Thoughts in a Haystack

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Uh, oh!

Jerry Coyne is "doing" philosophy again.

Predictably, the results are not unlike what happens when other activities are described as "doing" something.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Coyne is claiming that atheism is a scientific position.

The specific occasion for Coyne's assault and battery on philosophy is the post by Massimo Pigliucci, "On the scope of skeptical inquiry," at his blog Rationally Speaking, that I recently quoted:

[L]et us turn to atheism. Once again: it is a philosophical, not a scientific position. Now, I have argued of course that any intelligent philosopher ought to allow her ideas to be informed by science, but philosophical inquiry is broader than science because it includes non-evidence based approaches, such as logic or more broadly reason-based arguments. This is both the strength and the weakness of philosophy when compared to science: it is both broader and yet of course less prone to incremental discovery and precise answers. When someone, therefore, wants to make a scientific argument in favor of atheism — like Dawkins and Jerry Coyne seem to do — he is stepping outside of the epistemological boundaries of science, thereby doing a disservice both to science and to intellectual inquiry.

[L]et's be clear about what atheism is. I'll call "weak sense atheism" the position that, I think, most atheists hold. It is this: "There is no convincing evidence for God, so I withhold belief." This can be further refined, as Dawkins does in The God Delusion, into the statement, "There could be lots of evidence for God, but none has appeared. Therefore I think it improbable that God exists." This is the stand that informs the atheist bus posters that read, in part, "There probably is no God."

The second form of disbelief, which I call "strong sense atheism," is the flat assertion, "I know there is no God." Note that this elides a bit into the "probably-no-God" position, depending on how strong you think the evidence is. The existence of suffering in the world, for example, convinces many, but not all, that there is not a beneficent God.

So let's take weak-sense atheism (WSA) as the default stance. In its very weakest, "no-evidence-for-God" sense, WSA is absolutely scientific. After all, what is science but the claim that one needs empirical evidence before accepting something as a reality? When one says, "I see no evidence for a god, and therefore refuse to accept his/her/its reality," one is saying nothing different from, "I see no evidence for the view that plants have feelings, and therefore I don't accept the idea that they do."

What about the "probabilistic" form of WSA? That's equally scientific. If there could be evidence for a phenomenon, but repeated investigations fail to give that evidence, one becomes less willing to accept that phenomenon. In this sense, being a WSA is no different from making a perfectly scientific claim like this: "I think it pretty improbable that the Loch Ness monster exists." After all, if there were a giant reptile trapped in the Loch, presumably you could find it. And people have tried. They've looked underwater with cameras, hung around the lake trying to photograph it, and conducted sonar and satellite investigations. Nothing has turned up. In all probability, the Monster is a myth.

Based on these searches, is it then a "philosophical position" to say that it's highly unlikely that Nessie exists? I don't think so. It's an evidence-based position — in other words, a scientific one. Similarly, the god that many people believe in, who is said to be beneficent, answer prayers, heal the sick, come back from the dead, and the like, is contradicted by evidence: the failure of prayer and spiritual healing, the existence of inexplicable evil, and so on. There are a million ways that a theistic god could have shown itself to us Earthlings, but it hasn't happened.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 2:49 PM