Atheism skepticism

All of the people who say that they are "atheists through skepticism, because they see no evidence that God exists," are patently unthinking people, since by virtue of turning skeptic, no one has ever done anything—employed any logic, gathered any evidence, found any way forward—to reach a conclusion about whether God exists. So these atheists have not reached a conclusion; they have made a commitment.

What the scientific skeptic ought to say is this: "Having examined the hard evidence, we declare that route to be exhausted. The only kind of evidence for God’s existence that counts will have to be of some other kind—if there is any other kind."

That would be reasonable. And it would be a fine thing for a skeptic to doubt that there is any evidence besides the standard, demonstrable kind—and there are skeptics who do so. But all those who, just because they doubt it, run home with the question answered are frauds like their agnostic brethren if they still call themselves scientists.

Hunches are starting points, not arguments. We need "to inquire, to investigate, to think critically about any subject" before we settle our minds, as they so love to tell us. But where are the skeptics who go up the mountain with Pascal? Nowhere.

When the smart scientist of the seventeenth century was asked, “Is clear water pure?” he did not go with his gut and answer "yes" or "no." "The naked eye says yes," he answered, "but is there an instrument better than the naked eye with which to see?" We need to listen to the scientist who claims that there is, and that scientist is Pascal.

That instrument is the heart. "It is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason" (424 278). "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know" (423). Pascal’s reasons of the heart are meant to take over from an intellect that operates on hard evidence but has run out of it. "The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one" (298).

We are not talking here about feelings, which love to cheat us. Pascal says that the heart convinces, makes us rightly sure. “Demonstration is not the only instrument for convincing us” (821).

...We are told we should face the facts. Well here they are: The only world in which strictly empirical evidence is the road that we should take in our views about God is a world in which God either shows himself by such evidence or simply does not exist. Those are the options that the agnostic and the atheist like, and it is because they like them that they never pay any attention to the further fact that accompanies these: God might await us down another road. There are three options, not two.

In a world in which God both exists and hides, relying upon conclusive evidence is the way to be wrong about God. Reason delivers three options, but the agnostic and the atheist are not listening to reason; they hear only the options they like, and simply pick the one that suits them...

... We need evidence that God exists. Agreed. What kind? Is there only one kind? Scientific evidence. And what is that: material evidence? Is that how science works? Didn’t the nature of evidence expand as science went deeper into what is? Aren’t there new and unexpected kinds of evidence?

Even scientists don’t quit when the old sort of evidence runs dry. Not quitting—going beyond the established sort of evidence—is a virtue of science.

What would we say to the pre-Darwinian who did not believe that biodiversity could be explained? (“It all had to be put here,” he insisted. “There is no material evidence for a mechanism of biodiversity.”) Was natural selection material evidence?

The researcher who quit that project, enthralled by his “absence of evidence,” is what we would call an uninspired, even a bad scientist. We would say to him that scientists do not seek only data: Sometimes they seek a way to get data, and when they find it, they may find that it does not mimic the procedures they followed before.

It is a bad scientist who says that nothing can possibly orbit Jupiter when the means of discovery are absent—when there is simply no telescope by which to check (the naked eye being deficient). It is a bad scientist who says that metal is not crystalline when the fact is that there is no microscope fit to show its structure (the light microscope being deficient).

Maybe what the nay-sayers ought to do is to stop pronouncing in the absence of evidence and start looking for new instruments by which to get some. That is science. Modern science, especially, advances by the discovery of new means by which to acquire what is, to be sure, also concrete, measurable evidence. But it is not always “material evidence,” “the evidence of the eye.”

The lesson science teaches is the pitfall of fetishizing past means of seeing, the kinds of things that have convinced us thus far. It is a primitive thinker who models the world on our present and standard abilities to perceive, and who presumes to know the means of testing for x before he has even considered what nature x might have...

Touchstone Magazine