Defending Theism

And they desire to extinguish the Light of Allah with their mouths, and Allah will not allow but that His Light should be perfected, even though the unbelievers may dislike it.

The Qur’an [9:32]

The Burden of Proof

In this chapter I take a careful look at some of the popular argument against God, and show them to be severely lacking.  Before doing this it would be instructive to look at the notion of the burden of proof.  When it comes to debating the existence of God, who is it that has the obligation to prove their position?  Atheists typically argue that the onus falls on the believer – it is up to the believer to provide evidence that God exists; otherwise the default position is that of disbelief.  In other words, if there is no proof that God exists, then we ought to be believe that there is no God.  For the sake of argument let’s put aside the earlier discussion that established the rationality of believing certain things even in the absence of argument.  What is the atheist’s justification for taking atheism to be the default position?  Why isn’t agnosticism the default position, i.e. neither affirming nor denying the existence of God, but remaining neutral on the question?

1.       ‘You can’t prove a negative’.

A ‘negative’ is a statement that denies the existence of some particular thing, or denies that some particular thing has certain characteristics.  Atheists commonly claim that it is the believer who bears the burden of proof rather than the disbeliever, because ‘you can’t prove a negative’, and the assertion that ‘God does not exist’ is a negative, so it is not rational to require the atheist to prove their position.  This claim is very easily shown to be false.  You certainly can prove negatives, and here are a few examples.  Take the negative ‘there are no bars of gold in your pockets’.  This is very easily proven by turning out your pockets and not finding any gold bars.  Or take the mathematical claim ‘there is no largest prime number’ – this is a negative that was decisively proven by mathematicians over 2,300 years ago.  In fact mathematics is full of proven negatives.  Or take the claim that there are no married bachelors – this is easily proven by showing that its denial entails a contradiction. 

You might think that the above considerations are bad enough for this burden of proof argument, but it gets worse:  any statement can be reworded to form a negative.  The simplest way to do this is to add a double negation.  For example, the statement ‘Paris is the capital of France’ can be made into a negative by rewriting it as ‘It is not the case that Paris is not the capital of France’.  The latter statement is equivalent to the former, and the same move can be made for all statements.  If the atheist is correct in claiming that negatives cannot be proven, then no statement can be proven, for every statement is equivalent to some negative.  Furthermore, the negative ‘God does not exist’ can be reformulated as the proposition that ‘everything that exists is natural’.  Whilst the former is not strictly identical to the latter in meaning, the latter entails that God does not exist and is typically what atheists believe, and is certainly not a negative claim.  The believer can then ask the atheist to prove that claim instead.

The final nail in the coffin is realisation that ‘you can’t prove a negative’ is itself a negative!  If you cannot prove a negative, then it is not the case that negatives can be proven, so it follows that the very same claim cannot be proven.  It is nothing more than a baseless assertion.

2.       Russell’s Teapot

This refers to an argument that has its inspiration in something Bertrand Russell wrote.  If someone claimed that there was a teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars, but too small to be detectable by our telescopes, then we would want proof for this claim.  If no proof was forthcoming then we would believe that there was no teapot.  Belief in God – the argument claims – is akin to belief in this teapot, i.e. it is irrational.  Dawkins approvingly rehashes this argument in his book The God Delusion whilst arguing against agnosticism:

‘[W]e would not hesitate to declare our strong belief that there is positively no orbiting teapot.  Yet strictly we should all be teapot agnostics: we cannot prove, for sure, that there is no celestial teapot.  In practice we move away from agnosticism towards a-teapotism’

Page 52, The God Delusion

Russell’s teapot is member of a set of supposedly un-disprovable fictional entities, which despite not being disprovable, should still be denied to exist.  Other members include the flying spaghetti monster, the invisible pink unicorn and Santa Clause.  We are told by atheists that the assertion that God exists is like the assertion that these fictional entities exist, and given that the ‘default’ position in the case of the latter is disbelief, the default position in the case of God should also be disbelief.  Hence it is the believer that carries the burden of proof rather than the disbeliever.

Is Dawkins & Co. correct in this claim?  Philosopher Mark Sharlow argues decisively in his paper The End of the Teapot argument for Atheism (and All its Tawdry Imitators) that they are not.  Sharlow asks us to consider the claim that there is an oblong two-cratered rock orbiting somewhere between Earth and Mars.  This rock hasn’t been detected by any of our telescopes, so should we believe that there is no such rock that exists?  Clearly not- we should not deny this rock’s existence, for all we know such a rock does exist.  This raises two questions:  the first is the question of why we are inclined to deny the existence of an orbiting teapot but are much less happy to deny the existence of an oblong two-cratered rock.  And the second is why the existence of God is supposed to be more like the existence of an orbiting teapot rather than the existence of the rock.

The reason that we can deny the teapot but not the rock is because the teapot is intrinsically unlikely to exist in space.  Its existence is improbable relative to our background knowledge, for were such a teapot to exist then the most likely explanations would be someone putting it there, or it forming by chance, both of which are extremely unlikely to happen.  The rock, on the other hand, is not intrinsically improbable.  There is nothing in our background knowledge of the world that would make us think such a rock is unlikely to exist.  This shows that our denial of the teapot’s existence is not simply a product of our lack of evidence for it; rather it is because the existence of such a teapot is improbable to begin with, and we don’t have any evidence that makes it any less improbable.  The same can be said of Santa and the flying spaghetti monster.  Given what we know about the North Pole, humans, Reindeer and Sleighs, it is very unlikely that such a human exists.  Similarly, given that the Universe came into being a finite time ago, it is not plausible to suppose that its creator has the attributes of the spaghetti monster, who is supposed to be made up of matter and exist in time, for then it cannot be the creator of matter and time.  I could say a lot more about why such a creature would be unlikely, but you get the idea – there are independent arguments for why these things are unlikely.

The atheist now owes us an argument.  If he wants us to believe that the existence of God is more like the existence of the teapot rather than the oblong rock, then he has to show why God’s existence is so improbable.  It’s not enough just to claim that God’s existence is like the teapot’s existence – he has to give us an argument.  Such an argument isn’t contained within the teapot argument or within its imitators; they are no more than mere claims of parity between one improbable object and God.  And that’s just not good enough.

3.       'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'

   

      This is a statement made famous by the cosmologist Carl Sagan.  The basic claim is that God is extraordinary, so it is the believer that shoulders the greater burden of proving that He exists.  What is important to realise is that the word ‘extraordinary’ is ambiguous.  One sense of extraordinary is psychologically extraordinary, meaning that it just seems weird or strange to us, but on reflection this is not because there is any good argument contradicting it. This may be because we’ve never thought about it before, or because we’ve grown up in a society that demeans and ridicules this particular claim, and that has created a psychological barrier making it difficult for us to accept it. In this case extraordinary evidence is not required, because the claim does not contradict any evidence, and is only extraordinary for psychological reasons. 

      Another sense is evidentially extraordinary, meaning that it is made unlikely by our background knowledge, or that there is specific evidence contradicting it.  If this evidence is exceptionally strong, then it is right and proper to require extraordinary evidence to counter balance the evidence against it.  So, is God extraordinary in this second sense or merely in the first?  If the latter, then the atheist is wrong to require the believer to carry the burden of proof; it’s not the believer’s problem that atheists have been brainwashed into disbelief.  On the other hand, if the atheist wants to insist that God is extraordinary in the second evidential sense, then he owes us an argument.  Why does he think God is extraordinary in this sense?  What evidence contradicts God’s existence?  It’s no use parroting ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’, what we require is a positive argument.   So by itself, Sagan’s famous maxim is powerless. 

4.      Ockham’s razor

      The fourth and final burden of proof argument that I will discuss is Ockham’s razor.  This states that we shouldn’t multiply entities beyond necessity.  The atheist claims that his atheism is simpler than theism, so per Ockham’s razor, atheism is the default position.  

      It is certainly true that we shouldn’t multiply entities beyond necessity, but what do we mean by ‘beyond necessity’?  We mean that if there is no good reason to posit the existence of another entity, then we shouldn’t.  Let me give an example.  Suppose we have really good evidence that John murdered Harry.  Given Ockham’s razor, we should be content with that, and not posit the involvement of many other people in Harry’s death if we don’t need to.  When would we be entitled to posit the involvement of others?  The answer is:  when it becomes clear that ‘John murdered Harry’ isn’t a sufficiently good explanation of Harry’s death.  This may be because it becomes clear that John isn’t strong enough to murder anyone by himself, for example.  If this was the case and we did posit the involvement of others, this would not violate Ockham’s razor, because we aren’t positing what is ‘beyond necessity’:  other people are required to fully explain what happened; other people are necessary for the explanation to work.

      Coming back to the existence of God - if the atheist wants to claim that positing God violates Ockham’s razor then he has to show that God is not necessary to explain the different features of the world.  This means that the atheist has to refute arguments for the existence of God, as well as giving an account of existence that is plausible without a creator.  Until he has done this, Ockham’s razor cannot be appealed to because he hasn’t shown that God is posited ‘beyond necessity’. 

      The Problem of Evil

tbc