Dunatis Posted:

To all atheists in the forum who claim some sort of scientific basis.

Isn’t atheism itself based upon faith thus making it not very scientific at all? Science only declares any sort of certainty when the opposite is disproved in repeatable experimentation where all other factors were removed and given the impossibility of disproving the existence of God, wouldn’t that make Agnosticism the true scientific religion?

It’s true that in scientific terms, nothing is ever certain, only supported by evidence/observation to differing degrees. The real problem is defining god well enough to know what we’re supposed to be looking for. Any time you find enough evidence to say “No, the god you were describing almost certainly doesn’t exist”, a religious believer can just say that their god isn’t like the thing you disproved.

Taking god as a proposition, you can search for evidence of some entity existing that matches the description, but given that the normal description includes things like “invisible” and “mysterious” the best you can do is infer from cirgreat timesstantial evidence – you can say “If a god matching description X exists, then we would observe Y. We do no observe Y therefore god X is unlikely to exist”. You can choose to believe in a different kind of god than X, but scientifically speaking X has been disproven

Using that method, the more we can explain about the world without the need for god to be involved, the fewer potential descriptions of god are viable – if you describe a god that created the universe and everything in it 6000 years ago, it conflicts with colossal amounts of scientific evidence in the fields of cosmology, astronomy, geology, biology, even human history. But if you describe a god that stood back and watched while everything happened without intervention, then it doesn’t conflict with science, but does run up against the fact that such a god has zero evidence in his favour because he isn’t purported to have done anything.

At the end of the day, there is no scientific evidence that points towards god’s existence and no scientific theories (proposed or actual) make use of god in their explanation of any known phenomena. As far as science is concerned, god is entirely unnecessary. There is no scientific reason to believe that god exists, so if you “try to live on science alone” (to quote the song) then you would be an atheist – no belief in god because there’s no reason to believe in God, and it’s silly to believe in things without a reason to do so…

It is however important to note that “atheism” can be two different things. Lack of belief in god, or an active affirmation that god does not exist. The first is definitely scientific (as described) so to answer the question, yes atheism is tenable for a scientist. The second is a stronger position that technically speaking makes the unprovable claim that there is definitely no god. However, I think it’s still supported by the evidence – we have no evidence in favour of any kind of god, only a lack of evidence against the kinds of god that are described in such a way that there’s nothing we could find that would be solid evidence against it.

Put another way, there’s no way to scientifically prove whether or not there exists in the world an invisible, intangible, immortal, rabbit. There is no way to say for certain that there isn’t a teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. We can’t know for certain that we won’t one day discover unicorns or fairies or leprechauns. There is no evidence in favour of these things, their existence would contradict a lot of what we think we know, but we can’t solidly prove that they don’t exist. As far as I’m concerned god is in the same category, and I feel no scientific qualms about saying that he doesn’t exist.

Also of note, agnosticism and atheism aren’t incompatible – an agnostic atheist would be one who says “I don’t believe in god, but I don’t know for certain”, which is probably the most strictly scientific position available. You can also be a theist agnostic or a neutral agnostic, and even agnosticism comes in two variants. Either simply not knowing yourself, or believing that it is fundamentally impossible to know would be agnostic positions.