You’re merely proving my point. Cartesianism is shot through with theology. In positing a split between mind and body, Descartes was then left with the problem of how an immaterial mind could form accurate knowledge of the material world. He solved this problem by constructing an ontological proof of a benevolent God and then arguing that a benevolent God would not have created humanity with defective senses. So using Cartesianism to justify agnosticism has serious problems since Cartesian epistemology takes the existence of God as a given. If you remove God as a premise, then Cartesian epistemology falls apart.
The logical positivists DID try to formulate a similar rigorous foundation for knowledge construction in the 1920’s and 30’s. And they did remove God from their epistemology and grounded their notions of truth in bedrock verification procedures. However the positivist position was pretty conclusively demolished by Quine, Popper et al in the 1940’s. I don’t think anyone takes it seriously as philosophy these days, even though a sort of weak, informal positivism continues to suffuse the sciences.
Positivism was very influential in the law and still is.
The fact of the matter is that DeCartes was bound by some essential assumptions from the way he looked at the world, and so are we. Neurologists have done a lot of interesting work on how the human mind fills in the blanks from our very limited perceptions. As humans, we perceive a very narrow slice of the universe and we infer what it is from there. People of all walks of life do this every day in every activity.
As important as bringing the scientific method to our explanation of the world is, it faces many of the same limitations Cartesian-ism and positivism did.
An example of this that occurs to me is the recent Cosmos episode where Tyson (our host) explains that there is no such thing as the color green. Our brains invent the effect of the color green and it indicates what wavelengths of light are absorbed and reflected from that object. Counter-intuitive, but absolutely correct.
But, how could he prove it? That is, how do you know the miracle-working voice in the burning bush is the voice of God and not of Satan, or of Cernunnos, or of some ET prankster with indistinguishable-from-magic technology and a warped sense of humor?
Evidence for what god? Give me a detailed description of the god, goddess or godthing you are talking about, and I will be better able to tell you what I am looking for in the way of evidence.
Except Cartesianism and positivism have gaping holes in them, while science continues to work.
Now, it’s true that there is still argument over WHY science works and what the nature of scientific knowledge is. However, it’s pretty much universally accepted that science is not about PROVING things. Creating an epistemological framework in which scientific truths would be provable (and not provisional) was a big part of what logical positivism was trying to do. And it failed. (Which makes it sort of odd that you would talk about logical positivism as though it was somehow something apart from science.)
Yes, it’s true that we live in a world that bears the legacy of Descartes, Kant and Russell. And so there’s a naive, popular sense that facts about the universe are provable. But this sense is grounded in a theory of knowledge that has been demonstrated to be broken for more than half a century. It would indeed be a big deal that God is unprovable if most things we observe were provable. But since no one has managed to put forward any process or mechanism by which anything observable can be proved, making a big deal out of being unable to disprove one particular thing (God) is silly.
In short, agnosticism is a 19th Century idea that is grounded in an epistemological stance that was shown to be faulty a long time ago. It does not cohere with our modern understanding of what knowledge is or how it is constructed. It certainly does not cohere with modern neuroscience.
This is why there is no SINGLE piece of evidence that would demonstrate the existence of God.
However, I can imagine living in a universe in which the simplest explanation for a wide collection of different events is that they are the product of a benevolent God. Again, it’s not a matter of PROVING that God exists, any more than it’s a matter of PROVING that he doesn’t. It’s a matter of coming up with the most useful provisional explanation for the evidence at hand, and revising that explanation as new evidence presents itself.
If God regularly appeared in front of me and performed miracles, then “God is real” would be a rational working hypothesis. Maybe He’s really prankster aliens or I’m a brain in a vat as part of an experiment. But barring evidence of those alternatives, I have to go with the simplest explanation that accounts for the evidence at hand. Even if He really is prankster aliens or I’m a brain in a vat, “God is real” would still be a useful way to navigate the situations I’m presented with, and so it would be a reasonable belief to hold.
(Just as right now I can’t be sure that my current experiences are not caused by prankster aliens or the product of a virtual reality simulation. I believe that the world is real because that belief allows me to navigate the situations I find myself in, not because I believe the world is real on some ontological level.)
That is true, an atheist could make a positive claim that there is no god and it is up to them to back it up with evidence.
However, and it is a big however. I, along with many, many others are also atheists (i.e. have no belief in god) and yet we do not state that there is no god.
We are* not *making a claim and so in dialogue with us it is theists that have the burden of proof. Until they come up with evidence I’ll simply disregard their arguments out of hand, just as I do the millions of other fantastical things that the human mind can conceive.
If you can’t grasp that simple and yet critical distinction then there really isn’t any meaningful discussion to be had.
If the god that a majority of Christians seem to follow exists, then she/he/it would already know exactly what it would take for me to believe that she/he/it exists, even more than I would know myself.
Shrug. If a being can perform miracles in front of you, “omnipotent” is not a bad working hypothesis. If a being demonstrates that it can do whatever it wants regardless of physical law and the boundaries of time and space, then you might as well treat it as omnipotent, because for all practical purposes it is. If at some point you discover that it’s powers fail in the presence of kryptonite, you’re free to revise your assessment.
Omnipotence can never be a good working hypothesis, because it will always be more plausible that the being is very powerful than that it is omnipotent.
Like, say it turns out that the stories in the Bible were constructed as a result of the fact that an entity created the universe by separating out light from darkness, creating the moon and then the stars, etc. Suppose this being did things described in the Bible in order to help out the Israelites, and took the form of a human being and got crucified etc etc. And suppose the stories about hell etc in the Bible are there because this being really does put people in hell or heaven after they die and so on.
Would this mean the Christians were right, and we should all be Christians now?
Of course not. It wouldn’t prove them right in any meaningful sense at all. Because they go way beyond affirming Bible stories (those that do so, anyway–of course plenty don’t affirm the stories). They affirm the existence of a God who’s omnipotent and omniscient. The Bible does state these things about the being described in it, but even if all the stories about this being were true, none of it would prove, or even give evidence, that he can do absolutely anything and knows absolutely everything. It will always be a more plausible hypothesis that he’s extremely powerful, not that he’s omnipotent, and that he’s extremely knowledgable, not that he’s omniscient.
