This one is going to be rather personal for me, unlike the previous dozen entries.  But, hey, after all, this is my blog.  Besides, it’s the thirteenth entry … doo-doo doo-doo, doo-doo doo-doo …

The reason this post is so personal is because the crux of it is a controversial evaluation of available evidence I’ve made.  What I’m referring to here was given away pretty clearly in the title, but I’ll make you keep reading to see precisely what the story is.  If you have also thought about this issue critically and came to the opposite conclusion, I’d like to hear about it.  This isn’t my normal pitiable panhandling for comments on something I’ve written; I truly would like to hear your thoughts on this.  I’ve thought about this quite a bit over the course of my life (what can I say, I’m a nerd and a geek … I think about stuff a lot), and I’d be interested to hear what someone that came to the opposite conclusion would have to say about it.

I recently decided to begin calling myself an atheist, rather than my usual response to faith-based queries: “oh, I was raised Catholic.”  I thought about this a lot, and realized that I gave this response because I didn’t want to offend the person asking the question.  Someone who asks about your faith is probably religious themselves, and saying “raised Catholic” effectively says nothing about your beliefs but forges some kind of bond between you and them.  At least you were once religious like them, and odds are they are also Christian (and maybe even Catholic) like you used to be.

I decided to stop dancing around my (lack of) beliefs because I have a right to them, and I shouldn’t feel pressured to keep them to myself.  No religion deserves a sanctified place in our society, and so I should not hide my beliefs lest they offend other peoples’ beliefs.  That’s to say nothing of the simple fact that my atheism shouldn’t offend anyone else, especially since I’m not trying to ‘convert’ people or anything like that.  I don’t know whether or how this is going to affect me socially, because the only tangible occurrence that’s come of this decision was to put Atheist in the previously-empty Religion box in my Facebook profile.  I’ll keep you posted if anything does happen with it.

All That Having Been Said …

Enough about me, onto this week’s statement.  This argument is intriguing because it can come from both sides of the issue.  A skeptic could say this to an atheist, by way of the argument that science cannot prove a negative.  Since science cannot ever definitively disprove the existence of a supernatural deity, agnosticism is the only valid belief system if you do not accept the evidence for deities.  A religious person could also throw this argument at a skeptical atheist, in an effort to liken atheism to religiosity.  Since there is no proof for atheism, believing in atheism is just as un-skeptical as believing in a god quote-unquote “without proof.”

As you can probably imagine, both sides consider this pretty clever.  It sounds like ‘skeptical atheist’ is an oxymoron!  Oh snap!  Well, I actually think that this is a complete non-issue.  As we’ve seen before, the devil is in the details.  (Well, he would be … if he were real.)

You’ve Got No Proof!

Each angle of this argument can be summed up as the following statements: “you can’t prove that god doesn’t exist” and “you can’t prove atheism.”  The arguers here are ultimately trying to make atheism into a belief system, since it cannot be scientifically proven.  I don’t believe (heh) that this is a matter of belief, but rather a matter of non-belief.  Let’s take these statements one at a time.

“You Can’t Prove That God Doesn’t Exist”

What we have here is skepticism run amuck, with a touch of postmodernism thrown in for good measure.  (There’s probably a better and more succinct way to describe this, but I’m no philosopher.)  This argument promoting agnosticism towards a deity could be applied to anything.  Let’s steal Russell’s Teapot, a china teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars.  We have no proof whatsoever that Russell’s Teapot doesn’t exist, but it would be absurd to argue that one ought to be agnostic towards it.  To steal another religion debate favorite, we also have no proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster does not exist.  [Insert joke about His Noodly Appendage here.]  Should we be agnostic towards the FSM, since there is no proof for apastafarianism?

In my opinion, a skeptic scoffing at an atheist has crossed that cynical curmudgeon line we talked about in my first few posts.  (Though, interestingly, they’re crossing the line walking backwards, in that their curmudgeonry leads to very nearly the opposite result that Michael Shermer alluded to in his quote.)  Their argument implies that everyone ought to be agnostic towards everything except that which has been proven to exist, up to and including the undetectable fairies frolicking on the bobbleheads on my desk.  Or are they angels?  I don’t know; it’s tough to tell.

Skepticism in no way mandates agnosticism towards every unproven hypothesis ever proposed; provisionally rejecting claims is completely acceptable.  I would actually argue that this ought to be encouraged to an extent, lest we waste our time endlessly retesting crummy hypotheses on the off chance that they might get proven right someday.  (I’d make a comment about my scapegoat pseudoscience, Bigfoot, but I’d like to continue stifling the cryptozoology taunting until I at least write an entry on it.)

As for my offhand comment about postmodernism, I’ll admit that I’m referring to a philosophy I know very little about.  My extremely limited understanding of its overall premise can be summed up as the following: nothing can be truly proven or falsified because science and logic are social constructs.  In five words (all I’m going to grant the subject at this time): I think this is rubbish.

“You Can’t Prove Atheism”

The other side of this coin, “there is no proof for atheism,” sounds quite analogous but is subtly different.  It’s trying to turn atheism into a hypothesis unto itself, when really atheism is just the null hypothesis of theism.  Hence the term: a-theism.  Thus, what this statement does is get the concept of proving hypotheses exactly backwards.  The burden of proof is on the hypothesizer, not the skeptic.  If the hypothesis is that a theistic god exists, then I do not think the available evidence proves that the hypothesis is true.  You cannot prove a negative, because one can always technically argue that the evidence is somewhere out there.  All you can do is provisionally decide that the hypothesis isn’t correct, and ask the true believers to give you a call when (or if) they find something interesting.

The statement that you cannot prove atheism really doesn’t amount to a whole lot.  It’s probably just a case of projection.  A religious person saying this to an atheist is attempting to make atheism out to be just another belief system.  What’s funny about this is that someone making this argument is running full-tilt at a brick wall of logic.  Let’s imagine for a moment that religious people did somehow prove that atheism is also a belief system.  This would do nothing for their ultimate hypothesis that their (or any) deity exists.  All they’ve done is commit the tu quoque fallacy: “well, you’re a true believer, too.”  Such a proof would have precisely zero bearing on the theistic hypothesis, it would only show that atheism is just another one of the countless religions out there.

Curmudgeons and Projectors

Atheism is a bit of a hot topic in skepticism.  Many skeptics feel that atheism ought to be a major part of the skeptical movement, while others think that this would be a mistake for a variety of reasons.  I consider myself part of the latter camp, which is why I prefaced this entry with a disclaimer about this being a personal matter.

I don’t think you need to be an atheist to be a skeptic.  Nor do I think you need to be agnostic to be a skeptic, regardless of what any cantankerous skeptics or silver-tongued theists might argue.  And finally, I don’t think that theism and skepticism are incompatible.  If you’ve evaluated the evidence for theism and concluded that it is correct, that’s your skeptical prerogative.  I personally disagree with you, but your conclusion is provisionally fine.  Just like mine.