Don't atheists have faith in science just like religious people have faith in God?

In a sense, that is correct, but only in a very simplistic sense. Religious people who make this argument would do well to heed their own counter-arguments when we atheists say that faith is not a virtue. One of the ways religious people respond to that criticism is to say that "faith" doesn't necessarily mean "blind faith;" it can also mean "justified faith" (as in, "I have faith that Steve is a loyal friend because he's proven his loyalty over and over again"). Blind faith is believing something without any meaningful evidence, whereas justified faith is being convinced of something because of evidence, but recognizing that due to the problem of induction, you can never be 100% sure that there isn't some further compelling evidence in the other direction that you just aren't aware of. I think we can have justified faith in the scientific method and the scientific community.

In my case, I did a lot of personally examining the evidence in favor of evolution; I was actually so indoctrinated by creationism that I continued to believe evolution was dumb even after I stopped being a Christian. But then eventually I decided that I should look into the evolutionist rebuttals to creationist claims, and I found the rebuttals to be far more convincing, and backed up by far more evidence. And whereas creationists claimed that evolutionists were just dishonestly propagating a science they knew was false to validate a specific worldview, the creationists were the ones who openly acknowledged that they would simply ignore or discard any evidence which goes against the conclusions they already had going in.

Bottom line, my examination of the evolution issue was pretty thorough and in-depth, and I don't really think I believe in evolution based on faith (even justified faith) in the scientific community. Yes, there are always things that we don't experience firsthand, but there has to be a limit of reasonable skepticism to what information we doubt just because we didn't experience it firsthand (analogy: somebody doubts that a certain law was passed, and you show them the text of the law straight from congress.gov, but that doesn't convince them because hackers could've just planted false information on the official government website; yes, it is technically possible, but it's outside the realm of reasonable likelihood). If a person is going to be that skeptical and that demanding of firsthand experiential information, then I would fully expect that they're only applying that extreme level of skepticism to worldviews they disagree with, because there's no way their own beliefs would hold up to the same demand (unless, perhaps, their own worldview is full-blown solipsism).

Anyway, bit of a tangent. The point is that I have investigated evolution myself quite thoroughly, and found the position of mainstream science to have far more hard evidence to support it. So then, when people attack the position of mainstream science on issues like climate change or vaccinations, I see a lot of similarities between their lines of attack on those issues and creationism. I haven't done a tenth of the research about climate change that I've done about evolution, so yes, I do have some degree of "faith" in the scientific community on that issue, but it's faith that is justified by my more in-depth examination of how science gets the job done on the issue of evolution (and some other minor issues that were quicker and easier to research).

So that's the main way that I would respond to this criticism, but there is one other small point worth mentioning. I think another way our "faith" in science is different from the religious faith that many believers have is that it's subject to change in light of new information. There are many religious people who actually take pride in the fact that their beliefs wouldn't change no matter what new information came to light (like William Lane Craig saying that the ultimate evidence which supersedes everything else is "the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit," i.e. a gut feeling). But the thing about having some degree of trust in the scientific community is that you recognize it's just humans doing the best they can, not some divine word from on high, so I think that makes it much easier to be humble and accept that we should be open to new information potentially changing our position, instead of blindly walking in lock-step with whatever mainstream scientists believe at the time. But I do think that once you've done enough research for yourself to see that mainstream science isn't just some shadowy cabal of people trying to foist a specific conclusion on the unsuspecting public to support some selfish worldview, then it does make sense to take an "innocent until proven guilty" approach to the mainstream scientific consensus on an issue. Because, as others have said, it works; it gets results.

Return Salvo: You Don’t Gotta Believe

This is a review of an article called, “You Gotta Believe: Atheist or Not, You Already Have More Faith Than You Realize,” by James S. Spiegel, which appeared in Salvo (a very conservative Christian magazine). I previously reviewed the article in a much more detailed and thorough (but stream-of-consciousness) fashion, responding to each point as I read the article for the first time. My intention is for this to be a more streamlined and concise review.

Spiegel begins by saying that we all take the reliability of our senses on faith, a point which I commented on separately here. The point he’s trying to make is that we all have things that we need to put our faith in just to get through the day, so also putting your faith in God really isn’t that bad. Spiegel acknowledges, “some faith commitments are more reasonable than others,” and agrees that there is a difference between “justified faith” and “blind faith.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t make any effort to define his terms or draw any meaningful, clear distinction between those two qualitative levels of faith. The problem I have with this type of argument is that it’s too easy for an apologist to essentially say, “you have ‘faith’ in some concept (because there’s actually really good evidence that it’s true), so you might as well have faith in God too,” but without providing the same level of really good evidence for God. At the end of the day, I think that is basically what Spiegel does here.

The arguments he gives for why faith in God is just as reasonable as faith in those other concepts are, in my opinion, very thin. In the paragraph immediately before the section on “Reasonable Religious Faith,” he states, “in order to have a justified faith in a person or thing, your trust must be grounded in some objectively good reasons.” Despite that, his first argument for faith in God being reasonable is the fact that “millions of people all over the world have reported experiences of God.” Frankly, I don’t think there’s anything less objective than personal experiences. Maybe if all those millions of people had the same personal experience, then there might be something to it, but people in every religion have personal experiences of the divine (or near-death experiences) which just happen to align with what was already in their minds. That’s not an “objectively good reason” to have faith in God.

His second reason is that there are things like gravity and love that we can’t directly see, but we know they exist because we can see the effects of them. The problem is, he never even bothers to make any sort of connective argument to justify the claim that God is on an equal basis with things like that. He just baldly asserts it, saying simply, “these are no less matters of faith than belief in God.” That’s it. That’s the whole argument; he never makes any effort to show how God is like gravity and love in that sense, or what effects of his existence we can see (other than the personal experiences, which are still subjective). Speaking formally, that seems like a clear non sequitur. Speaking informally, it just doesn’t seem like a very good argument. And those two arguments are the only ones he ever makes in the whole article for why belief in God is justified.

After that, he delves into a bunch of other “faith commitments” that theists and atheists share (but again, makes no effort to show that faith in God is on equal footing with those). Then he claims that naturalists must have a faith in something he calls the “naturalist explainability thesis,” which is basically the claim that atheists must believe by faith that everything has a natural explanation (another issue I dealt with separately, here). Working off of that claim, he begins to wrap up the article by claiming that atheists actually make a bigger leap of faith than theists. But observe the way he tries to justify that:

Now it is true that the theist also believes by faith that divine intelligence created life, consciousness, and the laws of nature. But considering the attributes of an almighty, all-wise God and his infinite capacity for creativity, this actually seems much less of a leap of faith than the atheist makes in holding to the naturalist explainability thesis. It is for this reason that some have claimed that it is not the theist but the atheist who exhibits more faith.

Of course, that’s all well and good if you already believe in God as he does, if you’ve already made that leap of faith that he claims isn’t happening. But what is the basis for the claim that the theist isn’t making much of a leap? “The attributes of an almighty, all-wise God and his infinite capacity for creativity.” But how does he know God even has these attributes in the first place? Early on in the article, he acknowledged that the authority of Scripture can’t be proved, so it can’t just be from the Bible. He’s certainly made no arguments in this article for how it would be justified faith that God has any of those attributes, much less all. In short, he’s defending the assertion that theists aren’t making a leap of faith by making a different leap of faith. And yet, he has the hubris to say that atheists are the ones who have a more untenable level of faith. As I’ve discussed in my previous posts, I don’t think any faith is required to be an atheist. But there is a lot of faith required to be a theist, as James Spiegel clearly demonstrates, even in the very argument which intends to show that theists don’t require a leap of faith. 

Don’t you just assume that everything has a natural explanation?

This is another common argument in the “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” line of criticism. The accusation is that since atheists don’t believe in a God to perform all the creative acts that shaped the universe, we must then just believe dogmatically in materialism as an article of faith. That even if the current progress of the scientific community has absolutely no earthly idea how something may have occurred naturally, we just have to believe by assumption or presupposition that there is a natural explanation.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that I disagree with this accusation. While I’m sure there are some naturalists who believe in naturalism through pure dogma (there are, after all, some irrational people in every group), that is not the position I hold. The position I hold is that I will not believe in the supernatural until I have reasonable evidence that it is real. If we define “natural” as “anything that is not supernatural,” then you don’t have to make a pledge to believe that the natural is all there is to be a naturalist. All you need is to not believe in the supernatural. Just like not believing in God is all it takes to be an atheist (without needing to make any claims to know there is no God), naturalism can be a “negative” belief (a lack of belief in something) rather than a claim to definite certainty that the natural is all that exists.

Even so, modern science has provided us with many examples of things that now have accepted natural explanation, which previously could only be explained supernaturally. The diversity of living organisms on Earth is probably the biggest example, but there are others, like disease, weather, and planetary rotation. In times past, people have just accepted that there wasn’t any natural explanation for any of these things, but now we know that there is. So that gives a good inductive basis to expect that there might be further natural explanation for other mysteries that are yet unsolved.

Though we have that good inductive reason to expect more natural explanations, we still don’t need to assume them. In the areas where we don’t have answers yet, many naturalists have no problem saying, “we don’t know, and that’s okay.” As Michael Shermer put it, in response to a claim that something could be not be explained through existing scientific knowledge:

So what? The fact that we cannot fully explain a mystery with natural means does not mean it requires a supernatural explanation. It just means that we don’t know everything. Such uncertainty is at the very heart of science and is what makes it such a challenging enterprise.*

Let me clarify what I think he’s saying here, because I suspect someone who is less sympathetic towards naturalism may well read this quote and see it as some kind of admission that naturalists are completely closed to any supernatural explanation no matter what. But notice, the issue at play is simply that there’s no existing natural explanation for something. There’s not even a claim being made that there’s actual evidence for a supernatural explanation, just the lack of evidence for a natural one. This is not a case where Shermer has been presented with clear evidence for the supernatural and he still says “we don’t know” despite that. Rather, this is yet another case where religious people act like a simple lack of natural explanation means the supernatural explanation should be accepted by default.

With that in mind, what I think Shermer’s saying here is that if there’s no evidence for a natural explanation, and no evidence for a supernatural explanation, then it’s better to just accept that we don’t know, instead of assuming a supernatural explanation so we can feel like we’ve closed the gap in our knowledge.

This is quite contrary to the assertion that the naturalist has to assume a natural explanation without any evidentiary foundation. Shermer’s position here (which I believe is shared by many rationally-minded atheists) is that it’s better to accept ignorance than believe a conclusion which is completely without foundation. Religious people will toss out examples like the origin of life or the apparent fine-tuning of the universe, and act like the absence of a definite natural explanation means that atheists just believe dogmatically by faith. On the contrary, I contend that it’s perfectly reasonable, and demands no faith at all, to say “we don’t know what caused life to emerge, but until you give me any actual evidence that it was God, I’m not gonna believe that.” Because, if I did just assume it was God without any positive evidence (as opposed to the “evidence” of simply not having any other explanation), then I would be living dogmatically as a theist, not an atheist.

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* http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surviving-death-on-larry-king-live-2010-03/

Don’t you need faith to believe in the reliability of your senses?

Doesn’t it take faith to believe in the reliability of our senses?

Sometimes, religious people seem to act like giving any examples of something that requires “faith” for anyone to get through their day makes it perfectly justified to have faith in a specific God. One of the common examples of this is the fact that we generally trust that our senses are reliable. Personally, I don’t just assume or blindly trust that my senses are reliable; I think it’s much more rational to operate with the awareness that they might not be at any given time. And yet, it’s true that I still need to trust their reliability to some degree, at least as a provisional conclusion. Religious people will argue that this is purely a matter of faith or presupposition, because the any attempt to validate or justify the reliability of your senses would still require the use of your senses.  I don’t accept this, because you can use one of your senses to confirm another. If you see a wall in front of you (sense of sight), you can put out your hand and feel to confirm that the wall is really there (sense of touch).

Someone might object, “but that’s still using your senses to confirm your senses!” Maybe I’m just missing some basic philosophical implication that’s obvious to everyone else, but I don’t see why the senses should all be bundled together in the consideration of their reliability. The sense of touch is not the same as the sense of sight; why must our judgment of their reliability be all-or-nothing? If I took off my eyeglasses, I will have good reason to distrust the reliability of my sense of sight; but that doesn’t give me any reason at all to think that my other four senses have become deficient as well. On the contrary, studies have shown that a brain which lacks the reliability of one sense (i.e. being blind or deaf) will rewire itself so that the other senses are more heightened.* Thus, I see no basis for the mindset that we must judge the reliability of “our senses” as an all-or-nothing packaged deal. I contend that it’s perfectly reasonable to validate the reliability of one of our senses using another one of our senses.

And lest you argue that this just moves the issue back a step (because I would then need to justify what validates the second sense that validated the first), I see no reason why the senses can’t mutually validate each other. Let’s say I’m not sure whether I should trust the reliability of my sense of sight, so I use my sense of touch to validate it. In doing so, I’m not assuming (or taking on faith) the reliability of my sense of touch; if the sensory data of my sight and touch didn’t match, I wouldn’t just assume one was correct and the other was wrong, so I’m not placing any faith in either sense’s reliability there. Rather, it is the fact that they agree which validates both of them.

Think of it like scientific experiments. When one scientist conducts an experiment, the accepted scientific method is for someone else to go along and reproduce the experiment to double-check the first scientist’s findings. If the findings of the two experiments don’t agree, the accepted scientific method is not to just arbitrarily decide, “well, the first one was done right, so the second one must have some mistake,” or vice versa. They don’t just assume that either one was correct. Even so, if both experiments turn out the same way, then it is taken as good evidence that there is something to the results of that experiment (while always leaving the door open for additional data to be added). So I don’t think there’s anything circular or irrational about using two sources of data to validate each other.

I would go even further and say that this is a perfectly common practice. If there are two witnesses to a crime (or perhaps two suspects who are pleading innocence), then investigators will question them for details separately, and then see how well the two stories align. If they don’t match up, the detectives may not treat either testimony as reliable, but if they do (especially if the police are sure they didn’t have an opportunity to discuss and plan out their cover story together), then that will give them both some validation as being reliable, even though neither of them had been validated individually beforehand.

Now, I will grant that it’s even better if the investigators have some external way of verifying their stories. I’m not saying that this type of mutual validation is the best warrant for a belief we could ever possibly have. But in the case of judging the reliability of our senses, I think it’s more than adequate. Then again, I think we actually do have an external source of verification; our continued survival. Think about the illustration of seeing and feeling a wall. If our senses were completely unreliable, how many times would we run into walls, or fall into holes, or otherwise interact with our environment in dangerous ways, before it killed us? Unless we all have unreliable senses in an unperceived world that is completely safe and docile, then I can see no way that our senses being unreliable wouldn’t prove fatal very quickly. I don’t need to have implicit faith in the reliability of my senses to see that the fact I’m alive at all demonstrates that they’re doing the job well enough.

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* http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superpowers-for-the-blind-and-deaf/

Have you ever actually read any of William Lane Craig's books?

The short answer is no, not any of his whole books. The long answer is, after seeing a lot of arguments from him in other forms (he even answered a question from me in his Q&A column), I don't believe it would be anything but a complete waste of time to read a whole book. Observe the following quote…

First of all, I think that I would tell them that they need to understand the proper relationship between faith and reason. And my view here is, that the way in which I know Christianity is true is first and foremost on the basis of the witness of the Holy Spirit, in my heart. And that this gives me a self-authenticating means of knowing that Christianity is true, wholly apart from the evidence. And, therefore, if in some historically-contingent circumstances, the evidence that I have available to me should turn against Christianity, I don’t think that that controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit. In such a situation, I should regard that as simply a result of the contingent circumstances that I’m in, and that if I were to pursue this with due diligence and with time, I would discover that in fact the evidence, if I could get the correct picture, would support exactly what the witness of the Holy Spirit tells me. (Source)

…And by the way, that’s not just something he said in an interview in the spur of a moment. I did research his actual scholarly work enough to know that his flagship book (Reasonable Faith) has a whole section on this, where he repeatedly reinforces the idea that the way Christians know Christianity is true is ultimately because of the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit, so reason and rationality must only ever be subordinate to that.

See here (Google Books link is dead, but you can follow along if you happen to have a physical copy), the section starting on page 47 with the header “Role of Argument and Evidence.” Here are a few of the most damning quotes, if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing…

“I’ve already said that it is the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit that gives us the fundamental knowledge of Christianity’s truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role.” 

“Reason is a tool to help us better understand and defend our faith;” [...That is, not to find out whether our faith is actually true or not.]

[Down on page 51] “Therefore, the role of rational argumentation in knowing Christianity to be true is the role of a servant. A person knows Christianity is true because the Holy Spirit tells him it is true, and while argument and evidence can be used to support this conclusion, they cannot legitimately overrule it.”

…In short, Craig admits over and over again that his entire worldview is based on a feeling, not facts, data, arguments, or evidence. He further admits that no amount of arguments or evidence would ever changes his mind, and even seems proud of that! He then compounds the sophistry of ignoring arguments himself while using arguments to convince other people, by reframing the feeling which serves as the basis for his belief in an intellectual-sounding buzz-phrase, “the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit.” At the end of the day, he’s no different from all the Young-Earth Creationists who openly admit that they will simply dismiss any evidence which goes against their presuppositions. He’s not a bit different. But I’m supposed to respect his intellectual or philosophical acumen?

But wait there’s more; there’s also this other little nugget which he wrote right above that section on page 47…

“Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ, it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God.”

…I don’t know about anybody else, but I know (just as fully and confidently as I know anything about myself) that the reason I’m not a Christian has nothing to do with loving darkness rather than light. But hey, William Lane Craig is the foremost Christian philosopher of our time, so he must know my own heart, my own motivations, better than I do, right? Pardon me if I’m skeptical.

So, just that quickly, in one short section of one of his thirty or so books, he’s completely torpedoed his intellectual credibility for me in not one, but two different ways. And that’s without even factoring in all the many things he’s said and done to torpedo his credibility for me in all of his many debates.