Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Disproving God

[Neo-Scholastic]

If I have understood you correctly, especially regarding some of your posts in the what is atheism thread, then a main problem with atheism being defined as the lack of belief in god, is that even if one has a lack of belief, then that individual must have reasons for his or her lack of belief; therefore, those reasons are subject to scrutiny.  Have I understood correctly?

Yes that it absolutely what I am saying. I follow this up by questioning whether or not atheism should be the default position, as many atheists assume. My position is that people are justified in believing that things are as they appear to be until shown otherwise, i.e. that some ideas are properly basic and one of those ideas is that some divine agency is operative in the world. Nature appears teleological. People instinctively sense a transcendent moral order.  Synchronicities abound. Uncanny personal experiences are ubiquitous. The list goes on and on. To all appearances the world does seem saturated with the divine. Now, maybe it isn’t. Maybe that is only how things appear but not how they actually are. Of course that is possible, but one needs sound reasons for denying what seems to be the case.

Most AF members seem congenial and for them the question of whether God exists is not particularly important up until it touches their life in some significant way. But if someone is going to go around saying that theism is irrational and that theists are deluded because they accept a properly basic belief then THOSE accusations are positive claims that needs to be justified. It is juvenile to avoid accountability for those accusations by playing semantic games.

I’ll say that another way for clarity. Rejections of properly basic beliefs require justification.

Many of the secular members here have written that they have not been presented with sufficient evidence to support the existence of a deity.  Hence, IMO, in this thread and others concerning atheism, theism, and etc., it seems that theists and atheists are not using the term evidence in the same way: many of the secular posters here want hard, scientific, measurable data that would stand up to the intense scrutiny of multiple examinations being performed by different teams of qualified individuals, while some theist posters have said that the NT, along with their personal experience and observations of reality, is evidence for them.  Do you see things differently?

We are generally on the same page. The word has a certain amount of ambiguity. My 9th edition Webster’s defines it as clear and obvious facts as in “At the party, lots of celebrities were in evidence” and I do admit it can be used as a synonym for proof. But it isn’t fair to vacillate between the two meanings, which is what I think the atheist posters are doing.

The real question is whether people are using appropriate criteria for evaluating the veracity of any given proposition. The criteria used in historical research, philosophy, literary criticism and mathematics aren’t appropriate for doing natural science and vice versa. Lincoln’s assassination will not be repeated. The value of pi isn’t an average of measurements taken from circular objects. Being-as-Such does not have a control set. The symbolism of Dante’s Inferno can’t be isolated in a test tube. And yet, that is how unreasonable most of the demands for “evidence” made by atheists sound to me.

For example, the way you wrote it makes it seem like the NT would not qualify as “intense scrutiny of multiple examinations being performed by different teams of qualified individuals”. As SteveII has abundantly demonstrated to willfully ignorant ears, nothing could be further from the truth. The NT is not a single source; the bible is a summary collection of accounts and letters by various authors from disparate populations. Asking for sources outside the NT is like saying various reference materials don’t count if they come from the same library! Even then there actually are extra-biblical written records, even if like everything from the ancient world, there are only a handful. These illuminate cultural practices of the NT era, like customs for criminal burials, that support the biblical narrative. Archaeology has located everything from inscriptions mentioning Pilate to the pool of Bethesda, these too support the biblical narratives. It is one thing to say that none of that evidence supports (proves) the Resurrection, it is a completely different thing to say there is no evidence at all.

… plenty of posters here have pointed out that many of the arguments made by theists rely on assertion, and from a skeptical and secular point of view, asserting the truth of a statement must be reinforced with sound logic and supported with proof/data that shows that each premise of the argument is in fact true.  Hence, do you find that these objections are dodgy? Do you think that the evidence that the secular members here have asked for is unreasonable?

I welcome sincere debate over what conclusions can be drawn from observable facts. I am not saying that objections are dodgy. The notion that one doesn’t need a valid reason to justify rejecting a properly basic belief is. And as I wrote at length above, some of the demands for certain kinds of evidence are unreasonable.