Why atheists should be careful in their claims

More than ever, people seem to be embracing atheism and rejecting the notion of god. Whilst this pleases me on some level, I am worried that they are doing so for the wrong reasons. Whether or not god exists is a non trivial question, but many articles seem to make it out to be very basic. Such articles often like to describe different arguments in favour of god (e.g. First cause argument, ontological argument, design argument etc) and then dismiss them in just a few lines. I feel that this presents the case in a very biased way, and that those who reject the notion of god should perhaps be a bit more careful on deciding why exactly they do so.

The first thing to note is that the existence of god is a largely seperate issue from questions of whether religion is a good thing, whether religion has a positive or negative impact on our lives. Often people make claims of non existence on the basis that that the religions cause harm, which does not directly follow. We can plausibly imagine the existence of a god, yet hold that those who worship said god are destructive.

The second thing to note is that there are a number of possible 'methods' to in theory verify God. The first is a deductive argument, akin to Gödel's ontological argument that rely purely on logic. Whilst the logic is usually flawless, they rely on a number of premises that might be viewed as questionable, and are often rejected by atheists. The second type of argument is an inductive argument, focused around empirical data and an evidence based approach. I think this is the type of view that gathers more support, and pleads towards the scientific method. This argument (call it S) rejects God on the basis of insufficient evidence.

I've discussed previously why I am somewhat skeptical about the scientific method, but I do think it holds certain merits here. S seems to be based around an intuition regarding statistical hypotheses. We take the null hypothesis that God does not exist, and we keep this position until there is significant evidence to say that God does exist. In this sense, the onus lies upon the theist provide an explanation of God's existence. The atheist only needs to assess whether this evidence is significant, which they usually conclude to not be the case

What does this mean? Well an atheist under S lacks the argumentative resources to actually argue that God does not exist. They maintain a rejection of God by arguing that there is insufficient evidence to say that God does exist. Note that this is because we are engaging with a type of inductive argument and thus we are not able to (logically) deductively prove whether something is the case. We can only provide support for a given position by considering the evidence. 

This is a crucial difference. To argue that God does not exist places the onus on the existing party and thus an atheist who adopts such position must provide the evidence to show this non existence. To simply reject the null hypothesis is a much safer and easier position to hold. Thus, atheists can effectively respond to the question of 'why do you not believe in god' by 'why?'. Yet theists can also easily respond to the question of 'can't you see that god does not exist' by 'why?'. 

As an atheist myself, this is the position I hold. I have not received enough evidence to reject my null hypothesis that god does not exist. A final note that it is also non trivial as a question of why we ought to take this as a null hypothesis. Indeed there seem to be good arguments to suggest that we ought to actually assume the null hypothesis that God does exist and ask for evidence that it does not. Still, the intuition seems to be that since we can not perceive the existence of God, we ought to null assume non existence. I might discuss this concept in another blog post in the future.