Topics Religion

Question Most atheists presumably believe that there is insufficient evidence to justify belief in God. What I want to ask is: is there ANY evidence? Or none at all? Is there anything that the panelists might point to and say, "this counts as evidence that God exists"?

Accepted:
May 22, 2008

Comments

I don't know of any good reason to believe in God; and, judging by the fact that this question has gone unanswered for more than a week now, it would appear that my fellow panellists don't know of any either.

I suppose a theist might say something like the following. Just look around you! Absolutely everything you experience constitutes evidence for the existence of God. The fact that anything exists at all entails that there must have been a creator. The fact that things display such a precise adaptation and organisation entails that this creator must have been an intelligent designer. 'Inference to the best explanation' is a standard mode of argument that is adopted throughout science and other domains, and this would be presented as just another instance of that kind of inference. The data in this case is the evidence our experience provides us of the way the world is; the conclusion is that a certain kind of God exists; and the argumentative move between the two relies on the principle that, of all the various possible explanations for those data, any one of which could be true, the theistic hypothesis is the one that, if true, would provide the best explanation of the data, and consequently is the one that is most likely actually to be true. Pinning down precisely what makes one candidate explanation qualify as 'better' than another is tricky: but, personally, I'd be inclined to say that the kinds of explanations that scientists provide (Big Bang theory, evolution, etc.) are massively superior in just about every way to explanations drawn up in terms of the supernatural activity of a transcendent deity; and hence that it is the former that are more likely to be true.

Sorry, I didn't see this one, or I'd certainly have said something about it.

Unsurprisingly, different people have different views about what the evidence for God's existence might be. And, for that matter, very different conceptions of who or what God is. Most of the suggestions Jasper considers are familiar and ancient, and still popular. And I'll agree with him: pretty unconvincing.

But there are other views. Speaking just for myself, I'm not really sure if I'd say there was any "evidence" of God's existence. It's not that I don't think there's any reason to believe that God exists. I do. It's rather that I don't think I could describe my reasons in terms of "evidence". I suppose that much of my own conviction lies in my personal experience of the divine. But of course I don't expect anyone else to find that convincing, and such experiences aren't like (say) visual experiences, where you can just say, "Well, look for yourself". And I wouldn't want to model this, as some philosophers have, on some analogy with the way perceptual experience justifies perceptual beliefs. What I mean by "an experience of the divine" isn't an experience of God, in the sense that one is in touch with God, the way one can be in perceptual contact with an apple. It's something quite different, and I don't know of any way to give literal expression to such experiences. But this sort of mystical experience has been the subject of a great deal of fabulous art. All of which is to say that, to my mind, the best analogy would be not to visual experience, the way philosophers usually talk about it, but to aesthetic experience. (That's an idea that has been developed by others, perhaps most famously, Kant.) As a result, I tend to think that talking about whether God exists is generally a waste of time. God cannot be understood or encompassed in that sort of langauge. Poetry would be a better bet.

So, in the end, I guess I think "evidence" just isn't the right notion here. But what the right notion is, I'd be hard pressed to say.

I am an atheist, but I think that before Darwin I probably would have been convinced by the Design (teleological) argument to believe in at least a Deistic God. Without the theory of evolution by natural selection to explain the wonders of nature, a creator God may have been the best explanation for the (apparent) design of living organisms.

Today, however, the best argument available for the existence of God seems to be a modern version of the Design argument (NOT intelligent design) called the 'fine tuning' argument. It claims that there are astronomically many ways that the fundamental physical constants of the universe could have been and that the vast majority of these ways would lead to a universe without the requisite materials for the evolution of life (e.g., matter, stars, planets, etc.). So, the fact that the universe has the 'right' physical constants for these materials and hence for evolution and hence for the evolution of intelligence is supposed to be evidence that a creator made it so. I think there are some mathematical looking proofs about this.

The best responses to this argument are (from what little I know of the debates): (1) the physical constants are, for some reason, necessary not contingent, so they had to be what they are; (2) the anthropic principle, which says that the chances of the universe having the right constants to allow for intelligent life given the existence of intelligent life to observe the universe (and raise these sorts of questions) is exactly ... 1. So, that we exist is not improbable, certainly if we consider that there may be lots of universes in the 'multiverse.' Indeed, we should expect to be in just the one that allows for us to exist! But I've not looked to see if there is a response to this response that says something like this: there is reason to believe (or some argument) that there is in fact (can only be?) one universe, so the fact that the one universe is tuned to allow for intelligent life is improbable. The anthropic response still makes sense here, but the best explanation for the constants being what they are might involve a designer.

I didn't respond earlier mainly because it was that time of year when college teachers are worried about grading exams and such. But I'm with Richard on this one: I find many of the discussion of evidence around this question not altogether helpful. There is, of course, evidence for God's existence, but then there can be evidence in favor of claims that we ultimately reject. so if the only question were whether there is any evidence at all the answer would be easy. But many thoughtful believers don't to believe because they're convinced by some quasi-scientific argument. They believe because as it seems to them, belief in God makes the most sense of things entire.

There's a way of misunderstanding that. Non-believers often think of believers as offering something akin to a scientific hypothesis, meant to explain the details of the physical world, and that is one strain of traditional theological thought. But I don't think it has a lot to do with the outlook of the typical believer. As Richard points out, it's hard to capture what animates the believer in resolutely literal terms. When a believer talks of God as that in which she "lives, moves and has her being," she's not talking about the air or the electromagnetic field.

This sometimes frustrates and annoys non-believers. They accuse the believer of self-deception, or foggy thinking, or disingenuousness. The believer may feel a bit like someone who's been asked to explain why she enjoys abstract expressionist painting or why he loves his spouse. It's not as though there's nothing to say, but it doesn't really feel like a subject for argument and evidence in the ordinary sense either.

There's a good deal more to be said here and trying to say it in short compass would do violence to the subject. But another analogy may help: it would be odd to look for evidence that there is such a thing as cause and effect, understood in a way that goes beyond mere patterns of correlation among events. Philosophers who aren't satisfied with a thin account of cause and effect of the sort often called Humean can't cite scientific evidence, because the background notion of causation is part of how they understand evidence. And while they can offer reasons of various sorts, these reasons are hardly probabative. What we might call "realists" about causation are probably realists because it seems to them that overall, this way of looking at things makes the most sense of things.

By the way: you may wonder if I speak as a believer. My answer would be that I find myself without a commitment on these questions, and without any sense that I need one. You might call that agnosticism, but that doesn't seem to me to get it right either, since what many people who call themselves agnostic tend to be agnostic about doesn't exactly seem to me to be worth fighting over. Suffice it to say that I can be quite comfortable participating in religious services, and don't worry too much about what it means when I do. This puzzles and even annoys some of my fellow philosophers. Just between you and me, I've been known to get a certain good-humored pleasure from that fact.

Question Most atheists presumably believe that there is insufficient evidence to justify belief in God. What I want to ask is: is there ANY evidence? Or none at all? Is there anything that the panelists might point to and say, "this counts as evidence that God exists"? Accepted:May 22, 2008

Question Most atheists presumably believe that there is insufficient evidence to justify belief in God. What I want to ask is: is there ANY evidence? Or none at all? Is there anything that the panelists might point to and say, "this counts as evidence that God exists"?

Accepted:
May 22, 2008