Indeed. In being interviewed for this broadcast, Neil shared that he had his daughter place some money under her pillow to prove to her that the tooth fairy doesn't exist and is now extrapolating that to God doesn't exist.
It's akin to when elementary school teachers in the now defunct state atheistic Soviet Union used to bring in a plant and place it in front of the kids and tell them if God exists, he'll water it. The plant died of water, of course, since they did not water it.
In '
The Dawkins Delusion,'
Alister and
Joanna Collicutt McGrath respond to this fallaciousness:
"As anyone familiar with antireligious polemics knows, a recurring atheist criticism of religious belief is that it is infantile-a childish delusion which ought to have disappeared as humanity reaches its maturity... that belief in God is just like believing in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. These are childish beliefs that are abandoned as soon as we are capable of evidence-based thinking.
Yet the analogy is obviously flawed Those who use this infantile argument have to explain why so many people discover God in later life and certainly do not regard this as representing any kind of regression, perversion or degeneration."
Indeed, what Neil and the teachers in the 20th century did is not science: it is an exercise in fallaciousness. A genuine experiment would be to test Christianity based on what Christianity actually teaches rather than engage in a fallacious exercise that doesn't prove anything other than they have no interest in examining what Christianity actually teaches.
As God gave mankind dominion over nature, it's obvious that He delegated responsibility for watering that plant to the teacher. The teacher was simply amiss in carrying out their God-given responsibility. And, of course, putting money under one's pillow for a non-existent tooth fairy in no way disproves God's existence. It's just an ignorant exercise in infantile fallaciousness, not the "strong contradictory evidence" Dawkins and Neil claim.
And various religious beliefs can be shown to be justifiable without demonstrating that they are proven.
I remember McGrath stating that Gould observed, "Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs-and equally compatible with atheism." Nature can be interpreted in a theistic or in an atheistic way while demanding neither as both are genuine intellectual possibilities
from a scientific perspective.
McGrath went on to further point out that the natural sciences depend on inductive inference, which is a matter of "weighing evidence and judging probability, not of proof." Competing explanations are evident at every level of the human endeavor to represent the world-from the details of quantum mechanics to what Karl Popper termed "ultimate questions" of meaning.
This means that the great questions of life (some of which are also scientific questions) cannot be answered with any degree of certainty. Any given set of observations can be explained by a number of theories. To use the jargon of the philosophy of science: theories are underdetermined by the evidence.
The question then arises: what criteria can be used to decide between them, especially when they are "empirically equivalent"?
An orthodox atheist would simply revert back to a fundamentalist position that favors their atheistic worldview in the exact same manner as a Muslim or a young earth creationist would revert back to a fundamentalist position that favors their particular worldview.
The truth is that given the limits of science: science, philosophy, religion and literature all have a legitimate place in the human quest for truth and meaning. This is a widely held view, both in Western culture at large and even within many sections of the scientific community itself as Gould discovered.
Naturalistic science and other disciplines are not at war. It is the atheist (whose core, incontrovertible, foundational assumption is that there is no God) that places them so and tries to force us to choose between them. Worldviews promoted in such a way leans toward fanaticism and leads them into error based on their own dogma even to the point of absurdity in putting money under a pillow and claiming that shows that God doesn't exist.
Everything I've heard about this series, points to it to refuting the belief in God and Him creating everything there is. Carl Sagan wasn't exactly a friend of Christian beliefs.
