Can We Test Empirical Statements?

"Skeptical" atheists often admonish their theistic interlocutors thus: you have a hypothesis, namely, that God exists. So get out there and try to confirm it empirically -- better yet, try to disprove it. When you've done either, get back to me. This is said to be the proper way to acquire knowledge and to dispose of erroneous beliefs.

Ignoring the logical problem with any notion of the supernatural (as if...), which I've discussed several times, the skeptic's admonition depends on epistemological considerations that were demolished in 1951, notably by W.V.O. Quine in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." (It's, again, a case of basking in the light of a long-dead star.) Specifically, the simplistic admonition depends on the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, which holds that meaningful statements can be only one of two kinds: 1) analytic: necessarily true by definition (convention) and so, as tautologies, uninformative about the world (e.g., cats are domesticated felines), and 2) synthetic: potentially informative and verifiable by observation but contingent (e.g., my cat is on that mat). All other statements, such as those about ethics, theology, and aesthetics, are noncognitive, emotive. Question: is the proposition water is H2O analytic or synthetic? Read on. (Some argue, of course, that God exists is an analytic statement because existence is God's essence; so we can know he exists by analyzing the concept God as the most perfect being conceivable. We'll leave this ontological argument aside for today.)

In that paper, which some regard as the most important of the 20th century, Quine showed that the line between analytic and synthetic statements is at best fuzzy, and he addressed whether an isolated proposition could be verified or falsified on its own, as scientists and many philosophers (the logical positivists) thought. Quine wrote, 

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a manmade fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.... If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement -- especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may.

In other words, we never test just an isolated proposition because all propositions reside in a "web of belief" more or less remotely related to direct observation. A test that seems to refute a particular proposition may actually be indicting something else in the web. Figuring out what to do then is a rational process. Reason and logic are required by fallible beings to accomplish the task.

Auburn University philosophy professor Roderick T. Long elaborated:

As W.V. Quine reminds us, no scientific proposition can be empirically falsified in isolation. Empirical tests falsify only conjunctions of beliefs, and cannot tell us which conjunct(s) to reject; that decision requires the inquirer to make judgments of relative plausibility and overall coherence, i.e., to apply the reflective equilibrium method (Quine 1951). An empirical test simply introduces a new belief— and thus a new potential for inconsistency—into one’s overall system of beliefs; in short, empirical data constitute an exogenous shock to the inquirer’s belief set. Like any exogenous shock, such data are a disequilibrating factor, which ordinarily triggers a self-correcting mechanism to move the system back toward equilibrium. In the course of adapting itself to the new belief, the mind may adjust or eliminate older beliefs that conflict with it. (Sometimes, however, it is quite properly the empirical “data” themselves that get rejected, as occurs in the case of experimental results that cannot be replicated. Hence in a sense there are no “data”; no facts are simply given to us in such a way as to exempt us from the responsibility to assess them critically.)

The mind’s self-correcting mechanism does not operate automatically or uniformly. The process of intellectual inquiry is an entrepreneurial one, requiring alertness—not only to novel information but also to the previously unnoticed implications of information one already possesses. Just as the ordinary entrepreneur moves the economy toward equilibrium by discovering and correcting asymmetries of information within the market, so the auto-entrepreneur (to coin an ungainly phrase) moves herself toward reflective equilibrium by identifying unresolved tensions within her own belief set—unexploited opportunities for intellectual profit, we might say—and seeking to resolve them. Bringing [F. A.] Hayek’s metaphor home to roost, we might call this “discovery as a discovery process.” ...[C]omplete reflective equilibrium is of course never achieved—first, because inquiry is costly, and in any case we never have the time or ingenuity to trace out all the implications of our beliefs and so uncover every hidden conflict; second, because new experiences are constantly introducing novel information into the belief set, compelling the process of reflection to chase a new equilibrium. Hence a better name for the method of reflective equilibrium would be “reflective equilibration”; an evenly-rotating mind is as much an artificial construct as an evenly-rotating economy.

Reflective equilibration, as I’ve described it, is in tension with empiricism, since empiricism by definition grants empirical data a privileged status, while reflective equilibration throws them in on a level with everything else.

Note that Long says that no one has the "ingenuity to trace out all the implications of our beliefs and so uncover every hidden conflict." That seems right. Hence, if individual and social flourishing is our goal, we need dialogue (think of Socrates), conversation, dissent, toleration, and respect, all of which depend on freedom of conscience and expression.

The skeptic's empiricist challenge to the theists is wide of the mark. We must go deeper, right to the logical root of the theist's claim. God is not part of a web of belief but of a web of contradictions. We don't go looking for square circles, do we?