Religion

Given that there is no proof for either statement, is it any more valid to say 'there is a God' than it is to say 'there is no God'? Or is the only valid answer 'I don't know if there is a God'?

Comments

As has often been pointed out here, there is no proof for many statements at all, except those in logic and mathematics, and even then the basic premises from which the proof proceeds can , in principle, be questioned. So the fact that there is no proof of either of the statements you mention seems no more relevant than that there is no proof of either "The Bush administration manipulated intelligence about Iraq" or "The Bush administration did not manipulate intelligence about Iraq". In particular, it doesn't imply that one can't justifiably have an opinion about the matter.

There's a common misconception about "proof" -- that if a statement cannot be "proven," then it's equally rational to believe either it or its contradictory. If "prove" means "establish with logical certainty from self-evident first principles", then nothing outside mathematics, logic, and semantics can be proven. Indeed, it's even a matter of controversy whether anything within mathematics, logic, and semantics can be proven. So the class of statements that cannot be proven is very, very big, and includes all of the following: "There is no Santa Claus," "Dogs are animals," "Washington, D.C. is the capital of the United States," and "Salt is soluble in water." But surely you believe all of these things, and would find foolish anyone who withheld judgment about them just because they could not be proven.

So the real issue, for any proposition, is what the arguments are. There are certainly many arguments for the existence of God, and many against, most of which are quite accessible to any thoughtful person (unlike the considerations for and against, say, string theory in physics, which can only be evaluated by experts). Given this, it would only be reasonable to conclude that you didn’t know if the arguments all turned out to be very weak (so that you have no reason to go either way) or if they turned out to be equally strong (so that you have reasons to go in two contradictory directions). I happen to think that there are no good arguments for belief in God (unless you mean something so waffly and vague by "God" that love or the Big Bang counts) and one extremely compelling argument against it -- the argument from evil. [For relevant discussion, see http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/question/1 ]

I get the feeling from some of the people I know who call themselves "agnostics" that they think they are being more modest, or less dogmatic than either theists or atheists. Maybe they think they’re hedging their bets in regard to the afterlife. In any case, I’m the kind of atheist who thinks that God most respects people who apportion their beliefs to the evidence.

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