Marcelo gleiser has become the first Latin American to win the Templeton Prize, which is awarded for contribution to the affirmation of the spiritual dimension of life.

In an interview about the award, this Dartmouth College physics professor argued that atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method.

Literally, Gleiser argued this way:

I believe that atheism is incompatible with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It is a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in unbelief. I dont believe, although I have no evidence for or against, I just dont believe. Point. It is a statement. But in science we dont really make statements. We say, Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or in favor of that. And then an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence of God or any kind of god (Which god in the first place? The Maori gods, or the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim god? Which god is that?). On the other hand, an agnostic would not recognize any right to make a final statement about something he does not know.

Gleiser reminds us that we are on an island of knowledge in the middle of an ocean of the unknown. As knowledge advances, we become more aware of what we do not know.

Given all the times scientists have said something was already safe and later found out it was not, it could well turn out that the statement there is no God could end up being similar to saying, No balloon or plane will be able to fly into the future a century ago. Similarly, the skepticism of the claim X does not exist is also important in science since X could one day appear.

Gleiser is right. But it does because it is defining skepticism and, by extension, atheism in a very restricted way.. Surely there are atheists and skeptics who reason that way, but atheism is also defined as I dont think about this hypothesis because it doesnt give me anything to solve the problems I face. That is to say, that one is an atheist with respect to God as he does not believe either that he lives on a television set and is continuously being deceived, or that he lives in a dream, or that a magician has bewitched him and he does not know anything about the real world, or that even everything that appears in the cinema is true but the government hides it.

To be agnostic would be to affirm that everything is possible. And that is obvious. Everything is possible. But admitting that everything is possible is not the same as introducing all the possibilities (each and every one of them, to infinity) when reflecting on how the world works. Simply, trying to climb the mountain of knowledge step by step, proposing humble hypotheses that we can progressively test. To propose the hypothesis of God is simply to set ourselves at the top, at the highest level of knowledge possible, and to propose a total explanation of everything. So, is there a greater show of daring and ineffectiveness than proposing a hypothesis that explains everything?

Or put another way: atheists are also agnostics: of course they do not know with absolute certainty that God does not exist, as they do not know anything absolutely. What atheism proposes is that it is a too vague and daring hypothesis, as well as impractical, wondering if God exists, if there are four thousand parallel dimensions, or if we are actually in an alien circus entertaining the masses without being aware of it.

All of this is possible, but do we waste time deciding it? No. First, many other hypotheses much more plausible and, above all, affordable for our narrow space of knowledge must be falsified.

Bertrand Russell He explained it very well with his famous kettle. While it remains true that humility can be a good thing, that we do not know what we do not know, and that it is impossible to prove the negative claim that God does not exist, Bertrand Russell reminds us that we can be rational in saying that we do not believe in something of which we cannot disprove the existence:

I must call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I dont think the existence of the Christian God is more likely than the existence of the gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another example: no one can prove that there is no porcelain kettle rotating in an elliptical orbit between Earth and Mars, but no one believes that this is likely enough to be taken into account in practice. I believe that the Christian God is equally unlikely.

What Russell is saying is that just because a point that is made without evidence cannot be disproved does not mean that it is unreasonable to think that it is not true. Furthermore, Russell places the burden of proof on the person making the positive claim (God / the kettle exists) and not on the person who questions that claim.

The astronomer Carl sagan He made a similar argument about the existence of a dragon in his garage in his book The World and Its Demons:

Suppose I seriously make such a claim to you. You will surely want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been countless dragon stories throughout the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity! Show me, you say. I take you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle, but no dragon. Where is the dragon? You ask. Oh, shes here, I reply, waving vaguely. I forgot to mention that she is an invisible dragon. You propose to spread flour on the garage floor to capture the dragons tracks. Good idea, I say, but this dragon floats in the air. Next, you will use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire. Good idea, but invisible fire has no heat either. You will spray paint the dragon and make it visible. Good idea, but its a disembodied dragon and the paint doesnt stick. And so. I counter every physical test you come up with with a special explanation why it wont work.

What is the difference between a floating, disembodied, invisible fire-breathing dragon with no heat and no dragon? If there is no way to refute my argument, no conceivable experiment counting against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? The inability to invalidate a hypothesis is not at all the same as proving it as true. Claims that cannot be proven, claims immune to refutation are truly useless, whatever their value in inspiring us or exciting our sense of wonder.

Sagan, as Russell, holds that the burden of proof rests with the person making the claim. Since there is no evidence of the dragon, it is unscientific to say that one does not believe the dragon is there.

Is it going too far to say that God does not exist? That depends on where you want to place the burden of proof and how much evidence (or lack thereof) is needed to make such a claim. Given that we are talking about God (the most mind-blowing supernatural thing we have on record), maybe we should ask for millions and millions of proofs and quintals of evidence at the very least. More than anything else weve been able to discover in all of human history. Or put another way: even laureate physicists should study a little more epistemology.

Corollary proposed in the following video: do not believe in anything that is not proven, and propose hypotheses that can be falsified (God is not one of them because we do not even know what it is, it is only a human word to refer to the unknowable):

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Atheism is incompatible with the scientific method, according to this Templeton Prize-winning physicist - Explica