Several years ago, long before this site ever existed and once hosted somewhere long since dead, I had written a very pointed and brief thought-piece about “The Arrogance of Atheism.” It had garnered the attention of Austin Reed Cline, a Regional Director for the Council for Secular Humanism and editor of the Atheism section of the About.com web portal, who had published an excoriating and profoundly inaccurate review of my article. Some time last year I decided to resurrect that piece and republish it here, and to include not only Cline’s rebuttal but my response to him as well.

Around that same time I extended an invitation for Cline to interact with me on the response I had composed. His response can be found in the comments to the relevant article at his portal here, and the remainder of this article is my answer to him.

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In the original article published at our web site, we had addressed the question, “How is God relevant anymore, now that we have science?” If you have not read that original article, it might be best that you do, since this follow-up article shall be addressing a rebuttal offered by someone from AtheistForums.org named Tavarish. (His real name is withheld out of respect for his privacy, as he has not disclosed it publically.)

Although Tavarish had a lot to say, he could have spared himself a significant amount of writing because, for some curious reason, nearly half of his rebuttal was devoted to articulating what the scientific method truly is and how it is engaged. He could have spared himself all that writing because not only do I understand the scientific method already but, more importantly, that had nothing to do with what my article had to say. In other words, he invested a tremendous amount of writing in describing what the flashlight is and how to properly use it, whereas my article simply took those sort of issues for granted in order to address an antecedent issue: the fact that the flashlight works in the first place and how to account for that. I think Tavarish was very forceful and clear in his rebuttal, but unfortunately he was rebutting something other than my article. If he wants to make his stand on when a theory is scientific and when it is not, he might be surprised to find me standing beside him. Quite simply, the issue was never the demarcation problem, despite his attempt to insist otherwise, but rather the foundations upon which science rests (taking for granted what science is).

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“Why do we need a God when we have science?” he asked.

My mind immediately responded with, “Because in God we find solid answers to a host of questions that science cannot even ask, much less answer.” That is not what I would say to him, though, because I expect that his question was a bit off the cuff, a little too hastily phrased. I expect that his question really was, “How is God relevant anymore, now that we have science?”

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In a November 2006 interview with Time Magazine, Dawkins gets it so miserably wrong;

TIME [Magazine]: Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?

DAWKINS: The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1553986-2,00.html

In depth discussions of epistemology aside, I believe Dawkins is making a category error which results in a conclusion that does not logically follow from the premise. You see science, which is limited to observations of interactions within the “natural” world, is being used to come to the conclusion that a “supernatural” creator does not exist. Or put another way, if it turns out that science doesn’t have the tools to “test” for the existence of supernatural things, then it stands to reason that it cannot be used to come to the conclusion that a supernatural creator does not exist. I think that’s fairly straight-forward.

Thinking that science (defined as it is within a materialistic framework) can be used to make such conclusions on questions like this, is like concluding that chickens have no weight because the thermometer we used to investigate this question failed to provide any answers. Science can only deal with physical things governed by physical laws. So by very definition then, science cannot directly address the question of whether non-physical things, like God, exist or not. Such a question is outside its capabilities.

But there is another point to be made here concerning the use of reason and logic. Reason and logic, it turns out, are tools that science depends upon, yet they are not physical things that science can test. To illustrate, what scientific experiment could you do to verify reason? Can you put it in a test tube and watch what happens when it’s heated? Can you measure its diameter or weight, or check it’s reaction to various external stimuli? No of course not. Instead science must assume the presence of immaterial things such as reason and logic to be able to make a scientific case for anything! They must therefore rely on the presence of the immaterial to make sense of the material. But that’s not all folks! Not only must atheists like Dawkins assume that reason and logic exist to be able to do the science that he thinks disproves the existence of God, but he must also assume that his own mind (another non-physical entity) can make accurate assessments pertaining to these non-physical things, which if anything, implies the existence of God, rather than evidence against. No amount of high-tech lab equipment can take a sample of reason or a few milligrams of logic, put it under the microscope and test its properties. These are things that only a mind can grasp and put to use, because minds, like thoughts, reason and logic, are not physical things. In other words they’re real, but not physical.

So if reason and logic and the mind are immaterial things that we know exist, even though we know science cannot possibly test them, then is it at all correct for Dawkins to claim that the answer to the question, “Does God Exist?” is a scientific one to which the “answer is no”? Absolutely not! This is a category error. It’s like trying to weigh a chicken with a thermometer. Science can teach us some pretty awesome things about the universe that God created (and to a certain point, about God Himself), but science alone can never disprove God. It’s not a scientific question.

So during a conversation on an Atheism message board I made a shocking statement which I thought would stir a hornet’s nest of activity, and yet surprisingly almost none of the participants gave it any attention. One atheist had said that science relies on the assumption of ‘materialism’, which he described as the view that only material things exist. I corrected him by pointing out that science, in as much as it is occupied with the study of natural causes and events, obviously relies on the assumption that material things exist, but not on the assumption that only material things exist. Even if it turns out that metaphysical naturalism is false, we would still have science because material things do exist. What I said next should have created a flurry of activity, and yet for some reason it didn’t: that metaphysical naturalism is already considered bollocks and for extremely good reasons, but science continues unabated (thus proving my point).

Yet of the atheists involved in that discussion, there was only one who took issue with my comment, an outcome which defied the predictions of my experiences. But at any rate, what I wish to share with you here is the conversation that occurred between me and that one atheist, the outcome of which was even more unexpected.

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Over at his blog, Dr. James Anderson recently announced a 50% discount being offered for a very limited time by P&R Publishing on the festschrift in honour of John Frame, Speaking the Truth in Love: The Theology of John M. Frame (2009), with expository and analytical essays from 36 contributors on Frame’s own work in the fields of theology, apologetics, ethics, etc. (including Wayne Grudem, Paul Helm, Vern Poythress, James Anderson and more). The discount expires 31 March 2010, so get your copy soon. See the Table of Contents and a sample chapter (PDF).

(HT: Chris Bolt at Choosing Hats.)

I can state without any sense of reservation that I really admired Carl Sagan as a popularizer of science. I miss him terribly and still cherish his remarkable legacy. The television series Cosmos, which he co-wrote with Ann Druyan, ignited my endless fascination with cosmology and astrophysics. Three of his books—Broca’s Brain, Pale Blue Dot, and Contact—are among the most tattered books on my shelf because I have read them so many times, and the latter still remains one of my favourite science fiction novels. (Even though the 1996 movie was really good, it just could not compare since, for obvious reasons, the book was able to explore nuances and depths that no movie ever could. And the plot device he turned π into? Pure genius!)

But his dictum that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” has come to irritate me something fierce, for no other reason than it ended up getting hijacked by parochial sycophants who are so remarkably irresponsible with it. It is inordinately popular with atheists because it feels in their hands like an impenetrable firewall shielding them against any and all theistic claims, but they wield the dictum horribly oblivious to a crucial handicap: they never bother to define univocal criteria for either what an extraordinary claim is or what extraordinary evidence looks like. The former is usually embellished with synonyms that never amount to a defining criterion, while the latter often gets positioned as anything that will not admit the supernatural. (For example, they usually posit circumstances or phenomena that never preclude possible natural explanations—e.g., God rearranging the stars to spell his name—being fenced in by Clarke’s Third Law on one side and Occam’s Razor on the other, for the evidence is always restricted to the empirical.) But also irritating is the audacious conceit of their demand, as if somehow their own intellectual sanction is a necessary instrument of validation for whatever claim was aired in their presence. “Without sufficient evidence to support your claim,” they usually say, “I am not able to believe it.” That may well be the case but, not to put too fine a point on it, what makes you think your belief is relevant or even required?

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LAST UPDATED: 7 September 2009

PREFACE: The following article was originally published in three different places, two which died internet deaths and one that still exists as an inactive blog. [1] Shortly after publication it caught the attention of Austin Reed Cline, a Regional Director for the Council for Secular Humanism and editor of the Atheism section of the About.com site, who published an excoriating and profoundly inaccurate review thereof. [2]

I invited Cline to interact with me on the subject because I intended to compose a rebuttal and wanted his input before publication; I also asked if he would be willing to provide a link to my rebuttal. On both counts he refused, and with some rather insulting remarks. So I had to complete my rebuttal without any input from Cline. Unfortunately that rebuttal was published at one of those now-dead locations, a web site that died when my hosting company went out of business.

I am republishing the original article here along with a new rebuttal against Cline (which I will finish by this weekend) for the thoughtful consideration of our readers and members. Please feel free to weigh in with your thoughts on my original point, on Cline’s review, and on my rebuttal.

Original Article (27/Jan/2005):

The really frustrating thing about most atheists, at least those who enjoy debating against Christian theism, is that they presuppose the truth of their system of belief and then tacitly insist their Christian opponent work within the framework of that system. In other words, the Christian is expected to provide arguments in defense of Christian theism which accord with the atheist’s epistemology in particular and world view in general. This is implicitly demonstrated in challenges such as, "Provide evidence that God exists." The relevance of evidence, and even what constitutes evidence, are defined by his system of thought.

However, if it is permissible for the atheist to presuppose the truth of his system of thought and expect the Christian to work within the framework of that system, then it is also permissible for the inverse of that situation. Otherwise, the atheist would shoulder the epistemic responsibility for explaining why the only presuppositions permitted in the field of debate are his own—and I would not anticipate a rational argument for that.

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