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Where's The Evidence - Philosophy Now
Where's The Evidence - Philosophy Now
| Philosophy Now
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue78/Wheres_The_Evidence
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there to be evidence for. Evidence is not needed for non-positions. While the word atheism has been used in something like this sense (see for example Antony Flews article The Presumption of Atheism), it is a highly non-standard use. So understood, atheism would include agnosticism, since agnostics are also not theists. However, on the common understanding of atheism no divine reality of any kind exists atheism and agnosticism are mutually exclusive. Some insist that this non-standard sense of atheism is the only possible sense, because a-theism means without theism. But if that were a good argument, the Space Shuttle would be an automobile, since it moves on its own (mobile=move, auto=by itself). Ditto for dogs and cats. Yet none of that really matters, for even the non-standard sense of atheism does nothing to neutralize evidentialisms demand for evidence. As we saw, evidentialism applies to all doxastic attitudes toward a proposition P: believing P, believing not-P, suspending judgment about P, etc. Therefore evidentialism says, with respect to the proposition God exists, that any attitude toward it will be rational or justified if and only if it fits ones evidence. Now it is true that if one had no position whatever regarding the proposition God exists (perhaps because one has never entertained the thought), no evidence would be required for that non-position. But the New Atheists all believe that (probably) no God or other divine reality exists. And that belief must be evidence-based if it is to be rationally held, according to evidentialism. So insisting that atheism isnt a belief doesnt help. In what follows I will use atheism in its standard sense.
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4. Ockhams Razor
What about Ockhams Razor, the principle of parsimony associated with the medieval philosopher and monk, William of Ockham? His principle is often expressed as, Do not multiply entities beyond necessity? Can
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this help? The idea, presumably, is that if a conception of reality without any divine being contains the resources necessary to explain everything that needs explaining (a proposition Ockham would have vehemently denied!) then Ockhams Razor licenses us to exclude all references to the divine in our explanatory accounts. Might this maneuver justify atheism without evidence? No. The trouble is that Ockhams Razor is of little use in disputes over whether some entity X exists. That is because it is typically an open question in such disputes whether everything that needs explaining can in fact be explained without X. Theists believe, or at least suspect, that there are features of reality which are inexplicable without appeal to a divine being: the existence of a contingent universe, the fine-tuning of physical constants, etc. We need not decide here whether a divine being is needed to explain these things: what is important is just that the Razor itself cannot decide such matters. It comes into play only assuming that a complete explanation of the relevant phenomena is possible without X; at which point it licenses us to eliminate X from our ontology. But theists will not accept that a complete explanation of reality is possible without appeal to a divine being, so long as no compelling case for that claim has been made. So Ockhams Razor can have no persuasive force in this debate.
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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 theres 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.
Conclusion
We have surveyed five ways in which the New Atheists attempt to exempt themselves from the demands of evidentialism while criticizing religious belief for failing to satisfy those demands, and we have seen that they all fail. Therefore, on matters concerning evidence and justification, the New Atheists have no good reason to treat their atheism differently from how they treat belief in the divine. How could the New Atheists respond to this conclusion? One option is to accept that evidentialist principles apply to atheism too. Another is to reject evidentialism. Since we cannot examine these options here in any detail, let me end with a brief sketch of how I view the situation. I believe that the dispute between believers, atheists and agnostics can be modeled on disagreements in the sciences, philosophy and other fields in which there is insufficient evidence to clearly favor any position. In many such disputes, all positions have a kind of
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intellectual legitimacy (which doesnt eliminate the disagreements, of course). Think of the range of legitimate positions that can be taken on the question of string theory, or on whether earthworms are conscious. Saying what intellectual legitimacy amounts to, and on what it depends, is a difficult task. It may fall short of epistemic justification, and instead involve a kind of instrumental or practical rationality. It may also depend on inquirers recognizing the distinct value of strong and compelling evidence, and accepting that such evidence must be the final arbiter on theoretical questions. However, the main point to be emphasized here is this: the various positions that can be taken on the existence of a divine being theism, atheism, agnosticism, and variants are in principle no less intellectually legitimate than positions in disputes in the sciences and other fields in which none of the positions enjoy strong evidential support. Dr Michael V. Antony 2010 Michael Antony is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, Israel. He is writing a book on how to approach the question of whether there is a divine reality, and what it might be like.
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