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22 Apr 2014

The irrationality of Atheist (among others) 'Science'. part1.

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I often comment on Youtube. A subset of these comments often get replies that lead to longer exchanges with people about certain subjects. The issue that crops up the most, because I am some kind of damned persistent anti-justificationist (so much so that most of my comments have now become some sort of paen to the works of Karl Popper) is the issue of justification.

The one persistent thought among Youtube atheists, is that religious people often accept things without evidence, and that evidence is all in their favour when it comes to their pet theories about the origin of species or about some other facet of the new atheist enterprise. I say pet theory not to disparage the theory, but in regards to the irrational reasons for which they are held to be true; they think that somehow the force of Agrippa's trilemma has been dispelled by some waving of the wand of a false positivistic theory of  science.

The fact that religious people often hold their beliefs without evidence is quite true, but irrelevant, because all the theories we hold to be true we do so without evidence to justify them, because this leads to one of the prongs of Agrippa’s trilemma. What is relevant is that they hold their beliefs despite criticism of their arguments for God, and despite the fact that the God hypothesis explains nothing in any invariable way necessary for a good explanation, or formulates any predictions about anything that makes it susceptible to refutation. 

That evidence does not confirm a theory, as proposed by Popper (and not yet successfully criticized), should be enough to show that holding onto a theory without evidence is not itself a legitimate reason to call somebody out as irrational, because the demand to only accept something that has been justified by evidence is itself irrational. These people hold onto science despite the fact that there is no evidence for science itself, that does not make their choice to pursue scientific explanations irrational; but if they think they need evidence for something to believe it, they have an irrational view of not just science, but of philosophy as well. 
 

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