ARCHIVE: Existence as Evidence. Or Not

*** This entry was originally posted to LiveJournal July 21, 2011 ***


Even for an empiricist, there are always assumptions. I don't have to have watched my car come through the assembly line to be confident to every reasonable degree that it was constructed in a Toyota factory somewhere. But that assumption is based on knowledge and experience. If I were from a time early in human history and had never seen a manufactured machine before, I would have as much cause to assume that the car was created through sorcery or divine miracle as through human technology.

The existence of the car, in the absence of other knowledge and evidence and experience, is not in itself sufficient evidence for any particular conclusion as to its origin. If it's there, it had to get there somehow. But to discover the particular how takes further investigation and knowledge.

I'm not just talking about cars here. It's the same with the Universe or any other observed phenomenon that leads people to supernatural or divine conclusions. The phenomenon exists, sure. Presumably something caused that phenomenon to exist, since in our experience phenomena tend to have causes. But the existence of the phenomenon is not, in itself, sufficient evidence for any particular conclusion as to the cause. Perhaps the cause truly is divine or supernatural. But in the absence of other evidence, that conclusion is no more certain than is a perfectly mundane and natural conclusion that we simply don't understand yet.

For an example, people sometimes see things in the sky that they can not identify. But just because the thing they are seeing is unidentifiED does not necessarily mean that it is unidentifiABLE. If a person sees something in the sky that seems to be outside of his or her experience with other objects typically seen in the sky, that is simply not conclusive proof of extraterrestrial intelligent life visiting Earth. Maybe that is the explanation, but it is hardly the only conclusion that could account for the existence of the observed phenomenon.

For another example, I think most of us would agree that the Universe is here. I think it's also safe to say that most of us currently alive would agree that we weren't present when the Universe came into being, and therefore have no firsthand knowledge of how it happened. The existence of the Universe is not, in itself, conclusive proof that it was willed into being by any deity--much less the specific deity in which a particular person happens to believe. Maybe one or more deities did create the Universe, but even if so it might have been the Christian Jehovah or it might have been Zeus or Allah or Osiris or Shiva or any of the thousands of other deities that have been worshipped through human history. Alternatively, it might not have involved any deities at all. There are prevailing scientific theories based on observations and mathematical modeling, but new evidence might arise to alter those theories tomorrow.

So yes, we must make assumptions sometimes. But we mustn't let our assumptions convince us that they're the only possible explanations, and we mustn't let them stop us from continuing to investigate and to acquire actual (which is to say, observable, measurable, and repeatable) knowledge, evidence, and experience.