Sandefur: All Epistemologies Are Not Created Equal
Timothy Sandefur has written an excellent piece on why secular (and specifically scientific) thought should not be considered “just another religion.” It’s in response to an article written by Stephen W. Trask in the Chapman University Law School Law Review, but you don’t need to have read that for Sandefur’s shredding of it to make good, and informative, reading. Go ahead and digest it, it won’t take long.
Sandefur: All Epistemologies Are Not Created Equal by I Wish I Knew, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
To play Devil’s Advocate…
While scientific method is hardly a religion – being a process and having nothing to do with faith – atheism should be regarded as a religious position. The certainty to state that there is no God (or spirits, pantheon or whatever) takes as much faith as the certainty to state that such an entity (or entities) does exist.
As for the scientific method – characterised by the sequence of analysis, hypothesis and synthesis – I don’t believe this is yet in a position to categorically state that religion is false. Unlikely, yes, but not yet certainly.
While science has provided alternative hypotheses for incidents such as disease, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, mutation and so on, which have moved on from the hypothesis phase to the synthesis phase with notable success, there are still many phenomena that support several hypotheses, none of which have been satisfactorily proved (ESP, psychosomatic effects – such as the placebo effect, dark matter, the origin of the Big Bang, etc).
To put it another way, whenever mankind discovers a new phenomenon he generates a number of hypotheses – some sensible, some more imaginative. Since we have no means to synthesise the supernatural theories, we experiment with the more mundane options until one fits the facts. If this generates a reliable, repeatable result then we are happy to install it into the body of scientific knowledge.
However, if we have a subject for which no practical hypothesis can be proven then we put it aside until we have developed our understanding to the point where we can test it properly. For instance, we were quite happy to believe in a flat Earth until we had developed methods to test competing theories (advanced seafaring, satellites, etc); the Greeks and those who followed them were happy with their theory of humorism until 19th-century science came up with a better explanation of the biology.
Arthur C Clarke stated: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The same holds for science: until we develop our science to a point where we can analyse certain phenomena then we have to tolerate any hypothesis that is put forward… no matter how absurd. Granted, some theories are more likely than others, but to dismiss them without having a solid alternative requires an act of faith (atheism).
Until our scientific knowledge has developed to the point where we can answer every question there is, then how can we possibly state that something isn’t true? Just because we can’t see or measure it doesn’t mean it can’t be. Our ancestors had no means to sense radio waves and they would be incredulous of the concept. Now we have the technology to measure and propagate this invisible phenomenon we use it as an everyday resource. Couldn’t it be possible that, in years to come, science could discover a means to measure and manipulate a ‘spiritual’ world? It could be that we will develop reliable sensors that can monitor ‘ghosts’, suppress or enhance telepathy or communicate with divine messengers currently beyond our comprehension. Unlikely, but plausable; improbable, but not impossible.
Now, to bring this back into perspective, science has consistently obliterated almost every “supernatural” hypothesis for phenomena that it has encountered – so there is good reason to believe that it will continue to do so in the future. However, the key word here is “believe”. To state that there are no supernatural phenomena is an act of faith, and hence a religion (in the sense you have been using it here). But this doesn’t drag the whole of scientific principle into the realm of faith. There are simply questions that we can’t yet answer.
Back to the subject of science being taught in schools… Science lessons should cover the scientific principle and that body of knowledge that we can confidently say is fact – motion, conservation of energy, blood circulation, geology, astronomy, etc. Those theories that are still under dispute should be kept in the field of debate – alternate dimensions, teleportation, remote viewing, etc. Until we can prove repeatable, reliable results for a theory explaining these phenomena (or even, in some cases, that they actually occur and aren’t simply misunderstood side-effects from other phenomena) then they can hardly be taught as fact – you might as well say that leprechauns make it happen.
Rob
“Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I? And it occurs to me that running a programme like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy in general. Everyone’s going to have their own theories about what answer I’m eventually to come up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than you yourself? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?”
Well, this isn’t really a response to Sandefur’s piece, since he talks exclusively about secularism/science, rather than atheism, but there are definitely some points in here that merit a response, so I guess I’ll step up.
You state that atheism should be considered a religious position; something of an ambiguous term, and, I contend, an inaccurate one. Your rationale for the position is that “The certainty to state that there is no God (or spirits, pantheon or whatever) takes as much faith as the certainty to state that such an entity (or entities) does exist,” but this is both a straw-man argument and inaccurate. Consider: the number of things that may be posited as existing is Infinite, whereas the number of things that actually do exist is merely Vast; it follows that anything posited to exist, in the absence of other evidence, is infinitely more likely not to exist than it is to exist; therefore the only rational response is not to believe in something for which there is no evidence. Yes, there is a condition on that disbelief, that further evidence may alter our judgement in the future, but that caveat applies to all statements of belief or disbelief - I might say I don’t believe there is a hippo in the room with me, and it might sound like a pretty positive assertion of certainty, but in reality you can imagine new evidence that would change my mind; perhaps I’m insane, or aliens have meddled with my brain such that I’m unable to perceive hippos. If all rational belief is subject to review, how is it fair to call atheism a religious position, when you’d make no such judgement about my a-hippo-in-my-living-room-ism?
“Ah,” you might say, “but that’s just it; an atheist’s disbelief in the supernatural isn’t subject to review!” And that would simply be untrue. It’s a straw-man, pure and simple. Atheists do not claim access to a revealed Truth that there is no God, and they do not claim that they can demonstrate the non-existence of God(s); they claim that there is no evidence to suggest that there is a God, making it’s existence (by our current reckoning) infinitely unlikely, and therefore rendering any belief in it irrational.
To put it another way, while your initial statement is true - absolute certainty either way requires faith - you overlook the nature of the unmentioned third position - that of not having faith. On the question of something’s existence, there are two faith positions (absolute yes and no,) but also two non-faith positions; the position of having weighed the evidence and concluded that it does exist, and the position to have done the same and found the evidence lacking. The fact that one of those positions (rational belief) is basically unavailable on the question of God does not invalidate the other; rather it necessitates it for rational people (or - more correctly - for people approaching this question in a rational way.) It’s worth pointing out at this point, that contrary to many of your examples the evidence in this question cannot be scientific; science is predicated on the non-existence of supernatural causes for natural events, so if science works (and lets be honest, it does - xkcd notwithstanding,) that in itself is evidence against the existence of supernatural agents.