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Whose Line Is It, Anyway?: The Question of God and the Burden of Proof I don’t believe in Nessie. I’ve made a casual review of the alleged evidence and simply think there is no good reason to believe that there is a serpentine creature splashing about Loch Ness. If you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, then the burden of proof is on you to produce the evidence. In the absence of compelling evidence, the default position is disbelief. The same may be said of faeries, Bigfoot and the monster under the bed. My atheist friends wish to say the same thing about my belief in God. “It is the theist that makes the positive assertion that there is a God. And so the burden of proof is upon him to put up or shut up.” In the absence of compelling evidence for the existence of God, the default position is disbelief—atheism. And so, the average village atheist adopts the strategy of the moray eel: he backs into a corner, concealing all vulnerabilities and exposing only his fighting side, and thus waits for unsuspecting theists to venture by with their reasons for belief in God. Once our atheist is satisfied that he has sufficiently shredded any arguments his prey has to offer—and personally subjected him to merciless ridicule—he retires to his cranny to await the next victim. Witness, for instance, the vitriolic writings of a Christopher Hitchens. Or pay a visit to an internet forum where religion is discussed. The atheist is no more compelled, he thinks, to offer up any positive arguments of his own for a godless universe than I am obliged to account for a Nessie-less loch. In this he is mistaken. There is a disanalogy between the question of Nessie and the question of God, and it becomes evident once we imagine a crestfallen Nessie enthusiast confronting the hardnosed skeptic with the question, “If you don’t believe in Nessie, what DO you believe in?” One may reply flippantly: “Well, there are herrings and puffins, albatrosses and Scottish ales, and lots of other stuff, too.” Only flippant people offer flippancy in answer to the question of God. Whether there is a prehistoric creature abiding in the depths of a lake raises interesting questions about what kinds of things there are in this world. Whether there is a God raises the question of what kind of world this is. Deny Nessie and nearly all else remains fixed and unaltered. Deny God and either you have stood the world on its head or you have righted it. If Nessie does not exist, then there is one less item on the inventory. If God does not exist, then everything on that inventory has an entirely different reckoning. Richard Dawkins has said somewhere, “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” This leaves the impression that the question of God is something like a census: Does the world include one more denizen than the Professor for the Public Understanding of Science is prepared to acknowledge? But whether Olympus is inhabited is more like the question of what is in the Loch. Chesterton was surely right in noting that the old myths may have provided men with a calendar—with annual festivities and formalities—but never a creed that forms the core of a comprehensive worldview and is even worth dying for if need be. “Thor may have been a great adventurer but to call him a god is like trying to compare Jehovah with Jack and the Beanstalk.” I would be astonished to learn that Superman is real. But even if so, it is not in him that we live and move and have our being. If God does not exist—if theism is false—then some other comprehensive worldview must be true. Presumably, our atheist believes that worldview is naturalism—the view that reality is exhausted by the kinds of things that are the subject of study through the empirical sciences. But then, the atheist really is charged with the task of defending naturalism; not merely fending off would-be arguments for God. And the devil is in the details. With God’s departure we are left with little more than atoms in the void, and the job of explaining the world strictly in terms of them is to be told to make bricks with no straw. For one thing, it is difficult to see how conscious and autonomous persons could be engineered from Big Bang debris—particularly when the would-be engineer is truant. A part of the trouble is that the essentially first-person feature of our experience, such as what it feels like to be in pain, resists description in the essentially third-person language and perspective of science. No amount of language about tissue and nerve damage or the firing of C-fibers comes close to describing the conscious, painful experience itself. No amount of examination of the contents of a living person’s skull reveals her experiences as they are to her, and this is true even if we believe we have found strong correlations between certain forms of brain activity and certain conscious experiences as reported by her. Attempting consistency with this overall naturalist perspective, philosopher Susan Blackmore wrote, “I have become quite uncertain as to whether there really is anything it is like to be me.” This is the consistency of Chesterton’s mad man who, though relentlessly logical in following through with the implications of his initial assumptions, ought, in fact, to have rejected those assumptions. It is common knowledge that atheists have no place for any sort of teleology or purposive decision at the cosmic level: “Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving,” Bertrand Russell said. But, on naturalism, the same is true of my decision to order a beer. Naturalism banishes teleology from the universe from top to bottom, so that the seeming purposive behavior of common life is in fact the outworking of chains of micro-mechanisms that are utterly blind to their outcome. It is not just Dawkins’ Cosmic Watchmaker that is blind. The same is ultimately true of the guy who fixed my Timex. If you do not think that naturalists are in a funk these days regarding the problem of consciousness, then you have not been reading. It is not merely that, given the relative infancy of the empirical sciences, we do not yet know how the feat could have been accomplished. This is the common refrain and, in many cases, it is suggestive of paying a debt with a bad check. It is the naturalistic equivalent to the religious believer’s “But God can do anything.” Rather, many of us think that we do know now why the feat can never have been accomplished. Perhaps the bricks and straw metaphor should be updated: it is rather like being contracted to craft a functioning stealth bomber from a ponderous slab of cream cheese. The project is not likely to get off the ground, but is very likely to ooze onto the tarmac. Add to all of this the notorious difficulty of attempting to derive real value from an essentially valueless universe. After asserting that we are the product of blind forces and are but the outcome of “accidental collocations of atoms,” Russell asked, “How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished?” How, indeed? The young author of that essay went on to offer a rather optimistic account that assumed a sort of “heaven” of moral ideals. But the older Russell came to see, with the help of atheist philosopher George Santayana, that such ideals are incompatible with atheism. The choices, as presented by the latter philosopher, were to keep the heaven of ideals but acknowledge God as resident there, or to reject both God and heaven and thus reject the reality of moral values. Russell took the latter course. In surveying these few potential problems for the naturalist, my point is not to argue that naturalism is false or that theism is true, though I do think that naturalism is false and theism is true. Rather, it is to make an observation regarding the true nature of the debate. To suggest that there is a “presumption of atheism” is, at the same time, to suggest a presumption of naturalism. And that is highly presumptuous. It is no good declaring neutrality. Glib and negative appraisals of theism are no substitute for offering a positive accounting of how the world might have acquired its texture from only the elements that are admissible on naturalism. And this requires the moray to emerge from his crevice and expose his own vulnerabilities. muddle's blog | login to post comments
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