Bitbutter

I found this short response to my article on presuppositionalism in my incoming links. Here's an excerpt.

I believe that both theists and atheists accept certain premises on faith and that acknowledging that they do so is better than dissembling, equivocating, and wrapping oneself in blankets of deliberate ambiguity.

It's misleading to equate the foundational assumptions (the 'puddle jumps') that make rational inquiry possible with the leaps that religious people make, even if they appear to be of the same type.

Daylight Atheism's commentary on one of the exchanges in the debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan explains this perfectly.

Science rests as well on some basic elements of faith…. These little puddle-jumps of faith are the foundation for your reason. I think they are justified. But that reason is really, au fond, a belief, an act of faith, an acknowledgment that, as humans, we have no "contingency-free" place from where to start at all and no "contingency-free" place on earth to end up at.

No, no, a thousand times no. Science, like every human endeavor, can deliver only provisional and not absolute truth about the world we live in, and can be sidetracked by human fallibility and ego. But this categorically does not mean that science is no better than any other way of knowing invented or alleged by humans, nor does it mean that its conclusions are no more certain than any religious assertion based on faith. Despite its faults, science is still by far the most and indeed the only reliable way of knowing we have ever discovered. The exponential growth of scientific knowledge, compared to the eternal stagnation of religion, should alone lay this silly trope to rest. Harris dismantles it with razor-keen wit:

…the fact that Hume's worries make sense, the fact that Wittgenstein can say things like "our spade is turned," does not place every spurious claim to knowledge on an equal footing with science. The discomfort induced in mathematics by Godel does not make the doctrine of Mormonism even slightly more plausible. There is still a difference between jumping a puddle and walking on water.