Why the “no evidence” accusation misses the point.
“Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!”
—Bertrand Russell, upon being asked what he would reply if, after dying, he were brought into the presence of God and asked why he had not been a believer
Bertrand Russell was certainly not a believer in God (though he has since, to quote a teacher of mine, changed his view!). But, to my knowledge, he never made the crazy charge I now hear occasionally put forward by skeptics, that our faith is irrational because there is no evidence for it.[1]
This charge betrays a lamentable ignorance of some subjects, like 1st-century history: The idea that none of the New Testament documents provide any evidence for Christianity should be pretty hard for even a serious skeptic to hold.
But let’s suppose we bracketed history, and granted for argument’s sake that there was no scientific evidence for Christianity. Would the skeptic be right in this case?
Not necessarily, even after those generous concessions. That is, even if there were no scientific or historical evidence, these do not exhaust the kinds of evidence there could be. To see this, it’s helpful to understand a distinction between two different senses of the word “evidence.”[2] I think this “no evidence” objection usually rests on confusion between these two kinds of evidence.
The first is evidence as that which justifies our beliefs, i.e. which gives us a reason to believe them and provides our rational basis for belief. We can call this “normative evidence” because it is what gives us reason for believing (the word “normative” means having to do with a reason for something).
The second kind of evidence is what we could call “indicator evidence” (it could also be called “scientific evidence” in a broad sense). It consists in a regular connection between two objects “out there” in the world, and science makes progress largely by discovering this kind of correspondence between objects. In fact, science can only study indicator evidence; normative evidence, being inside our minds, is beyond its reach.
We can see the difference between these kinds of evidence easily by considering how smoke is evidence for fire. Because there is a reliable (though not perfect) connection between smoke and fire, smoke is indicator evidence for fire. And when you or I look at smoke, we know this, and so smoke typically also serves as normative evidence for fire (that is, we typically become more rightly confident in believing there is a fire somewhere when we see smoke there).
But suppose a young child who didn’t know about the fire/smoke connection saw some smoke in the distance. This child would have indicator evidence for fire, but not normative evidence, since the child did not know about the connection.
So indicator evidence can exist without normative evidence, as for the child. And normative evidence can exist without indicator evidence. For instance, take your belief about what you last had for dinner. It is perfectly obvious that this belief is rational, though you likely have no scientific/indicator evidence for it.[3]
Is it likely that Christian belief has normative evidence in its favor, apart from scientific/indicator evidence? Yes. For instance, consider the Reformed epistemologists (see here and here) who take many Christian beliefs to be rational because of the witness of God’s Spirit, or a spiritual perception of God. Spiritual perception and divine witness would certainly give normative evidence, since it is rational to believe because of them. And they are plainly not indicators of anything in the scientific sense. So attempts to demonstrate the paucity of evidence for Christianity on the basis of a lack of indicator evidence fail, unless reasons can be given to reject these sources of evidence.
And, of course, all this would be the case even if there were no indicator evidence in favor of Christianity. Even if we were to come close to giving away the store to the skeptic, there’s still enough material left behind the counter to provide evidence for Christianity.
Tags: evidence, epistemology
[1] This assumes that all rational beliefs have evidence. This view, known as evidentialism, is very controversial in philosophical quarters; but let’s grant it to the skeptic for the sake of the argument.
[2] I owe this distinction to the very informative Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article by Thomas Kelly on evidence.
[3] What evidence there is for it is difficult to describe, not because we aren’t familiar with it, but because we aren’t used to talking about it. This evidence is probably something going on “inside your head”, that particular feeling that we get when we remember something that makes it feel different from something we imagined, desired, and so on.
