Tue, 12 Jul 2011
Verificationism Again
When I hear a New Atheist claim that science is based on evidence, but religion is just a matter of blind belief, I get a little peeved. Well, more than a little peeved. I want to grab the person and shake them and say, "Don't you realize that what you are saying doesn't make any sense!" Well, I can't reach through the Internet and shake someone, but I can try to make my point of view as clear as I can.
First, the argument is based on a dichotomy, I would argue a false dichotomy. It is the New Atheist view that all statements can either be empirically tested or are mere statements of belief. An example of the first is "the sky is blue" and of the second is "your soul will go to heaven when you die." It is not clearly obvious that this dichotomy is true, for there statements such as "this can be proven" (math), "this is beautiful" (aesthetics), "this is fair" (theory of justice), and "this is moral" (ethics) that seem neither to be empirically testable or mere matters of belief. But leaving these statements aside, what about the New Atheists proposition itself, "all statements can either be empirically tested or are mere statements of belief"? Is it an empirical statement or not? If it is not, the proposition stands refuted. So let us assume it can and ask what empirical proof of it would look like. First, because be the statement contains the word "all", it is not open to empirical proof by inspection. So it must be an inductive proof, of the sort that is used for similar universal statements in science. But one cannot examine statements like one could examine crows to see if they are all black. The notion that one could establish the dichotomy by induction is absurd. How would one go about choosing a representative sample of statements?
