Who's the Real Skeptic?

As I note here, when George H. Smith, in Atheism: The Case Against God, constructed a dialogue between a skeptic and an antiskeptic, the theist was the skeptic. That may be counterintuitive, but it shouldn't be.

Smith explains that many theists, including career theologians, are happy to present what look like reason-based arguments for God for as long as they can. But as soon as they run into the wall of logic, as inevitably they must, they will abandon -- nay, turn against -- reason and become open skeptics. (The best ones, after pushing reason as far as they can, then proclaim the limit of reason without actually rejecting it. Aquinas and Maimonides come to mind.) I think it was philosopher Antony Flew who said that theists treat debates with atheists like a tennis game in which the net is dropped when it's their turn to hit the ball. Just so.

When beaten by reason, those theists will demand that atheists prove that it is efficacious. They will even have the audacity to assert that atheists only have faith in reason, which faith they claim is no better than their faith in God.

What's an atheist to say in response? I know what not to say. The atheist ought not to agree with the theist about the status of reason and logic. Well, what atheist would do that, you ask? I've already reported on one celebrity atheist who says that while reason and logic have more or less worked up until now, we cannot demonstrate their cognitive power. He went so far as to say that we can't even be sure that reason is "reasonable"! He is suspicious of the fact that you can't validate reason and logic without using them in the process. I kid not you. For rationalists, that fact is not a bug but a feature. Reason is self-validating.

Surrendering reason to theists is the worst thing an atheist can do. If you essentially give it up, you have nothing left.

Here's what an atheist ought to say: you cannot rationally demand proof of or evidence for the cognitive power of reason and logic because the very concepts proof and evidence presuppose that power. Those concepts are intrinsically reason-based. Without reason, no such things could be. And the claim that the rationalist has faith in reason is literally absurd. Faith (except in the ordinary sense of trust or confidence) is defined in contradistinction to reason. You can see this whenever a theist offers an argument for why reason presupposes faith. An argument is reason in action. So it's contradictory to argue for the proposition that reason presupposes faith.

Smith is worth quoting on why the theist is the skeptic in his dialogue. As a preliminary remark, I should point out that in philosophy skepticism does not refer merely to grounded doubt about a specific claim. Rather, it refers to the conviction that reason is impotent either in general or in a particular realm, say, the supernatural. A philosophical skeptic wouldn't ask for evidence because he already believes that reason is useless. David Hume is usually regarded as the classic skeptic (actually he was more complicated than that label would suggest), and it was he who famously wrote that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." (Emphasis added.) He meant that while reason can tell you whether you can get there from here, it can say nothing whether there (the pursuit of truth, say) is worth going to. 

Hume also said, "When I am convinced of any principle, it is only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence."

Does any atheist who embraces science wish to endorse those views?

In chapter 5, The Skepticism of Faith, Smith writes:

If faith [at least as some use the word--SR] is to gain a foothold, reason must be attacked, which brings us to the issue of epistemological skepticism. Although skepticism assumes many forms, it is basically the doctrine that reason is unable to know or adequately deal with particular aspects of reality. Although skeptics rarely deny knowledge outright, they may argue that facts cannot be known with certainty, or that man cannot perceive reality directly, or that the foundations of knowledge -- such as the laws of logic -- are arbitrary constructs of human consciousness and cannot be said to mirror reality.

It is a widespread delusion that Christianity stands as the last threshold against philosophical skepticism....

This is a gross distortion of the truth, both from a historical and philosophical perspective. Christianity has never been a champion of reason, nor is it so today.... While reason was permitted to explicate and defend religious dogma, it was never allowed to question the truth of dogma as such.

As I've said before, building the case against God on skepticism is like building a house on sand. Skepticism is the road to nowhere. Reason is the road to knowledge.