The progressive religious attitude is best summed up, I think, by the recent United Church of Christ blog ad campaign, a tag line of which was, "Science and faith are not mutually exclusive." Fundamentalist religion… well, I think its attitude is best encapsulated by the Biology for Christian Schools textbook, which declared that, "If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them," and "Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible."

Which brings me back to Edwards's comment, and the question of holding beliefs that aren't contradicted by evidence but aren't supported by it, either.

Here's the problem.

I could, in the next fifteen minutes, come up with half a dozen beliefs that aren't contradicted by evidence but that also aren't supported by any. The universe was created by a cosmic graffiti artist, and the Big Bang was the result of her spray can exploding under pressure. Cats talk to each other in Sanskrit — but only when nobody's listening. Gravity is caused by hundreds of tiny invisible demons inside every physical object, pulling towards each other with a magical force field. (Objects with more mass can hold more demons — hence their greater gravitational force.) Etc., etc., etc. Atheists even make something of a game of it: the Flying Spaghetti Monster; the Invisible Pink Unicorn; Bertrand Russell's china teapot orbiting the sun; the incorporeal dragon in Carl Sagan's garage.

Why are any of these hypotheses any less plausible than any of the commonly- held God hypotheses actually believed by millions of people? Why do they have any less gravitas?

The only reason — and I mean the ONLY reason — that the standard God hypotheses have more gravitas than the flying spaghetti monster or my secret talking cats is that lots of other people believe them. And that lots of other people have believed them (or an assortment of evolving versions of them) through history. And that some very smart people have twisted their minds around the problem and come up with some very clever, if rather contorted, defenses of the proposition. If it weren't for the gravitas built up by centuries of belief, we'd have no more reason to take any of the standard God hypotheses seriously than any of the goofy joke religions that atheists make up to entertain themselves.

In other words, if the only thing you have going for your belief is "you can't prove that it isn't true," that isn't enough.

This is actually the point Bertrand Russell was illustrating with his china teapot. The point wasn't so much that "you can't prove that it isn't true" isn't a good enough reason to believe in something. As important as that is, it's actually secondary to his argument. The main point he was making is… well, let me quote the passage in question:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. (Emphasis mine.)

And if you don't have any basis for making that choice — other than the demonstrably biased, easily fooled, heavily- weighted- in- favor- of- believing- what- you're- predisposed- to- believe form of guesswork known as "intuition" or "faith" — then why on earth would you base your entire life philosophy around that choice?

Would you base your choices, your ethics, the meaning of your life, your assumptions about what happens when we die, on a belief in any other hypothesis for which you had absolutely no evidence, simply because you didn't think there was any evidence contradicting it? Would you base your life on a belief in the cosmic graffiti artist or the invisible pink unicorn, simply because they haven't yet been conclusively disproven?

And if not, then why is God an exception?

If your default theory has to keep shifting and slipping and mutating to accommodate new evidence contradicting it… AND if the consistent historical pattern of your default theory has been a long, relentless process of it being chipped away… AND if you don't have any solid evidence to support even the most core part of your default theory… then perhaps you should look at discarding your theory. 

It is not the case that your default theory can be anything, as long as you are willing to hear contrary evidence. That's not a logical, rational, or evidence- based way of thinking. In the absence of any good evidence supporting any particular hypothesis, the rational hypothesis is the null hypothesis. And in the case of religion, the null hypothesis is atheism.

You can't just say, like Criswell at the end of Plan 9 from Outer Space, "Can you prove it didn't happen?" That's not an argument — and it's not a foundation for a life philosophy.

(FYI, this is a topic on which I've changed my mind over the course of my blogging. So if this seems to contradict an earlier statement, that's why.)