By Mathew Goldstein
Someone recently published this “story” (using the terminology of the web site) advocating for agnosticism and criticizing atheism on a web site I never heard of: “Sorry, but atheism doesn't automatically mean you believe and understand science”. They published my response “in defense of ontological atheism”.
At first they rejected my story on the grounds that it did not align with the purpose of the selected community. The community categories assigned to the original story I responded to was identical to the assignments of my response, the human community with a science subcategory. Having recently published an argument that agnosticism is more consistent with science than atheism, they should be willing to publish a counter-argument that atheism is consistent with science. Maybe they changed their mind about rejecting my story after recognizing that the rejection was unfair.
At what conclusion, then, have I arrived? I have argued that we should make a clear distinction between the procedural demands of history and the sciences and their (provisional) commitment to natural explanations. Their procedural demand is nothing more than the requirement that claims be tested against a body of publicly-accessible evidence. While I have suggested that this procedural demand is non negotiable, I have argued that it is also uncontroversial. What is controversial is the metaphysical naturalism of history and the sciences, which excludes talk of divine agency. This naturalism, I have suggested, rests on the fact that historians and scientists operate with a working ontology, a sense of what kinds of entities are likely to exist. This is drawn from both common sense and the results of historical and scientific enquiry. This ontology is merely provisional, in the sense that it could be revised given appropriate evidence. But appropriate evidence is needed. Religious thinkers who fail to offer publicly testable evidence that their proposed theistic explanations are the most adequate explanations on offer have no reason to complain if the rest of us continue to ignore them.
