No Evidence, or No Good Evidence?

Evidentialist atheists often conflate the concepts evidence and good evidence. But I see a world of difference between saying, "You offer no evidence for your belief" and "You offer no good evidence for your belief."It's an important distinction. First off, is it really true that theists offer no evidence whatever?

In "Defensor Fidei," Roderick T. Long, an Aristotle and Wittgenstein scholar at Auburn University, says this not usually the case. Theists and atheists clearly use the word faith in different senses, which impedes the conversation.

Long writes:

It seems to me that what the word [faith] means in ordinary language is not belief that goes beyond the evidence, but rather belief that goes beyond one’s personal experience. To someone of skeptical tendencies these might of course come to the same thing, but for most of us they do not. My belief that Stonehenge exists is not based on personal experience (nor on demonstrative deduction therefrom), but surely I have, by all but the sternest skeptical standards, sufficient evidence for it....

In this sense, then – and contrary to what is often asserted – faith plays a central role in the empirical sciences. I am not talking about “faith in the senses” or “faith in reason” or any such rot; I am talking about the widespread practice of relying on the results of other scientists without testing them oneself. After all, scientific inquiry is a cooperative enterprise; a scientist cannot personally test for herself all the theories and principles on which one relies. (Otherwise she wouldn’t even be able to use a thermometer!) Hence reliance on testimony is a pervasive feature of the scientific enterprise....

 

This is also, I claim, what theologians generally mean by “faith” – not belief on the basis of insufficient evidence, but rather belief that depends on trusting someone’s word or testimony for some claim that we have not ourselves experienced or demonstratively proven. This is entirely consistent with thinking that such testimony counts as good evidence – or that we have good evidence for regarding the source of the testimony as reliable.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a theist (I'm thinking Jew, Christian, Muslim, Mormon) who, when asked why he believes in God, says, "No reason. I just do."

The theist is more likely to cite what are to him reasons: personal revelation, the Bible, assurance from a trusted authority, the arguments from design, first cause, ontology, etc. To that person, those things are evidence, and atheists spend a lot of time refuting those justifications, so surely they treat them as evidence in principle.

You can't brand those reason as non-evidence just because you think they fail. They may not constitute good evidence, but bad evidence is a sort of evidence after all.

Earlier in the post, Long writes,

 

I do not mean to deny that many doctrines put forward as articles of faith are in fact propounded without sufficient evidence. All that I deny is that their being so is part of the meaning of the word “faith,” either in ordinary language or in theology. Note that I am not saying that being based on evidence is part of the meaning of “faith,” but only that not being based on evidence is not part of the meaning of “faith.” Faith can either be well-grounded in evidence, or not. It is not the purpose of this post to affirm (or for that matter to deny) that any particular article of faith is true, or reasonable, or justified by evidence. I’m in formal rather than material mode here.

Now I can imagine something being offered as evidence that I would want to disqualify as evidence per se and not just as good evidence. If a theist were to he believes in God because he flipped a coin, I would happily say he has given no evidence. But I would also say that he doesn't really believe in God. You can't believe in something unless you are convinced it is or probably is true. Belief implies some degree of persuasion, and disbelief implies lack of persuasion. Wittgenstein wrote that we would not understand someone who said, "It's raining, but I don't believe it."

At any rate, if we want to impress theists and the uncommitted, let's exercise maximum rigor.