A Holiday Message From Ricky Gervais: Why I’m an Atheist
And since I had a few entries about religion on my previous log, I figured this would be a good topic with which to initialize this one. So, here are the interesting excerpts:
I don't believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence ...
[Science] knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence ...
Now, before I go on, let me say that I like and agree with Mr. Gervais' points... all but this one I'm about to pick at. And I have to pick at it... it's like a scab.... itching and itching... and even when I do scratch and pick at it, it never stops itching.
Mr. Gervais pulls "science" out of thin air without even seeming to know what the word means. Let me state it as plainly as possible. Science doesn't prove things to be true. It proves things to be false. Science does NOT know what it knows. It cannot know anything. It only knows what it does NOT know. (Let's allow all that anthropomorphizing of science as if it's a purposeful entity for awhile. Science doesn't do or know anything... people do and know things.)
Science has nothing to say about the existence of God or the gods because there is no testable, falsifiable hypothesis for the existence of God or gods. There are falsifiable and falsified hypotheses for the properties of particular gods. And the more specific hypotheses we falsify about particular gods, the more abstract, remote, and metaphysical the definitions of the gods become. True believers can always run, from science, to their permanently safe metaphysics.
Now, there is a practical line between mere belief and the ability to persuade. And science can be invoked in this context. Science, being a behavior, a process, can be transmitted from one person to another. Beliefs (or indeed any thought) cannot. In order to persuade someone, you have to act, move, do something. Here's where science is helpful. Science, as a behavior, is all about persuasion. It's a form of rhetoric. If I do something in front of you, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, you tend to believe it. If I stop there, you kinda believe it; but it leaves you open to the persuasion of another. If I do it enough times and in enough specific detail so that you can also do it, and then you go and do it over and over again so that you remember the behavior, then I've completely persuaded you.
That's science. And it cannot cause a person to believe "there is no God" because science is all about doing specific, particular, behaviors in front of other people and teaching them to also do those behaviors.
Everyone who says they are an atheist because of science or a (lack of) scientific evidence is not simply wrong, they are the worst kind of ignorant... the ignorant know-it-all. A sanctimonious, arrogant twit who thinks they know more than they actually know.
Now, had Mr. Gervais simply gone with the "I'm an atheist because my brother asked me an important question at an important time in my life", I'd be totally down with that. But invoking science, here, is just plain stupid.
Having been called an atheist for most of my life by other people, I tend to regard atheists as "us". But when some of us say stupid and indefensible things like claiming they're an atheist because there's no scientific evidence for God, we have to show them the error of their ways. We have to police ourselves. God knows the theists are not going to police us effectively. ;-)
Update
Oh, and there's a follow-up piece where Mr. Gervais answers questions:
Does God Exist? Ricky Gervais Takes Your Questions
He makes the same error as above in many of his answers. But, having dealt with that error, I'd like to pick at 2 more nits regarding "logical impossibility" and his inference of agnosticism. Let's handle the simpler one first.
Agnostics do not necessarily think "just because you haven’t found something yet doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist." It may be true that many agnostics think this way. But there is an alternative that Gervais leaves out because he doesn't understand science. That is that many agnostics (particularly many scientists) believe that evidence for God is unknowable. I.e. it's not that we just haven't YET found evidence for God; it's that there is no (never will be) evidence for God. There can never be certainty about God's existence because such certainty is metaphysical. This is the sense of "I don't know". And many agnostics could easily be as arrogant as the atheists and say that not only do I not know, but neither do you. You don't know there is a God. You don't know there is no God. You don't know it and you will never know it because it is unknowable.
Now the more difficult one. Just because something (e.g. a square circle) is logically contradictory does not mean it doesn't exist. That belief system can be called "logicism", the elevation of logic to some ontological reality. But we know from the logical results of Tarski and the mathematical results of Goedel that logic fails in a rather fundamental way in representing reality. Tarski showed that any sufficiently complex language (e.g. logical system) has to reference concepts outside itself. Goedel showed that any formal system will be either incomplete (some statements cannot be shown true or false) or inconsistent (some statements are both true and false).
More practically, contradictions are often only apparent and are really paradoxes that can be resolved by widening the discussion. To see this clearly, examine this picture:
Wife and Mother in law
You cannot see both the wife and the mother-in-law at the same time, yet both are there. While it's true that this may not be a logical ambiguity, it is certainly a perceptual one. The two ways of looking at the picture can be said to be contradictory, but they're not. They're the result of an ambiguity. Many apparent logical and mathematical contradictions are similar. They're an artifact of how we choose to talk about, view, describe the subject.
Hence, claiming that something is logically impossible is also a nonsense argument for being an atheist. Again, that doesn't mean one can't be an atheist. Believe whatever metaphysical stuff you want to believe! Just don't trot out silly arguments trying to justify your beliefs.
