There’s a bit of a flap going on in some of your better-known online Atheist hangouts, over an article written by Steve Zara and put up on the Dawkins website. In short, he argues that there is absolutely no evidence that can prove the existence of God.

No, really.

Zara has the seed of an idea, believe it or not, but it’s buried beneath paragraphs of the most whiny, self-righteous tripe I’ve had the misfortune to read in a while. There are other serious flaws in his piece too; for example, all of his arguments against God use the Abrahamic conception as a starting point, except for a brief historical discussion of Greco-Roman mythology. You see this sometimes with the Atheist community, it has to be admitted; not just an unfamiliarity with other religious perspectives, but an unwillingness or inability to consider them. It’s an odd form of mental straightjacket, actually; when your average, Western Atheist like Zara states he doesn’t believe in ‘God’, he’s simply ruled out the Abrahamic God in his own mind, and considered the matter settled.

Which is not to say that there’s any evidence for the other religious perspectives either. It’s just that, when making an argument against the existence of something like God, you can’t simply address the singular, narrow religious perspective of a minority of humans alive today, discuss it, and consider the matter thoroughly covered somehow. You’re not addressing the topic, you’re addressing an instance, discussing only Lady Gaga when you mean to talk about music. It’s also not an argument that’s going to hold much water with the vast majority of the human audience, who don’t believe in that Abrahamic God, and never have.

Zara makes this same mistake, the assumption that his personal definition of a concept is absolute and, well, definitive, over and over again. For example, here’s his paragraph on the supernatural:

It’s worth a brief diversion into the idea of the supernatural. What exactly is it? The answer is that it is about fear. The world we see around us is full of pain and tragedy. It’s just not fair. So, for some, it seems only reasonable that there is a realm of justice, a place where wishes can come true; where we need not die permanently. The supernatural is not a place, or a state: it is a desire. This leads some to set up a false dichotomy between the natural and supernatural, between the heartless, unfeeling and cruel world of atoms and the void, and the place where morality is as real as words carved on stone and God loves things into existence.

I’m so glad that I now know, with absolute certainty and for all time, what the word ‘supernatural’ means, and that all about ‘fear’. Here I thought that a reasonable argument for supernatural might simply be ‘beyond the natural world’. We should fire the staff at the OED at once, and replace them with Steve Zara, for he has all the answers. *rolls eyes*

Zara’s piece concludes thusly:

The theists can’t win. They can’t talk about evidence when they base their beliefs on faith. They can’t describe us as flawed beings and yet claim that we can get to truth through revelation. (Incidentally, when the Pope decides to be infallible, how can he be sure of the infallibilty of that decision? But I digress).

Theists hide God beyond rules and logic in the supernatural, and then claim that we can get to God through the rules and logic of theology. We are supposed to use logic to demonstrate the illogical.

…

I propose a new strident atheism. No playing the games of theists. No concessions. No talk of evidence that can change minds, when their beliefs are deliberately placed beyond logic, beyond evidence. Let’s not get taken in by the fraud of religion. Let’s not play their shell-game.

Do you see the flaw here, and the core of a useful idea? Let’s hit the flaw first.

Zara (and Myers acting in agreement) makes a fatal mistake here: he extends the concept of there being no evidence of this particular conception of God’s existence that could conform to the rules we humans live and function by, as empiricists and material beings, to the idea that there can be no evidence at all for God’s existence.

That’s a big leap, and unsupportable.

Zara is right to point out that, if you posit a being that is beyond logic and understanding, you can’t reasonably use logic and understanding to arrive at knowledge of said being. He’s right to point out that you can’t use tools of the natural sciences to study the supernatural, something that is defined, at a minimum, as being beyond the rules and order of the natural world.

But it’s a fallacy to assume that, just because the tools of one world can’t be used to understand something, that such understanding is impossible.

The classic literary example is that of Flatland. For two-dimensional creatures, what can the third dimension really mean? At best, an abstract understanding. Could they truly even conceive of it, in their world? Could they actually imagine, picture such a place, in their minds? Can a human being actually form a mental picture of a five, ten, seventy-three-dimensional form, and truly grasp it? What would happen if you could take a peek into such a realm?

In the Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost”, two human beings get to see into such a higher-dimensional space, and they can’t make any meaning of it. It’s not that their eyes don’t work, or that light doesn’t travel in such a space; they do, and it does. It’s that their minds, fashioned in our four dimensional world, cannot comprehend, are not accessible to, knowledge from a higher dimensional number. So they’re blind while seeing perfectly well.

Is that what would actually happen? I don’t know, and what’s more, you don’t either; that’s rather the point.

Zara’s right that logic can’t meaningfully consider illogical evidence. He’s wrong that such evidence is automatically invalid. If the Great Old Ones actually exist, in terrifying alien spaces beyond human understanding, where the rules of our physical universe not only don’t apply but cannot apply, then the fact that you can’t describe them using geometry and physics doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means that discussing C’thulhu in terms of gravity is absurd. On the other hand, to C’thulhu, gravity itself is absurd, and by the way, you’re very tasty.

*crunch*

So yes, you can’t have a meaningful argument using empirical tools on an anti-empirical subject like religion, and yes, it’s pointless to argue over such evidence with theologians. That doesn’t mean you can be justified in making a blanket statement like ‘there is no evidence that you can give to prove God exists’. You might not be able to make use of that evidence, understand it, even process it, any more than a Flatlander could use a pop-up book, but that doesn’t preclude the existence of either the pop-up book or evidence for God. You’re confusing ‘evidence’ with ‘evidence I am equipped and capable of understanding in the systems of knowledge that are accessible to me’.

Unfortunately, Myers jumps on this bandwagon:

So yes, I agree. There is no valid god hypothesis, so there can be no god evidence, so let’s stop pretending the believers have a shot at persuading us.

Jerry Coyne took him to task, proposing a particular, outlandishly implausible example of an event that would make a reasonable person conclude there might be something to this God thing, and Myers tried to respond, but didn’t do a terribly great job.

Coyne crafted an argument where it would require a greater leap of faith to disbelieve the evidence of God than to do otherwise, and Myers’ response seems to be… awfully.. dogmatic.

Much of his counterargument boils down to the fact that Coyne’s example isn’t really like any of the religions around today, which misses the point entirely; the argument isn’t whether a particular God exists, but whether there could be, anywhere, any sort of evidence that would lead you to believe in ANY God.

Myers and Zara say, with absolute faith and conviction, that there is not. No matter what you, or anyone else, or anything else, or any possible experience or evidence says, they will not change their iron-clad beliefs. It’s not just that the evidence needed to convince them is inconceivable at the moment; they categorically and for all time deny that it could ever be.

That, my friends, is faith in a nutshell. Faith, taking a particular form, is also known as religion.

Congratulations, PZ: you just found religion. Enjoy.