Public Challenge To Atheists: Why Believe In What Can Only Prove False?Every now and again I meditate on the fact that the atheist / naturalist / materialist position cannot be empirically vindicated. By atheist / naturalist / materialist position, I mean the Epicurean idea that death entails the complete and final cessation of consciousness – that after we die, there will be no more thought, no more experience, no more anything.
One of the many disadvantages of this world view is that no other option can potentially befall it other than falsification. That is to say, even if this position is correct, we can never prove it, for how could we ever be conscious of the cessation of consciousness to prove that such was indeed the case? You need consciousness to prove anything, and indeed, the atheist / naturalist / materialist position cannot be empirically vindicated. It can only prove false, because if even one iota of consciousness continues in any form after death, the idea is effectively bunk.
And so the challenge is for any atheist, naturalist or materialist to satiate my curiosity by reasonably or at least politely answering the following questions: Why believe in an idea whose only possible empirical verification is disproof? What of the hypocrisy in committing yourself to a position that claims to rely on proof as the highest measure of truth when the position itself cannot possibly be proven?
On Malfunctioning Bus Doors & Arguing Against A False RealitySo I worked late the other night and was riding the bus home. It was cold, it was one of those times where there's a mild to severe "flu scare" in the general atmosphere. You know, that stage which usually happens to correlate with what they call "flu season" where the media or some other authority has pumped the idea of a "new and improved more virulent strain" into everyone's minds. It was cold, and it seemed everyone else on the bus had just gotten off work and was tired. They all had that post-work, spent, lifeless kind of stare, that stare where you just sort of gaze non-descriptly ahead while processing the random background noise, that stare too many people have seen and felt before. You ever notice that when a person is experiencing some kind of privation their patience tends to plummet? How many husbands might crack an ovulation-related joke here? Okay maybe that's a little too much, but the point is that if we're not careful, strong desires to remove privation can blind us to an objective view of reality.
How Would You Define A Miracle?In the past few months, via several discussions with a variety of learned skeptics and religious people, I've come to better understand the disparities in our concepts of miracles, and specifically, I've been thinking about how falsifiability and confounders diminish the extent to which an alleged miracle can be considered authentic. It may very well be that proving a miracle is impossible, and on this matter I haven't quite decided yet, but I've certainly concluded that there is a wide range of skeptical positions one might take concerning the concept of miracles, and what we can justifiedly say about them, if and when they do occur.
One of the biggest hurdles to overcome regarding alleged healing miracles is developing a reliable method for excluding confounders of spontaneous remission and the placebo effect. Hitherto unexplained, either of these mysterious phenomena would provide good confounding cover for a genuine miracle, and that's not to say that all instances of spontaneous remission and placebo effect are intrinsically miraculous, either. Some skeptics are fond of claiming that only repeatable, observable, systematic instances of miracles would be sufficient to convince them that they were unjustified in their skepticism. This is sounds more like magic than miracle.