Why strict atheism is unscientific
realclearscience.com
realclearscience.com
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.
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.
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. :-)
"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...
"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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
According to the bible, the consequences for non-believers are very dire. If the bible is true, then this is a very important thing to think about.
Weak agnostic or strong atheist, we're all going to hell.
I contend that there's little difference between a weak agnostic or a strong atheist. If you're not scared of hell, then you're living your life as if you believe that God doesn't exist.
As in most things in life, it's what you do that matters, not what you say.
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.
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.
Who wrote this stupid article? Mr. Spock?