On Skepticism

The new atheists, as opposed to an older generation of atheists, love to portray themselves as skeptics. But they should be careful. It is true that words like skeptic have a narrow meaning in the sense of referring to doubt about a specific claim only. That's fine: language is a living, changing thing, and words can drift in various ways, such as narrowing and broadening.

But skepticism (call it capital-S skepticism) has not lost its earlier radical meaning of universal principled doubt: the literal inability to know anything at all or anything about a particular matter. Atheists who defend reason ought to make clear that this is not what they embrace. After all, if we can't know, then what's the point of asking a believer for evidence of God's reality? What is evidence to a capital-S skeptic? It's an illusion. If in principle we cannot know, then evidence is a bogus category. There can be no such thing! Anyone's claim -- even a theist's -- is as good as anyone else's, which is to say: no good at all.

Demand for evidence ("evidentialism") is the opposite of capital-S skepticism. Since we can know and since reason is efficacious, the question How do you know what you say is true? is a perfectly good question. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out in On Certainty that capital-S skepticism collapses in self-contradiction. (Objectively speaking, a contradiction is a no-no.) Here's why: to express doubt even to oneself about any claim, you must use language. But using language -- an inherently social institution -- presupposes a good deal of knowledge. So expressing doubt about a claim necessarily implies confidence in a ton of other claims. That means a radical skeptic can't even express doubt. He's trying to yank the very rug he's standing on. The most he'll accomplish is to fall flat on his face. (Be aware that skepticism and dogmatism are two sides of the same coin.)

Skeptics of all stripes (many theists are skeptics too) ought to stop talking altogether because they are committed to denying themselves what's needed to communicate at all, namely, an accessible objective framework (reality) and efficacious rational faculty. As Wittgenstein put it in closing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

The great satirist Tom Lehrer put the point more sharply, "If a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up."