semantics, evidenceIf you answer no, then why is their disagreement?
If you answer yes, please explain. I would also be interested in the root of the differences.
[edit]An interesting angle coming out of one answer posits a sliding standard of evidence dependent on the “strength” of existing belief. Relevant? Food for thought.
My experience has been that religious believers base their beliefs on authority, not evidence. Or, as the question suggests, their idea of what constitutes “evidence” is different from a skeptic’s.
A religious believer might consider documents or arguments, written by their authority of choice, to constitute evidence by the mere fact that they were penned by that authority. In fact, religious believers often rely on a “chain of trust”, whereby an authority that they trust will vouch for a “piece of evidence” they say was provided by another authority – whose supposed works they claim should also be trusted.
This isn’t to say that skeptics or non-believers do not rely on a similar chain of trust when forming or re-examining their view of the world. However, the difference lies in the fact that any evidence that appears along a skeptic’s chain of trust can be objectively verified. No authority is needed to perform this verification – all that is needed is a proper application of the scientific method.
Given that each link in the skeptic’s chain of trust can be independently verified, the chain itself can be disassembled and each link trusted on its own merits. The same is not true of the religious believer’s chain. It is not uncommon for a religious believer to implicitly claim that the link furthest from their personal experience is just as trustworthy as the closest. However, because it relies on authority only, their chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
In simpler terms, when a religious believer says that their particular holy doctrine is true, the truth of that statement relies on their own personal, and fallible, ability to distinguish what is true from what isn’t – no other link is relevant. If they have no method of distinguishing truth from fiction other than personal conviction, then I would say that their standard for evidence is quite different from the skeptic’s.
Every person has slightly different criteria that they trust when forming a new opinion. For some people, a gut feeling or a dream is all the “concrete evidence” that is needed to form a strongly held-opinion. For others, airtight mathematical or physical evidence is all they trust.
But even the most compelling evidence is often not enough to change someone’s mind about an opinion they already hold, or if someone is being presented with information that doesn’t line up with other beliefs. So some religious people believe in creation over evolution, even though there is some pretty compelling scientific evidence in favor of evolution; and some atheists refuse to believe in concepts like multiverse theory, even if there are compelling mathematical models that support it. To each of these groups, the new evidence, although compelling to many people, is simply not compelling enough to overcome their existing beliefs.
So I think there are different standards of evidence for all different people, but more important is the relationship between evidence and pre-existing belief.
(This is why I believe that it is so important to teach my 3-year-old son that lots of people believe lots of different things, and that it is his job to think his way logically through any opinion he is going to hold, rather than fill his mind with my opinions, passing them off as fact. I want him to be able to make up his own mind about what he believes as he grows up, without having to first overcome a lot of existing prejudices that were “implanted” in his belief system before he was old enough to decide for himself.)
There is likely considerable variation between the relationship between evidence and members of both theistic and atheistic communities, so this argument may be mute except in talking about mean tendencies. Still we can talk about these tendencies.
So in truth, there is some research that address this question, at least in a somewhat round-about way, if we assume that some atheists treat science as most of Andrew Shtulman's experimental participants did.
Shtulman, A. (2010). Confidence without competence in the evaluation of scientific claims. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 302-307. (http://faculty.oxy.edu/shtulman/documents/2010b.pdf)
Working with the assumption that atheists are like most people with regards to their acceptance of science in conjunction with Shtulman's data leads to an interesting, if preliminary, conclusion. It would suggest that a tendency to accept appeals to authority as justifications for belief is fairly universal. While the epistemologists present might bristle at this claim, I do think appeals to authority can be reasonable at least for functional belief for the purpose of guides behavior. For one example that shows my hand a bit, not all of us can be climate scientists but that doesn't mean that we should not believe in global warming and adjust our behavior accordingly.
If this is the case, then the difference lies in which domains individuals are willing to accept appeals to authority rather than a simple rejection thereof. Importantly, one of the nice things about empirical observation is that experiments, at least ideally, are repeatable and observable by outside parties. These properties generally are not present in many religious beliefs.
Still though, it may be that atheists end up having more veritable belief systems, by virtue of their appealing exclusively to scientific claims, but that does not mean that they require a different level or type of evidence. That would require a deeper understanding of the positive qualities of science. And while many atheists may have such understanding, we cannot yet prove that all of them do or even that a majority do.
An efficient and functionally useful heuristic of that true understanding is to simply state that if a scientist says it, then the statement is probably true, and if an explanation appeals to supernatural forces, then it is probably false prima facie, and is the result of a testable relation between the phenomenon in question that simply hasn't yet been discovered. If people can get by on this, and scientists are trustworthy enough to keep check on each other's credibility (which the peer review system helps enforce) then this heuristic will be pretty solid.
Yes. Entirely.
Believers are willing to ignore almost any form of reason, rationale, logic and proof in favor of intangibles such as “faith” and “belief”. They’re willing to excuse any amount of contradiction and are happy to reinterpret text, doctrine or belief into their own synthesis of their own belief system.
Atheists tend to believe more in things that can be imperically and logically proven, retionales based on evidence and are less prone to just accept something that someone else states.
Yes, it would seem so. Not all atheists are skeptics, but the ones I’ve encountered all seem to be.
I have seen no evidence for “God” that is any more compelling than the evidence I’ve seen for Zeus, Odin, Ra, Vishnu, … or even Santa, the Loch Ness Monster, and Bigfoot.
It appears that theists are not skeptical when they consider religion.
Well obviously they take their books and their feelings as evidence, which many atheists do not (mind you, there are plenty of atheists who act more on their books and their feelings than they do on anything else). So in that sense, sure, there are different standards. But most people don’t apply the scientific method well in their daily lives…
Beliefs are tricky things. Many of them are irrational, even in the most rational people. There is a large body of theists, telling each other that they’re right. It’s a powerful reinforcement.
Theists do require an inordinate amount of evidence from a non-theist to shake even the most trivial of their beliefs but it would take a theist that forever-after they brag about earning to dissuade me from trusting the evidence science lays at my feet so yes the standards are different. We need our evidence to fit their preconceived notions for them accept it. They need evidence, period.
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