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 a