The River Church of New Jersey

For a while I wondered why atheists hold on to the view of atheism that looks more like agnosticism.  By now, it’s pretty much accepted that no one would be audacious enough to claim absolute negation on anything b/c that’ll imply omniscience, an attribute of God – this argument destroys itself.  However, from scientific perspective, for an idea to be rejected, one does not have to prove absolute negation – lack of hard evidence would be sufficient to deny its validity.  So, when a scientific atheism claims there is no God, all they are saying is theirs is no physical evidence to support the claims of God and therefore must be rejected.

Theistic philosophers/Apologists would respond by saying lack of evidence does not disprove its existence.  Then they will appeal to historical evidence, personal testimony, logical argument, Metaphysics and etc.  Unfortunately the scientific community would reject all of these ‘evidences’ for being speculative w/ no hard evidences to support them.

This leads me to wonder: is there any common ground??  The more I think about this, the more I’m convinced that a qualification of proofs or evidences depends largely on paradigm or worldview one holds to.  In other words, when a proposition appears faulty, then there are at least two reasons [probably more] for it – either it’s a faulty proposition or the paradigm for judging the proposition is faulty.  I’m more convinced of the latter – God by nature is immaterial, unknowable, transcendent, supernatural being.  As such, I feel that we will never arrive at any ‘hard evidences’ about the existence of God purely by looking from scientific frame of reference.  Now we could appeal to the evidences of God’s intrusion into the physical realm like miracles or personal testimonies.  But, they’ll still be dismissed by scientific atheism for being speculative, subjective, and extrapolative.

So, now, I’m left w/ the same predicament from my 1^st year philosophy class – in atheistic/theistic debates, both sides are talking at each other, coming from different perspectives w/ no common grounds to agree on.  As the result, discussions go nowhere w/ each side being convinced that they did not lose the debate.