Daylight Atheist’s Scientistic/Positivist Verificationist Evidentialism

Having taken a look at Greta Christina’s evidentialism, we now take a look at her source of inspiration: The Daylight Atheism rules for convincing Atheists that there could possibly, maybe, exist a deity.

The Daylight Atheist has provided a handy list of items which would suffice to convict the non-believer that belief is warranted.

1. Verified, specific prophecies that couldn’t have been contrived.

Atheists commonly hedge with the lubrication of the term “verify”, which allows them enough fluidity of meaning to run from all arguments, deductions, experiences and knowledge which is not empirical. That means there is a restriction requiring physical evidence which is experimentally replicable, falsifiable, and which is successfully replicated, non-falsified, with open data and published in peer-reviewed journals. Not that this detail is specified up front, it is not. But in a pinch their demand will devolve to exactly that Philosophical Materialist, Scientistic requirement, the failed Logical Positivism of AJ Ayer which is rejected by actual Atheist philosophers, including Ayer himself.

The exception to this Scientistic/Positivist verificationist evidentialism is notably two-fold: no such requirement exists for Atheism/Materialism, nor for evolution, because those beliefs are blind-beliefs which are tightly held under the Appeal to Authority of Atheist scientists who are failed philosophers and Atheist philosophers who cling to religious scientism (and differentially, not to material evidence for their own blind-beliefs, because there is none in their favor). Still, we need to give a fair hearing to what this Atheist claims:

“If the Bible, for example, said, “On the first day of the first month in the year two thousand and ten, the pillars of the earth will shake and a great part of the New World will be lost to the sea,” and then January 1, 2010 comes and a tremendous earthquake sends California to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, I would become a believer.”

This is a safe bet, under the knowledge that the actual bible does not engage in such rhetoric. Further, it is a requirement for a purely physical, material manifestation, which confirms the underlying ideological Philosophical Materialist restriction being placed on the evidence. There is always a touch of dishonesty in invoking a physically unverifiable ideology to support the requirement for physical evidence for verification (internally contradictory).

And we note now that the "evidence" above, being a single sentence, is far outweighed by the list of conditions for rejection, including the condition which refutes the claim for the believability of the original argument:

“The book or other source from which it comes must have at least a decently good record on other predictions.”

So the original statement that such a prophesy, taken singly, would be believed is contradicted by this new caveat, which obviously nullifies it in advance, conveniently removing any rational possibility of occurrence and thereby creating a faux safe-zone for the author, which he built out of impossible conditions.

And the author does go to pains to reject the Christian claims of biblical prophesies which were made centuries before Jesus’ time and were fulfilled by the birth, life, death of Jesus, ostensibly due to non-verifiability; i.e., overt rejection of historicity as a process. This is another appeal to religious Scientism as the only source of knowledge under Atheist Philosophical Materialism. So we have uncovered three ideological, unprovable blind belief pre-conditions which are made out to be necessary for the acceptance of belief. This is non-coherent (internally contradictory). And it is, at its core, also a Category Error because the requirements are now obviously for the evidence to be (a) material, (b) replicable under Scientism, yet the entity being tested for is not material, not subject to scientific testing. So this whole exercise is intended to create automatic rejection because there is an evidentiary lock-out installed directly into it.


2. Scientific knowledge in holy books that wasn’t available at the time.

Here is another very safe bet, especially since scientific knowledge is not fixed, it is highly variable and contingent, never considered "truth". An example: the bible has always claimed that the universe had a beginning; science did not, until the Hubble red shift and the big bang theory became popular amongst cosmologists based on new knowledge – a very historically recent change which brought science into congruence with that particular feature of the few biblical claims. Science changes its own belief systems and realistic practitioners of science never claim truth for what they know to be contingently held, fragile beliefs, all of which are inductively based, including non-falsifications.

The claimed need for scientific knowledge to pre-exist renders this author either ignorant of the principles and properties of science, scientific knowledge, or deceptive; that places the author's positions squarely into the category of blind-belief in the accuracy and truth of current science which is religious Scientism in its worst form: designating truth to current contingent science knowledge status.

That intellectual defect is sufficiently damaging that one does not even need to take into account the fallacy of expecting books of history and moral guidance to have any claims at all regarding Philosophical Materialist issues. Science changes its knowledge set daily, while the books of history and moral guidance are timeless and unchanging by their very nature. If the author wished to falsify those tomes, he chose a specific way which is completely outside the realm of those books categorical focus, a very specific Category Error.

3. Miraculous occurrences, especially if brought about through prayer.

This is the standard Atheist misappropriation of prayer as a causal candy machine. Atheists demand something from prayer that is not biblically attributed to it (regardless of the pseudo-Christian “prosperity preachers”). Here is the author’s statement of candy machine prayer:

“But it wouldn’t have to be so dramatic; even minor but objectively verifiable miracles would do, especially if they could be invoked by prayer. If a hospital did a double-blind study to determine if intercessory prayer helps the sick, and it was discovered that only the patients prayed for by members of a certain religion experienced a dramatic, statistically significant increase in recovery rate, and this result could be repeated and confirmed, I would convert. ”

So we note here a strong tendency of this author to create his own cartoons or caricatures of religious principles, and then to make those into demands to be satisfied in order to generate belief in the existence of a deity. He has reduced the deity to a servant of each and every human. Under this reductive misunderstanding, every human could require the deity to perform whatever service the human demanded of it. By creating this absurdity the author has again guaranteed that his condition would never be met, especially by any self-respecting deity. This, then is yet another designed-in logical lock-out, a designed safe-zone for the author to protect him against deity realism.

4. Any direct manifestation of the divine.

The essence of this is: “I require the deity to perform directly for me”. In this case, the deity must reveal its existence in a manner which I command for it. (Greta Christina demanded huge words in the sky, easily interpreted in all languages; a YouTube Atheist demanded that the divine hand present him with a cheeseburger). What the deity wants for me is irrelevant. What I demand of the deity is what is important here, and the deity must produce to my specifications.

Once again the Atheist makes demands on the deity with the expectation that his demand has more weight than the wishes of the deity. Plus, the wishes of the deity in the matter are not even a consideration; the Atheist knows who is boss here, and it is not the deity. Absurdities are piling up.

5. Aliens who believed in the exact same religion.

This is so obviously a designed-in logic lock-out that it is ludicrous to have even included it. By this point in the article the author apparently thinks that reasoning people have already dropped out before getting this far.

6. A genuinely flawless and consistent holy book.

This is an ecclesiastic argument, not an argument against the existence of a deity. What the author really is demanding is a book written by the deity, handed to mankind, and preserved in its original condition from the beginning of… whenever, with discernable fingerprints of the deity. The author already knows that the New Testament, for example, is a historical series of viewpoints of several people regarding the same events and their meanings. The narrative is consistent, but the reported facts occasionally differ in degree from each other, with some giving additional facts not included by others, or of a different kind. Which is how accurate reporting works, of course, as those who are reporting gather facts from differing vantage points. This is rejected because obviously the deity did not directly write it. So on that basis alone it is rejected.

But historicity is not what the author is interested in, because what is being demanded once again is another logic lock-out. This is no different from the demand that God hand him a cheeseburger; it is a demand on the deity made from hubris on the one hand, and refusal to accept historicity as knowledge under the hegemony of Differential Philosophical Materialism/Logical Positivist Verficationist Evidentialism, again, a system of blind-belief which is itself unverifiable under its own principles.

7. A religion without internal disputes or factions.

Human fecklessness and misbehavior as they exercise their free will has exactly no bearing on the existence of a deity. If anything, it tends to confirm it by decorating the existence of non-determinism in living creatures, a phenomenon which is impossible under deterministic Scientism and Philosophical Materialism. So yet again the author has provided an exercise in self-refuting illogic as a demand for belief in a deity.

8. A religion whose followers have never committed or taken part in atrocities.

Refer to #7, because this is the same issue: the author wants free will to stop if there is a deity; that is irrational.

9. A religion that had a consistent record of winning its jihads and holy wars.

Here the author has once again forced his cartoon, caricature deity into the place of any actual theistically claimed creator, especially a creator of free will. There is no rational expectation for a deity to favor such a thing; the Hebrew testaments even explain why. And again he has created a logic lock-out, impossible to achieve and thus of no particular danger to his worldview. The fact that it is absurd is no barrier to its utility as an argument for the intellectually weak to admire.

Finally the author gives us more stuff which is rejected outright, a priori, as non-credible; that’s fine, he can not believe as he wishes, asserting blatant rejectionism as his reasoning. But I will take on this final claim:

10. Though I’m always happy to debate the merits of evolution.

Should the author happen to venture this way, I challenge him to provide the objective material knowledge which proves conclusively that either the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution OR the Extended Synthesis theory of evolution is objectively true, incorrigibly and immutably self-evident or at least premised on First Principles which underlie the empirical scientific method of evidentiary verification and fully loaded with necessary and sufficient material evidence.

And further, to provide disciplined, grounded, valid deductive arguments showing the precise progression from deterministic material laws of mineral behaviors to the non-determinism and agency, self-awareness, intellect, qualia, etc. in living creatures, AND including the nested information systems which inhere in replication and the communication systems which inhere in all living things. When he provides that type of evidence for evolution, then we would have something to discuss. After all, if he believes in evolution, he needs convincing material, replicable, objective evidence, right? Perhaps he would share.