Evidence for Athiesm

[Vertigo_One [Ops Mod]]

Where is the evidence for athiesm? Sometimes, religious people such as myself, find it fustrating that there is, for some reason, an attitude that to be rational and sensable, one must abandon religion. It really doesnt seem fair that as far as I can see, athiests don't need to hold their beliefs up to the same scrutiny. I would argue, as the article I will now present does, that athiesm and religious belief do not have an intelectual ranking. Rather, one may be perfectly intellegent, and believe.

“A wise man,” wrote Hume, “proportions his belief to the evidence.” This is a formulation of evidentialism – the view that a belief is rational or justified if and only if it is supported by one’s evidence. A more generalized version of evidentialism
covers beliefs with various degrees of confidence, as well as other
‘doxastic attitudes’ such as disbelief, doubt and suspension of judgment
(doxa is Greek for belief or opinion). It states that the
rational or justified attitude to adopt with respect to a claim or
proposition is the attitude that fits one’s evidence. Although
evidentialism is much harder to clarify and defend than it might seem,
there is no denying its prima facie reasonableness.

Evidentialism plays a key role in attacks against religious belief by the New Atheists, as it did for Hume. Belief in the existence of God or other divine realities is criticized on the ground that there is no
good evidence for it. Echoing Carl Sagan and Laplace before him, we are
told that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and we
are assured that there is nothing of the sort when it comes to the
divine. The upshot is that religious belief must be judged irrational,
epistemically unjustified, or intellectually illegitimate, and it should
be rejected. As Christopher Hitchens is fond of saying, “what can be
asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

But what of the New Atheists’ atheism – their belief that there is no god or other divine reality? According to evidentialism, that belief (with whatever degree of confidence it is held) also requires evidence in order to be rational. However, the New Atheists tend not to
worry much about providing evidence. Although they sometimes offer arguments – ‘the problem of evil’, Dawkins’ ‘Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit’ in The God Delusion,
and a few others – overall, those arguments play a minor role in their
attacks. Far more central is their repeated insistence that because
religious belief lacks evidence, it is irrational and so should be
abandoned.

The question I wish to ask is this: How can the New Atheists employ evidentialist principles to argue that religious belief is irrational if they are unwilling to apply those same principles to atheism? If the
New Atheists’ atheism is not evidence-based, as Hitchens implies in the
above quotation, doesn’t evidentialism entail that atheism is itself
irrational or epistemically unjustified? The answer is ‘Yes’; at least
if evidentialism is interpreted in the standard way. So it appears that
the New Atheists need some fix for evidentialism – a kind of
‘theoretical plug-in’ – which legitimizes their atheism in the absence
of evidence. They also seem to be aware of this, since they offer
several reasons why atheism requires no evidential support. I will
discuss five of the most commonly-offered reasons, and argue that none
of them succeed. At the end I will gesture toward what I believe is the
right way to view matters."

The full article is at the link below. Before you respond, the following headings are taken into account

1. Athiesm isn't a belief

2. You can't prove a negative

3. The burden of proof is on the believer

4. Ockham's razor

5. Absence of evidence is evidence of absecne

http://www.philosophynow.org/issue78/78antony.htm

I'm not expecting anyone to come to belief over this article, but I am expecting people to change their attitude towards religion. For people more interested in arguments for God, read here the following.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/july/13.22.html

[Kenny]

Too long, didn't read. Now, responding to your first paragraph which I did read;

Where is the proof that leprechauns don't exist? Where is the proof that the Norse gods aren't real? Where is the proof that there is not a microscopic tea kettle orbiting the sun in the asteroid belt? Belief in nothing doesn't require proof, it requires a lack of proof that something exists.

And for the most part if you're a Christian and you accept evolution and don't claim the Earth is 6000 years old then only complete douchebag Atheists will belittle you for it. Few Atheists care too much whether or not you believe in god, it's the ridiculous stuff like claiming the earth is 6000 years old that will make a Christian look like (and be called) a complete idiot.

[Vertigo_One [Ops Mod]]

If you had bothered to read the article, you would see that point five that the article raises in fact deals with that. I'll quote the article for you.

"To retain evidentialism in the absence of positive evidence for atheism, the New Atheists appear to need a principle which states that, in the absence of good evidence for theism, atheism is thereby evidentially supported. This may seem like magic, but a major theme of Norwood Hanson’s 1967 essay ‘What I Don’t Believe’, is, “When there is no good reason for thinking a [positive existence] claim to be true, that in itself is good reason for thinking the claim to be false.” Michael Scriven proposed a similar principle. So following Thomas Morris, I’ll call this the Hanson-Scriven Thesis, or ‘HST’. HST is a version of the idea that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Hanson defends HST in some of the ways we’ve already rejected. However, his rhetorically most effective defense involves pointing to things for which we have no good evidence – the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, Shangri-La, goblins – and which we also believe do not exist. His idea is that we believe these things don’t exist because we have no good evidence for them. However, he offers no argument for this latter claim. Presumably the examples are meant to just show that we reason in accordance with HST.

More recently the New Atheists have employed Hanson-like examples to defend atheism. We now hear of Zeus, the Tooth Fairy and the Flying Spaghetti Monster; then there is Bertrand Russell’s example of a china teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars, too small to be detected by our telescopes. In spite of our being unable to disprove the existence of such a teapot, this doesn’t mean we must take its existence seriously. On the contrary, the rational attitude to adopt is that the teapot doesn’t exist. Russell’s point, according to Dawkins, “is that the burden of proof rests with the believers, not the non-believers” (The God Delusion).

To evaluate this example-based defense of HST, I want to distinguish two broad types of evidence. Let us call evidence for a proposition P which is usually insufficient on its own to persuade a disbeliever that P is true, weak evidence. Weak evidence, however, can accumulate to make a compelling case, and it can also support different or even incompatible propositions (think of facts in a criminal case which are cited in arguments for incompatible conclusions). By contrast, strong evidence comprises sufficient or compelling grounds for rational belief, or at least, powerful considerations which competing theories cannot account for. It’s strong evidence we’re after when we ask, “What is your evidence for that?”

This distinction is important because the “good reason” in HST must be understood as strong evidence if HST is to apply to the case of divine reality. That is because there is weak evidence for a divine reality – religious experience, the fine-tuning of physical laws and constants, the apparent contingency of the universe, etc. These and other points, although far from decisive, and although explicable in other ways, could conceivably be mentioned in a compelling argument for the existence of a divine being. Therefore, if HST is about the absence of weak evidence, one cannot infer from HST that no divine being exists. So for HST to stand a chance of applying in the atheist case, ‘good reason’ must be understood as something closer to strong evidence.

We can now see why HST is false. Consider the claim that earthworms have a primitive form of consciousness. There is little evidence for this, certainly no strong evidence. Nevertheless, many consciousness researchers believe it (with varying degrees of confidence). Or take the proposition that physical reality is much richer and more mysterious than our current physical theories represent. There is no strong evidence for this either, but it is believed by many (the astrophysicist Martin Rees, for one). Or consider string theory. Again, there is nothing that could properly be called strong evidence for it, yet many physicists believe it. Such examples could be multiplied. Yet if we were to take HST seriously, given that there’s no strong evidence for any of the above propositions, we would rationally have to conclude that the negations of the propositions are true: that earthworms are not conscious, that physics is not far from completion, and that string theory is false. But that is absurd! These negative conclusions can be believed – indeed, many people do believe them – but there is no reason to suppose that they must be believed.

It gets worse. For whenever the negations of propositions like those above can be rephrased as positive existence statements lacking strong evidence, HST will counsel us to believe contradictions. For example, the statement ‘earthworms are not conscious’ can be substituted with ‘the boundary between conscious and non-conscious creatures is above the level of earthworms’. Since there is no strong evidence for that, according to HST we should believe there is no such boundary – which means believing that earthworms are conscious! So, according to HST, to be rational we should believe that earthworms are both conscious and not. This is a reductio ad absurdum of HST.

It is now easy to see where Hanson and the New Atheists go wrong with their example-based defense of HST: they select examples that conform with HST and ignore cases of the sort just offered that conflict with it. Not only does this generate the false impression that HST is true, it suggests that religious belief, because it lacks strong evidence, must be judged to be just as ridiculous as the Tooth Fairy or goblins. But given that there are numerous non-ridiculous beliefs that lack strong evidence, it remains open that belief in a divine reality is more like those than like the ridiculous beliefs. Certainly neither Hanson nor the New Atheists have said anything to argue otherwise. Moreover, it is clear that they have no argument that religious belief is ‘ridiculous’: If they did, they would have no need to justify atheism without evidence – the argument would itself be the evidence. Here it may be objected that believers have no argument that religious belief is serious rather than silly either. That may be true, but it is irrelevant. My point is just that, in presenting ridiculous examples and ignoring non-ridiculous ones, Hanson and the New Atheists create the misleading impression that the silliness of religious belief is a result of their reasoning rather than an unsupported presupposition."

[Kenny]

Seriously guy, too long; didn't read. And I honestly don't care what your religion is or why you believe in it. If I'm going to think someone's stupid it's based on more than which invisible sky daddy they believe in.

[Vertigo_One [Ops Mod]]

You know, your arrogence and anger that I've seen in a lot of your posts is symptomatic of a lack of patience.

But seriously, your going to go.

"Your wrong because of X"
"Actualy, X is untrue because of *long post*"
"I can't be bothered"

Have some commitment.

[Kenny]

Anger? Anyone who gets pissed at the internet loses at life.

But seriously, your going to go.

You're. You claim religious people can be intelligent but your spelling is horrifying.

"Your wrong because of X"
"Actualy, X is untrue because of *long post*"
"I can't be bothered"

Have some commitment.

Have some commitment? If we were having a discussion and you typed out an 18 page reply, I would sit there and read every single word. You're just copying and pasting someone else's thoughts and opinions because you don't have the time, the patience, or the intelligence to form your own.

[Duggabboo]

You're just copying and pasting someone else's thoughts and opinions because you don't have the time, the patience, or the intelligence to form your own.

How can you know that if you didn't read his post?

[Contradiction]

He says, at the beginning of his post, "I'll quote the article for you."

[Papa Bilby(Debaser)]

kenny is one of my favorite trolls, please feed he is still hungry

[Vertigo_One [Ops Mod]]

Well do you have a response to that argument? If so, then the discussion can progress.

[Madeleine]

Perhaps people would argue with your points a bit less if your "evidence" for your opinions wasn't written entirely in philosophical jargon? Sure, I can make sense of it, but it's not very accessible.

[Jennifer Somers Walker]

One of the things is that while you cant prove a negative, you can believe it...and taht's really what it comes down to: we chose to not believe.

Studying mulitple religions right now, im more certain in my choice when i see how much of religion is personal opionion and how much was changed...did you know that the Torah was most likely written by priests who then said they found it in the temple? It was accepted as the word of God. However, the likely hood was that the priests wrote the book themselves.

Or did you know that Jesus Chist's name wasn't exactly Jesus Christ? Christ means the annointed one, and Jesus is a translation of Josh.

"God's son's" name was Josh the annointed one. And he may not have been God's son - he never really said he was, he only preached God's word of loving others, and people began to believe he was more than a prophet.

Theres so much more that's intersting...so many contradicitons too...those aren't contradicitons, but some facts...did you knwo those already? I find the more you look at the history of religion and take a step back and say, "does this make sence?" sometimes you will find something wrong with the picture of what you're studying.

[Vertigo_One [Ops Mod]]

Ok, covering a few points

1. The whole "Can't prove a negative" point is rebutted in point one. It is not the case. Here is the quote from the article.

"Another common claim of the New Atheists is that you ‘can’t prove a negative’ – where what is typically meant is a negative existence claim of the form ‘X does not exist’. Rhetorically, this claim functions to legitimize the idea that evidence needn’t be provided for God’s nonexistence. After all, if evidence cannot be provided for a proposition it would be irrational to expect one to provide some, and so reasonable to believe that evidence isn’t needed. But the claim that you can’t prove a negative cannot help the atheist. That is because, on each of two possible ways of interpreting what it means to ‘prove’ something, it is generally false that you can’t prove a negative (and often true that you can’t prove a positive).

Consider first, proofs which deliver certainty, as in mathematics or logic. Such proofs are sometimes possible for negative existence claims, such as the claim that there is no greatest prime number. One can also prove with certainty that there are no Xs whenever the concept X can be shown to be incoherent (like the concepts round square, or 3pm on the sun). Of course, it is true that many negative existence claims cannot be proved with absolute certainty, but the same holds for positive existence claims, for example, from science or common sense, such as that there are electrons or tables and chairs. So there’s nothing special here about negative existence claims.

Turn next to proofs which aim to establish only the probable truth of their conclusions. These are the sorts of proofs which result from successful scientific and other empirical investigations. In this sense of ‘proof’, it is easy to prove the non-existence of many things: for example, that there is no pomegranate in my hand, or no snow-capped mountains in the Sahara Desert. And while it may be difficult or impossible to even in this weaker sense prove the non-existence of many things – goblins, sombreros in the Sombrero Galaxy – the same goes for many positive existence claims – that Aristotle sneezed on his 20th birthday; that there is a transcendent deity; that there is a sombrero somewhere in the Sombrero Galaxy. So, again, there is nothing unique about negative existence claims. The unfortunate saying that one can’t prove a negative should be dropped."

2. I know priests wrote the OT in several parts, the Bible makes no shy away from that. No one says the Bible was just flung down from heaven randmoly or found in the temple by some miricle. It was however divinely inspired.

3. Of course Christ was not his surname. I don't think anyone takes that idea seriously. Its a title. Also, Jesus is not a translation of Josh. Jesus is a name. It is a form of Joshua, but that is not the same thing as a translation.

4. Jesus did say he was God's son. When asked at his trial "Are you the son of God" he said "Yes, it is as you say". He also made several references to himself as the "I Am", specificly "Before Abraham was, I Am." Which is calling himself God in Anchient Isralite culture of the time he was speaking to them.

5. I would like to see some of these contradictions, although not in this thread as its not really a discussion on that point.