The Case for Atheism

[frasierc]

It's like this: if I have no evidence of a thing existing, and no indication that it even could exist, and every claim made about this thing comes loaded with fallacies and unfalsifiable attributes, and every test ever done on this claim returns no positive results, why would I continue to accept the possibility that such a thing exists until such time that I gain positive evidence for it?

It would be helpful to clarify what you mean by evidence. If your criterion for evidence is that it is possible to test in the lab whether God exists - then you're right there is no evidence of God's existence. But I think you would need to justify why you think only knowledge that can be obtained by using scientific methods is valid. How would you go about testing that assumption?

You're attempting to shift the burden of proof, Frasier: we can both see that the natural world exists, and one doesn't need to fully seal off any possibility of supernature in order to conduct empirical research, but it's not up to anyone else to disprove the existence of the supernatural before we're justified in examining natural causes for things first. You'd need to provide evidence for the supernatural, given that it's the ontologically positive claim.

I think here you're trying to use the analogy of naturalism as null hypothesis. So under this argument your claiming its rational and evidence based to hold to naturalism until there is sufficient evidence for theism that would require naturalism to be rejected.

Superficially this sounds neutral but there's a couple of limitations:
1) As scientific methods are not able to examine the existence of God - by definition you've fixed it that the null hypothesis (naturalism) will be accepted. Which is not much different from saying you presume naturalism without any evidence. Because any evidence that could be used to reject the null hypothesis has been ruled out in advance.

2) This idea of null hypothesis testing is actually quite an outdated view of how to interpret scientific evidence. The limitations of this general approach have been outlined in the literature for over 30 years.

Yes null hypothesis testing is still used in science but there is clearly a move away from this to a more helpful approach of focusing on estimation and precision. That is, what's the strength of the evidence that this is a true explanation and how precise can I be in drawing that conclusion. Where this is the case we need to do that for both naturalist and theist views of the world.

There's also evidence to suggest the way we interpret data is more closer to Bayesian than Frequentist approaches. In the Bayesian approach, you begin with a prior belief before looking at the evidence (e.g. presuming naturalism or theism), you then update this belief with the data to come to a posterior belief.

I think this is more of a realistic explanation of how theists and atheists interpret data about the world. When examining evidence for the existence of God, if you presume only methods that could produce naturalist explanations are permissible, you're by default basing your conclusions on your prior beliefs.

Now, this is where it gets hard, because how could that even be done? Just lacking a natural explanation for a phenomena isn't enough, that'd relegate your supernatural claim to being an argument from ignorance. Especially given the long track record we have for finding naturalistic explanations for previously unexplained phenomena, versus the nonexistent track record for discovering supernatural explanations for the same. Positive evidence is what's needed, causal links as opposed to just gaps in the knowledge plus correlation... and that's where the supernatural advocates fall mysteriously silent.

I think this is again a conflation of naturalism with empiricism. You're saying use of the scientific method has been really effective in explaining the world. I agree it has -but I disagree that requires me to be a naturalist. Also I disagree that this implies the only valid way to evaluate any question is by using scientific methods.

For example, on the last page you said it was unfair to compare the evidence for gravity with the evidence for god. Why? You bandied around accusations of presuppositions, but I can't help but notice you didn't even attempt to explain your proposed false analogy. What's the issue you were having?

One of Stimbo's responses has already explained this. Gravity is observable, repeatable etc in the material world. Scientific methods are therefore the appropriate method of evaluating this concept. God is immaterial therefore requiring the use of methods designed to understand the natural world aren't appropriate for determining evidence for the existence of God.