists.

But the bigger problem is the definition of God. Without defining it, the question "does it exist" is of course unanswerable. But if you mean "the Judeo-Christian God, the guy described in the bible" then one potentially can prove that it doesn't exist. Maybe you can't disprove the existence of ALL gods or rather all definitions of god, since the full set includes Spinoza's version. (If you choose to define god as being the same the universe and allow that the universe exists, then "god" exists.) But you CAN disprove the existence of THAT ONE particular god, because it is defined in self-contradictory ways. The "God" that religious people seem to be talking about most of the time is logically incoherent. So believing it doesn't exist is like believing something that's simultaneously green and invisible doesn't exist.

God is what you get when you start with Santa Claus and turn all the absurdity knobs up to 11. Omnipotent and omniscient, yet somehow allows us all free will even though he knows everything we'll ever do. "existed before the universe", even though the universe is defined as "everything that exists". And so on.

Why strict atheism is unscientific

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