101.05 Lesson 5
A majority of atheists today approach the question of the existence of God from a particular angle that leads to faulty conclusions. They might, for example, say, ‘God very likely doesn’t exist because there is no evidence to suggest that a God exists.’ A more formal articulation of their argument might be,
1) Theists claim that a God exists, and, since the burden of proof is always on those making a claim, it is their responsibility to prove it.
2) Extraordinary claims, like the existence of God, require extraordinary evidence.
3) Because other types of evidence are not reliable, the only acceptable form of evidence is scientific evidence.
As theists have failed to provide compelling scientific evidence that God exists, the rational stance is to assume he doesn’t…
This line of reasoning is not new but has its roots in the Enlightenment and in Cartesian foundationalism. Descartes began a program of extreme skepticism, questioning all previous knowledge to discover which elements of his knowledge structure were absolutely beyond doubt. He concluded that the one thing he could never deny was that he himself existed, because he had to exist in order to doubt. This realization gave rise to a new metaphor describing how knowledge ought to be constructed: the building metaphor. Instead of relying on unsubstantiated assumptions, we should start with an indubitable foundation and build on it only with components that can be thoroughly verified (later interpreted to mean scientifically verified). Under this setup, belief in God became extremely difficult to justify.
By the turn of the previous century, the subject of God was more or less discarded in intellectual circles. A few decades later, the philosophically sophisticated concepts of Foundationalism were translated for the layperson as well, so that, today, it’s not uncommon to find atheists who have never opened a philosophy book speak with the utmost confidence, because, after all, it’s everybody else’s job to prove them wrong.
The flaw in all this is that the starting assumptions of Foundationalism, that I exist, that other minds exist, that the world around us exists, assumptions necessary to do science, themselves need an explanation. If all these things exist, where did they come from? The God claim is not an independent claim requiring scientific verification, but is logically prior to the very foundation on which everything else builds, as one of the hypotheses for existence. Unless alternative hypotheses, such as Naturalism, can be scientifically demonstrated in their entirety, the God hypothesis remains in play; we simply don’t yet know which of these hypotheses is correct.
I have written a book addressing the common atheist arguments in much more detail, so I will not go further into this here. For now, the most we can say for or against atheism is that it is one of the potentially viable theoretical models mentioned in the previous lesson.
Recommended reading:
My book on atheism.
