Question Richard Dawkins has written: That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Is this valid, logically? If not, what are the consequences? He is talking about religious belief, i.e., belief in some God or other. Dawkins' statement makes sense to me but can any logical argument invalidate it? Would he then have to retract his statement, or is there a gray area between semantics and logic?

Accepted:
January 21, 2008

Comments

I don't know the context of this claim, nor why Dawkins thinks---I take it he does think this---that no-one has any "evidence" for religious belief. Most theistically inclined epistemologists of religion, in the analytic tradition, anyway, think we do have certain kinds of evidence for belief in God. Dawkins might not find the evidence impressive, or he might disagree as to the evidential facts themselves, but it would be a parody of religious faith to think people believe on absolutely no basis. Just for example, suppose one is some kind of coherentist. Then you might think belief in God forms part of an overal "theory" of the world, and the evidence one has for it is that this theory is coherent, more successful than alternative theories, etc. You've got the same kind of evidence for your belief in God, ultimately, as for anything else you might believe, though belief in God, in such a system, will be deeply embedded, like very high-level theoretical claims, rather than towards the periphery, where experience impinges upon it more directly---to borrow some imagery from Quine.

But anyway, yes, if something is (forget about can be) asserted on absolutely no basis whatsoever, then, well, the person doing the asserting might as well just be making stuff up, and we can safely ignore them.