“What Can Be Asserted Without Evidence Can Be Dismissed Without Evidence”?

One reason that people have for being non-believers in God is a lack of evidence to support belief in God.  This is obviously a different thing than positive evidence against something.  The burden of proof, as they say, is on the claimant.  Many times I have talked about evidence with theists and non-theists and always we return to the issue of faith. A theist must have faith that their god is the true one despite a lack of supporting evidence.  An atheist may dismiss the theist’s claims because the evidence is weak or, at the very least, unreliable.

I would suggest that we must start from the presumption of disbelief.  I do not believe in unicorns, dragons, cosmic teapots, talking animals and a whole plethora of others things not because I have evidence that they do not exist but because I have no evidence that they do.  The same holds true for belief in gods of any kind.  Furthermore Christians feel precisely the same way about Odin, Ra, Quetzalcoatl, Oghma and all the other gods that human beings have believed in throughout history.

There are reasonable objections to this.  People accept many things as true without insisting on good evidence and even in the face of contradictory evidence sometimes.  I accept that a coin toss will have exactly a 50% chance of landing heads or tails even when I’ve managed to throw ten heads in a  row.  Empirical evidence suggests the coin will land heads on each toss but I do not accept this because I know that this is simply a statistical abnormality.

Sometimes the evidence to prove a point is very complicated or difficult to understand.  Nobody expects you to understand how to read DNA to appreciate that it contains the building blocks of living things encoded within it.  Sometimes claims are not intuitive and seem to work against reason.  The speed of light is fixed in a vacuum.  If you were to sit at the head of a beam of light while light travelled towards you it would arrive at the speed of light and not twice the speed of light as you’d expect if you were sitting on a baseball heading towards another.  This is counter intuitive but nevertheless true.  Many of the “truths” of complex science are based on “evidence” that follows a convoluted chain of reasoning.  The Theory of Evolution itself is not provable in the classical sense but is simply the most reasonable path that the evidence suggests.  Good evidence supports it but does not provide absolute certainty.  Good evidence serves to make it highly probable.

A key problem that I have with claims of theists is with the issue of authority.  A scientist can demonstrate their logic through experimentation, an economist through modelling.  Reliable authority is claimed by a good success record.  We trust the conclusions of science because the conclusions are good in general and can be implemented in helpful ways and are supported by evidence.  Scientists are good authorities who can “show their working” and freely allow others to repeat their tests and draw their own conclusions. When scientists are wrong they do change their minds.  Perhaps not right away but when their position is untenable they have a mechanism in place to change tack.

Theologians are not such good authorities.  No mechanism exists for changing tack.  Members of the same religion disagree, sometimes violently.  There is no possible way to test the assertions of one faction.   The evidence for their claims are vague or missing.  Sometimes these claims are logically consistent or based on intuition or popular assent but there is not evidence, good, testable, repeatable evidence, that supports the claims.  Even the claims of probability that some science relies upon (abiogenesis, Big Bang theory, chaos theory) are open to refute with evidence.  Probability works if it is the best you have based on the evidence but the evidence isn’t sufficient even to make God probable.

There is, of course, a counter argument to this.  Perhaps the presumption of atheism is false.  We can accept that unicorns, dragons and cosmic teapots don’t exist based on lack of evidence but why should this be true for God?  Shouldn’t the atheist make the case that God does not exist before claiming disbelief?  Isn’t the position of agnosticism intellectually more honesty?  How should we go about putting a reasonable mechanism in place to test our reason in this situation?

We should apply both assumptions to an untestable idea.  Space aliens or the Loch Ness Monster for example.  What do we imagine that an alien or Nessie is?  What constitutes an alien life form visiting our world or a prehistoric suvivor living in a near frozen in-land lake?  What is our idea of these things?  Then we try to find evidence that supports these ideas.

As an unbeliever it is not up to me come up with the idea of what God is and find evidence for it.  It is up to the theist to define God in testable terms and present evidence to support the idea.  If it were up to me I could simply define God as a great, bearded man who lives on top of the dome of the sky and then claim that he does not exist because the sky is not a solid firmament for God to walk upon.  This would be unreasonable and more than a little rude.  I must work with the definition provided to me and then counter the claims of evidence with new interpretations or better evidence.

The theist, in short, must provide an idea of what constitutes God and provide support for having reasons to hold to this idea.  Failure to do so leaves God as an incoherent ideal, a half formed concept that could feasible fit any definition, even a changeable one, ever shifting to escape the attacks of evidence and reason.  This is intolerable for an honest explorer.  We must have something to work from if we are to make sense of an idea.  If there is no sense to the word “God” then there can be no God.

Other atheists choose atheism because they just feel that atheism is right.  The intellectual reasons either escape them or simply don’t matter because they follow their feelings that atheism is the right choice.  Perhaps they looked into other faiths and couldn’t decide which one suited them most and so decided on none.  Again I strongly suspect that the same is true for many people of faith who hold their beliefs because they just seem right to them.

There is another group though who are labelled as apatheists.  Apatheists or people who are apathetic with regards to religion choose atheism as a default option.  Rather they don’t choose at all, they simply don’t care one way or the other about or for questions of religion.

I don’t mind admitting that I find the idea of apatheists more than a little unsettling.  How can people not care?  For me a key event that triggered my own exploration of religion and rejection of many aspects of it was the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001.  In that case religion was used as a force for evil (and I don’t use the word lightly) to motivate people into attacking the West.  The reaction to this from religious groups helped to cement my views.  These views though are more about religion than about the existence or non-existence of God or gods.  Turned away from religion I explored the matter of existence from an intellectual view point.  Finding no compelling reason I am an atheist.  For other people 9/11 drew them into a faith a cemented their ties with a religion, perhaps they drew strength from their faith where I saw only division.  One thing 9/11 did was to prompt people to decide on faith.

Yet to have people who just don’t care strikes me as callous and more than a little odd.  Was 2001 really so long ago that people have forgotten about it?  Were the events so far removed from their lives that they’ve been able to dismiss them as unimportant?  I do not understand it and I do not feel that it is right.  Yet it must be the default position for anyone who comes into this world.

A child is born with no knowledge of religion and is taught all that they later know about the gods or God, about faith and about the organisations that are built on these viewpoints.  By my definition of atheism, that it is a lack of belief in God or gods, a child has had no chance to believe or not.  They fail to believe because they do not know that there is a choice.  These are not atheists but apatheists.  Once apprised of the facts they can choose to believe in one faith or none and can choose their own reasons for doing so.  To remain uncommitted is not something that makes sense to me.

I should point out that apatheist here is a different stance than agnosticism.  An agnostic has explored the ideas of faith and no faith and decided that they haven’t got enough information to choose.  The information is not quite compelling one way or the other.  They are not indifferent but intellectually honest.  Being unable to know in the true sense of the word they wait patiently for a juicy piece of evidence or reasonable argument that may sway them.  This is not a lack of interest or a path of ignorance but a balancing act of competing ideas.  Atheism answers the question of belief and agnosticism answers the question of knowledge.  They are not on the same scale of belief.

Perhaps an apatheist is simply exercising the same lack of interest in God that they see God exercising in them. Now there’s an idea, if a callous one.

–

I originally wrote this for Off The Map – Atheist in 2009 as part of a series explaining why I lacked belief in gods.

Are you familiar with Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development?  Too many people, particularly the right wing religious people who make up a very influential bloc in North America are stuck on the obedience and punishment stage. Perhaps it is the idea of obeying religious covenants that have been firmly ingrained into their psyches or perhaps they are simply deferring moral growth to their pastors.

To take an idea from Marx; religion is the opiate of the masses, it holds back moral development.  I should say it can hold back moral development rather than that it does.  If we want humanity to reach a post conventional level of morality where we at least engage in a mutually beneficial social contract (that open minded and permissive morality where we don’t judge those who are different based on our own preferences) then we need to work past the restrictions that religion places on growth.

My dissent with regard to Marx’ assessment of religion as a limiter leads me to say that I’ve known a few highly moral religious social commenters but that religion per se does not promote this kind of development (neither does its absence in all fairness).  I can see it in some aspects of Buddhism and if you read almost anything by the Dalai Lama you’ll see how acceptance and understanding are key to his view of personal and social happiness but you still find bigoted Buddhists.  I can see some fantastic moral lessons in Roman Catholicism too.  Charity for example is key to many Catholic endeavours, unfortunately the Holy See and the Bishop of Rome hardly seem to exemplify this quality.  There is also an idea in Islam that encourages the questioning of dogma and its constant reassessment.  Again it is something that we tend not to hear about these days but it did help Islam to advance scientifically, medically and culturally over its neighbours until our European ancestors crushed them.

I’ve said many times how I view religion as a Curate’s Egg with both good and bad parts.  Every religious person cherry picks their scripture and takes from it what lessons best suit them.  I think that this is a good thing and we, I mean society in general, should encourage it.  We need to encourage them to cherry pick the parts that promote a better society and to explain away or ignore the parts that limit or harm society.  We can do this by making society more moral and promoting humanist ideas.  As something of a utilitarian I think that we should examine moral questions from the principle of the least harm caused rather than from the viewpoint of an authority who dictates moral considerations but as long as those moral considerations that are dictates are to the benefit of all then we can certainly adapt them.

The Ten Commandments dictates prohibitions against murder and theft and promotes the idea of accepting that what others have is theirs.  The Eight Fold Way promotes wisdom, ethical conduct and mindfulness of others.  The Sermon on the Mount promotes compassion for the poor and hungry and condemns greed and violence.  I think that we can agree that these are good things that we could readily adapt into every day social contracts of morality alongside other ideas.

Let me know what you think.

It is Friday.
1+1=2.
I was born more than 3 days ago.
The sun will rise in the east and set in the west (relative to my current location).

That kind of thing are objectively true (or false) for everyone. Beliefs can be very specific or very general, trivial or serious. Beliefs can be suppositions (if the sun had come out it would have been a brighter day) or absolute statements of fact (If Alex is taller than Beth and Beth is taller then Cait then Alex is taller than Cait).

Philosophically ‘beliefs’ have truth value. They are capable of being true or false.

We have two distinct kinds of belief: The kind of beliefs that are either true or false and the kind of beliefs that are strongly held convictions. The latter include:

democracy is the best form of government.
cats are better pets than dogs.
Mozart was the finest composer who ever lived.
apples are a finer food than oranges.

These are subjective and are based on the preferences of the person making them. There is a distinction here that is sometimes lost when we discuss beliefs. How many times have you seen or heard the question “How can an atheist go through life believing in nothing?” or something similar? I’ve even seen it given as a statement and a condemnation. Atheists or rational beliefs are dismissed as having less value than theistic beliefs. Ultimately though, it is a failure of the person asking the question in understanding the difference between conviction and truth.

People of strong conviction even refer to their beliefs as truth, sometimes even capitalising it as Truth to give in added power. I know I’ve done it, I’ve considered some of my own convictions as so obvious and irrefutable that they must be true. Again though this is a confusion between the idea of belief inherent in truth and the belief inherent in a strongly held conviction. There being no way to prove (or disprove) the existence of God or gods, religion is a belief that falls firmly within the bounds of a conviction and is incapable of being true or false without further evidence. That isn’t to say that we cannot glean honest and good ideas from religion, just that the idea of proof isn’t relevant.

What meaning do we give to our lives without the firm convictions of religious belief? It isn’t as easy as taking the beliefs of a community (a church) or a family and adopting them. An atheist instead has to ascribe meaning to their own life and adopt those convictions that make sense. For me that gives the beliefs that I hold greater strength. I have challenged them myself in arriving at them (and continue to do so) so they are much stronger as a result. The values that I have and the beliefs that I hold have come about through questioning and evaluating them. It is true that some theists do this too. I just don’t think that they do it as often.

When someone says of an atheist that we don’t believe in anything they are failing to grasp the nature of belief. Both a theist and a non-theist may share identical beliefs in things that have truth value but will differ in beliefs that are formed of conviction. We both have convictions and true beliefs but some people fail to grasp the difference and place them together. This doesn’t help anyone to discuss or understand the differences in their beliefs.

I’m horrified by this story. The son has been arrested and is facing prosecution and probably a jail term. Fair enough, he committed a crime and society seeks to put in place corrective action and demonstrate a deterrent for future offenders. That deterrent shouldn’t extend to his family who are not responsible for his crime.

I note that Call-me-Dave says that “they’ll have to find housing in the private sector and that will be tougher for them”. Tougher? Yeah, let’s see a family (presumable on benefits or with a low income) raise a few thousand pounds for a deposit and a few thousand more for their first month or so rent.

No, what’ll happen is that they’ll go to the council again and ask for emergency accommodation for the 8 year old and mother (who they are already housing). The council can refuse as an evicted family is deemed “intentionally homeless” but in practice they won’t. They’ll be put up in a B&B or temporary accommodation for 6 to 12 months and go right back on the housing list.

When the son gets released after he finally gets a trial and they let him out for time served or shortly after they’ll apply for accommodation again. As an ex offender he’ll be given preferential housing and the family will end up in another council flat. Maybe even the same one.

Oh and the flat won’t be used for the next eighteen months. Most councils have a policy to keep flats used for crimes empty for a period to deter people who went to these properties (dealers, buyers, etc) from returning. Then it’ll be redecorated at tax payer’s expense and let out again.

The lovely Hil says that the council are within their rights according to the typical council tenancy agreement. Also that there is probably more to this story than is being told. Councils rarely evict based on single incidents.

Another thing. The eviction process is an expensive and drawn out process. Anyone who advices Sartain-Clarke’s mother will tell her to stay in the flat until the bailiffs arrive to evict in order to maximise their chances of being rehoused. That means more cost to the tax payer.

It looks to me to be an expensive and pointless exercise in public relations where Call-me-Dave can say that he is being tough on crime without actually doing anything constructive. Then again I may just be a cynic.

Apparently Call-me-Dave will make a speech about council housing reforms today.

An anti-gay Christian group is spending $7,000 to fly planes over Orlando, Fla., dragging giant banners that read, “Warning Gay Day at Disney.” The campaign is part of the group’s boycott and protest of the annual event.

Florida Family Association claims thousands of people enter the park each year during “Gay Day” only to turn around and leave when they realize gay people and same-sex couples are present. The group says it wants Disney to reschedule Gay Day at night after the park closes.

Heavens to purgatory, gay people exist and they go out in public. Quickly, lock up your families so they aren’t exposed to the horror.

The Florida Family Association says patrons of the event wear T-shirts that “promote homosexuality” and dress in drag. The groups also charges that gay couples publicly kiss, hug and grope each other – behavior the group’s leaders believe will turn children gay if they witness it.

Shocking! Gay people daring to show affection for one another in public. Not only do they have the audacity to exist but now they aren’t even cringing in shame at they own gayness. What is the world coming to?

Why do Disney allow this?

The six-day Pride celebration draws about 160,000 people, who spend an estimated $150 million, to the area to celebrate. Thousands of the event’s participants visited Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom on June 4.

Oh yes, two incomes, no dependents. That means that they have money to spend. But surely Disney don’t want to take the gay money, won’t it turn them gay?

/sarcasm.

On a positive note I think that it is great that the Christian Right are helping to advertise this event. After all it originated as a way to raise awareness of gay issues and to highlight that non-hetero people exist and aren’t just going to disappear because some people can’t accept the fact.

Source

Islamic group MyPeace, which wants to encourage Christians and Muslims to find common ground by raising awareness that Islam believed in Jesus Christ.

Isn’t that nice? Unfortunately for this peaceful attempt at opening dialogue between the faiths the Christians in Sydney don’t like it much.

Bishop Julian Porteous, from the Archdiocese of Sydney, says Christians believe that Jesus “is more than a prophet”…”In Australia with its Christian heritage a billboard carrying the statement `Jesus A prophet of Islam’ is provocative and offensive to Christians.”

Needless to say someone vandalised the billboard.

Christians, if you didn’t know, Islam believes in the same god as the Jews and the Christians. This is the god of Abraham and Isaac. They believe in Jesus, just like you but they have a different take on his divinity. Surely there is some common ground that you can meet on?

Of course not. As an atheist I will just sit back and watch the fireworks while feeling smug and superior to you all. That is what we do after all.

The case has already been rejected by the High Court last year and the Charity Commission.

Now the Charity Tribunal has dismissed the charity’s appeal.

The tribunal said it would be “a loss to society” if the charity stopped its adoption service but said it was “by no means certain” this would happen

I disagree, of course, an adoption agency that actively discriminates and perpetuates a superstitious myth choosing to close isn’t a loss to society. It is good for society. Oh but think of all the children that they help, I hear you cry. Well they manage to place a grand total of five children every year and it would certainly be a pity if any child had to suffer as a result of the Catholic Church and their actions. We all know how much the Catholic Church loves little children.

Let a secular charity pick up their funding. They at least won’t treat gay people who want to adopt like lepers.