Imagine a hypothetical skeptic. She’s a paragon of rational thought, and probably a scientist to boot (since the skeptic’s tools are so similar to those of the scientist). Assume further that she has seen no evidence for a conscious higher power in the universe. Due to her skepticism, this person is an atheist. Being otherwise would mean she’s claiming something about the universe that, as yet, has no observational support. But one day, perhaps on the way to Damascus, something blinds her and strikes her down.

Now a voice says, “I am God”. Because this God, like so many throughout history, is insecure, it truly wants our skeptic to believe it’s real. So this God goes on to say “The next time you get sick, pray to me. Ask for help and you will be healed.” The skeptic, because she’s a scientist and a tester-of-hypotheses, gives it a try. Sure enough, she’s cured of her illness the moment her prayer is over. So far, the evidence to this skeptic for a God is strong; there were initial observations (the voice), and then an experiment to further test God’s existence.

This skeptic and atheist would now tack strongly to theism because of the mounting personal evidence she’s collected. An outside observer, also a skeptic, would probably roll their eyes at the claims of “he spoke to me, and then cured me of my sickness”. And isn’t it more likely that the person on the road to Damascus had a visual and auditory hallucination, followed by a coincidental cure from sickness? Absolutely-in fact the probability of these is far higher than the probability that God exists, so atheism is still the more likely choice. But what person would explain away what happened to them in this way? If we can’t trust our senses to a certain extent, can we really be skeptics? The outside observer will place very little credence in what’s happened to our theist. But she can hardly be blamed for changing her beliefs, and is still absolutely a skeptic, though no longer an atheist.

I use this conversion example not because it’s common. In fact, it’s exceedingly rare. There are also many examples of people who have heard voices claiming to be God, and later seen evidence of the power of prayer. Assuredly, most of these people were religious before, and probably weren’t true skeptics. But the fact remains, my conversion example is not impossible, which means that skepticism cannot imply atheism.

While skepticism can’t fully eradicate god from personal beliefs, it can remove god from scientific hypotheses. The problem that intelligent design inherently contains is postulating an unknowable force to explain biology. Introducing god into an explanation of the events won’t satisfy the skeptic at all, because it needlessly complicates those explanations. If a phenomenon occured, it doesn’t add anything to say “that phenomenon occurred because of an unknowable force”. It’s like Moliere’s “virtus dormitiva”, that opium causes sleep because it contains a “sleep-inducing agent”. Was anything learned by that explanation? Certainly not, and a skeptic would have a hard time accepting it. The difference here from our case above is that only one skeptic observed some evidence for god, while no one else did. If god regularly interacted with the natural world, and left evidence of himself that could not be explained by other natural events, then he could be investigated scientifically and would be far from “unknowable”. It is this that the skeptic objects to, the alleged unknowability and supernatural character of god.

Regarding the dogmatism I mentioned at the beginning, an atheist could certainly pick his belief in the non-existence of god irrationally. In fact, if our skeptic above still clung to atheism after his experience on the road to Damascus, saying “my father was an atheist, and how could he be wrong?”, then she’s not much of a skeptic. This would be dogmatic atheism, something clung to even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Truth is not something that an authority gets to name, it is something anyone with a rational mind (a skeptic) can stumble upon. So as skeptics, we must reject dogmatism, no matter how close to our personal beliefs the underlying issue is. It’s a counter-intuitive point, but the religious person on your left might be more of a skeptic than the atheist on your right.

This post originally appeared on the Secular Students and Skeptics Society blog.

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