I cannot count how many times the equation has been made that since there is "not a shred of evidence" that God exists, people must be delusional who believe that such a God exists. My question to this is usually, What kind of evidence do you need to satisfy your taste for knowledge? That most people who have lived in human history have believed in some form of deity, many of whom claiming to have intimate experience with a deity, is not good enough. That is not evidence at all. The answer is that if God exists, we need to be able to put God to the same kind of testing we can accomplish with any other physical object. To make a believer out of an atheist with naturalist persuasions what is needed is some kind of magical demonstration that supports the hypothesis that a God exists. This is usually a God who can perform such magic on the known physical world by suspending the laws of science as we currently understand them.
Is this the only kind of knowledge that is reliable and/or reasonable? This is a sort of logical positivist argument that is rehashed over and over. Propositions about reality must be logically tied to each other and empirically provable. Why? On what basis is this so highly esteemed other than by an arbitrary and rather phantom understanding of reality? Do we really live our rational lives by this means? Is everything you do that is reasonable logically tied to something and empirically provable? And further, what kinds of empirical evidence pass muster here?
Physics, biology, and chemistry tend towards the place of prominence in this sort of questioning. Yet sociology is also scientific and rooted in empirical data. Psychology is the same way. If we look at the social sciences this is where odd judgments from the atheist naturalist come to play. These social-empirical judgments cannot really be tested since they are fundamentally non universal and not tied to specific objects other than people. So why is it that one is better than the other? Social sciences deal with such very different objects in reality and have such different rational processes in the course of an investigation that it is assumed they are inferior. Dawkins introduces new criteria for delusions because he believes the social sciences have given religion a "free pass." Perhaps this is because they are not the same kind of science Dawkins wishes they were? The humanities are even worse off. One kind of knowledge is judged to be superior here and no empirical test can prove it logically. This is a matter of taste.
This is what ne0-atheist assertions boil down to: taste. Values are shaped by far more sources than the kind of empiricism that many an atheist argument will level against the notion of God as a reality. While some concepts that prove to be powerful in the shape of our worldview such as love, it seems that it is reasonable to have these concepts and dispositions shape a worldview so long as there is an empirical object around which such concepts and dispositions form. So I can actually produce a physical object like my wife or kids to substantiate my feeling of love. But is it only the issue of whether or not there is an actual object? Can I love justice? Can I love compassion? Can I love peacefulness? Can I love the experience of my relationship with my family? Not the person mind you, the relationship itself. Do these concepts need to have some kind of empirical object for that love not to be "delusional"? Concepts like these depend on how one measures the term. Justice and compassion for one are likely to be different than for another. These are socially constituted terms that pack different social functions and meanings that are contextual for which we can only measure differences, set criteria, and then make predictions on human behavior from there. So are we then delusional to love justice or compassion?
On the one side is it only acceptable to rely on experience given that there are objects that meet some kind of universal criteria regulated by scientific discipline that are logically tied. It is only rational not to believe in God under that rubric. By another view, it does not seem all that rational not to believe in God given by such an arbitrary constraint imposed on what one can rationally experience in terms of those criteria alone. One will say "Why God?" and claim delusion. The other side says "Why not God?" and sees arbitrary limits on what humans are capable of understanding. Finding a deep connection in human experience that is constitutive of a reasonable worldview is not by necessity constrained to the atheist naturalistic criteria.
I happen to think the latter is more reasonable because we simply do not know why everything is the way it is, we may never be satisfied with our explanations, we may never come to any empirical conclusion about God or any sacred reality, and even science reveals on a progressive course that there is always something more to reality that we can currently perceive. It is the experience of a living God that makes sense of this progressive revelation of the very structure of reality in which we live, and are shaped.
Related posts:
