SurplusGamer's Thought Limbo

18th May 2011

Post with 1 note

Why atheism is not a position of faith

This has been talked about endlessly before, but never by me and I thought it would be fun. One thing that many atheists are wrongfully criticised for is that because they have no proof for their position so it’s a faith position like belief in a God, and it’s arrogant to claim that it’s anything more.

Absolute proof is an ideal concept, and most rational people wouldn’t claim to have absolute infallible proof of anything. But what you can have is evidence and lack of evidence.

For example, if I claim there’s a banana on my table, you can go and have a look, see what looks very much like a banana, which is good evidence. You could eat the banana, which would be even better evidence. You could of course have hallucinated the whole thing or be decieved in some other clever way, but you could probably say with a lot of certainty that there is a banana on the table.

If you go and you see no banana, though, that brings the claim into doubt. Still, it might be behind or under something, and if you look around a bit you can see where it is. Or perhaps I’ve got some banana cloaking device hiding it from plain sight, and so on.

In both cases the best you can truthfully say, if we’re being really pedantic, is either: There is a lot of compelling evidence of this banana and for now I accept the claim, or, I see no evidence of bananas here and so for now I reject the claim.

Now when we’re just talking about bananas on tables, there are a number of things we might take as sufficient evidence to accept the claim. In most cases you’d probably accept it just based on someone’s word, for example:

“I’m hungry.”
“Well, there’s a banana on the table, you can have that!”
“Thanks!”

If you think for some reason the person is dishonest, seeing the banana is likely good enough. In other words, for an ordinary claim, the standards of evidence as well as the rigour with which we check the evidence is pretty low.

What if instead of a banana, they said “There’s a meerkat on my table.”? Assuming this isn’t an environment you would expect to find a meerkat in, you’d probably at least want to see it before believing, and one you did, you might be justified in accepting the claim then.

What if it was a live Dodo? Well, you know the concensus is that they are extinct, and while it’s not impossible, the story is becoming less and less plausible. Even after seeing the Dodo you’d probably have some doubts unless provided with a convincing account of how this is a real Dodo and not a hoax, and ideally some proper evidence for the truth of the story.

A leprechaun? You get the idea. The more extraordinary the claim being made, the higher standards of evidence we hold it to, before we are justified in saying ‘yes, I think that’s probably true’

So when somebody tells us, for example, that they believe in the existence a being of infinite power who brought the universe into existence and reigns supreme over it, it’s perfectly understandable that we would say that we’d like good, solid evidence to accept it. The fact that lots of people believe it? Not enough. The fact that there are old, revered books that say this to be the case? Nowhere close. The fact that some of the universe seems so amazing that it’s easy to imagine that some being is responsible for it? Still not enough. A feeling, deep in your gut, that it’s true? Nope.

Many theists are sensible enough to see that the God claim just does not hold up when we apply the same standards of evidence that we hold everything else in life to, and it is acknowledged by them that they are, in the end, taking it on faith - which of course they are entitled to do. The atheist doesn’t need faith to justify their non-belief, they are applying the same sliding-scale standard of evidence to God claims as they are to leprechauns, dodos, meerkats and bananas. They would characterise the theist’s assertion that we ought to abandon those usual standards of evidence for faith in the case of God as special pleading. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading)

The difference between the faithful and someone like me is that they think faith helps them, that it is a good thing to have, and I strongly disagree. I think at best faith can make you believe true things for bad reasons and at worst blind you to the possibility of learning and adjusting your beliefs when they are flawed.