This is worth comment because it is exactly backwards. Atheism is irrational in demanding “empirical evidence as a prerequisite for belief” because not everything we know is empirical knowledge. No atheist is CONSISTENT with this principle and REASON requires consistency.
What reveals itself her is an INCONSISTENT belief in the universal scope of empiricism, which is not itself a rational position to hold. So here we meet not only a kind of FAITH, the kind the atheist THINKS he opposes, but one that is directly at odds with reason.
Show me the atheist who rejects the law of noncontradiction, logic in general, or mathematics because they don’t have an empirical foundation. Such a person—if there is one which I doubt—would perforce be a total skeptic about everything. But a CONSISTENT EMPIRICIST must do this.
By demanding a kind of evidence that is not appropriate to the subject matter, empirical evidence of immaterial, formal things like logic or math, it is the atheist who acts irrationally, and indulges in a silly and childish kind of faith.
Once we begin to seriously inquire into how it is that we have a priori knowledge of various truths, e.g. the first principles of logic, or the very idea of experience as a whole, once we give serious thought to epistemology, we come to understand that knowledge is not so simple.
One soon realizes that if our powers of knowing were limited in the ways empiricists say, they couldn’t know it, and so wouldn’t believe it, which they do—and so a WILL to not-knowing is revealed, a kind of existential “I will not know and thou shalt not either!"
In short: this claim to the rational superiority of atheism because it is “empirical” would hold water if empiricism were true or rational, but it is not. It is a kind of epistemological faith, and not a very rationally coherent one, which is why it ends in Humean skepticism.
Don’t take my word for it.
Here’s Bertrand Russell:
Here’s Bertrand Russell:
Hegel says the task of philosopher is “the actual cognition of what truly is.”
It is a ruse, a self-deception, to speak of “knowledge” that isn’t knowledge of what truly is.
“If the Absolute were not with us, in-and-for-itself, it would surely laugh our little ruse to scorn.”
It is a ruse, a self-deception, to speak of “knowledge” that isn’t knowledge of what truly is.
“If the Absolute were not with us, in-and-for-itself, it would surely laugh our little ruse to scorn.”
