God and Evidence

I made a drive-by comment on a recent Stefan Molyneux video, which caused an avalanche of responses, most of which I didn’t read. I did make one more comment that clarified/reworded the original. I don’t know if it helped. It probably didn’t.

In reading the video’s description, the philosophical assumptions are apparent:

Question: “I consider myself a scientific thinker, and like to dabble in some philosophy, I have also worked hard to maintain my Christian faith while doing this (an effort which most of my colleagues have seemed to abandon for one reason or another).”

“I’m looking to challenge myself by talking to you. The scope of the conversation, I would prefer to revolve around the question “how can someone be both logical and a Christian” as this question seems to come up in my day to day life to whomever is unlucky enough to ask me; but if we divert, we divert. In what ways does having a Christian faith preclude a person from being scientifically minded?”

The “solution” is easy: be scientifically minded about scientific things, be metaphysically minded about supernatural things—much like a bricklayer is in “bricklayer mode” when laying bricks, but goes into “dad mode” when he goes home at night and roughhouses with his kids. The atheist’s claim of “no god” is non-falsifiable, just as the theist’s claim that there is a god. But the atheist who explicitly frames the dilemma as such is working with a very non-scientific presumption, a presumption the theist rejects: that the only things that are knowable are epistemically falsifiable. As I’ve said before, the only purely rational position on God’s existence is the agnostic, when he claims that the question is unanswerable using just material evidence.

EDIT: Fixed some incomplete and half-worded sentences. I really need to get my head more tightly around proofreading.

10 Comments

  • Ed Hurst says:

    There you go; we are all agnostic on that level. In the past I’ve defanged all kinds of hard-driving debate by stating openly that the question is unanswerable by logic.

    • Jay says:

      Alvin Plantinga argued that belief in God could qualify as a form of knowledge, with its own set of logic, etc, independent of how “smart” or reasonable a person is. I’m not a pro philosopher so I don’t know how strong that theory is.

      • Ed Hurst says:

        I suppose I could agree with that. The problem is such logic and knowledge requires something almost certainly missing from non-believers, because it relies on a faculty that is, in essence, dead for them. Western intellectual tradition is really quite odd in being so restrictive about what it accepts and does not. Western Christians end up engaging in some truly silly gymnastics trying to keep everything within the Western frame of reference. I gave up on that a long time ago once I became aware of the limitations as limitations. I’m not sure I’d call myself a pro, either.

  • I was ready for some more “atheism is the lack of belief…” comments … anyway, hardcore atheism (and even Christianity) via YouTube just leaves a bad feeling in my stomach.

  • Jay DiNitto says:

    Just skimmed it. Looks good. I’ll “read it read it” later today.

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