What a comment thread about evolution taught me about a rule everybody wants to apply to somebody else

A workshop I'm running this month is built around one tool: a five-question test. What is observed. What is inferred. What assumptions enter the argument. Is the proposed cause sufficient. What would falsify the claim. I built it to stop people from treating a worldview like a lab reading. I did not expect the clearest violation of my own rule to show up in the comment thread before the workshop even started.

A commenter, arguing against theism, put it something like this: since the religious person's only evidence for God is personal experience, I can claim with equal standing that there never was, is, or will be anything supernatural, on the evidence of a lifetime of reality.

It sounds even-handed. Two sides, two claims, two lifetimes of experience. Symmetry.

It isn't symmetrical, and the reason matters for more than one comment thread.

A lifetime of not encountering something is a sample of one observer's experience. It is not evidence that the thing doesn't exist, unless you already have a method for detecting it that would have worked and came up empty. That's the actual test. Not encountering a thing, and having a reliable way to detect the thing, running it, and getting nothing, are two different situations. Only the second one earns the conclusion "there is no such thing."

Nobody runs this rule consistently, including the people who demand it loudest. We don't observe dark matter directly. We infer it from gravitational effects on visible matter that don't add up otherwise. We don't observe Caesar's court. We infer it from documents, coins, and ruins. Nobody but you has direct access to your own mind. Everyone around you infers that you're conscious from what you say and do. All three are respectable inferences to an unobserved cause from observed effects, and nobody calls them wishful thinking. So when the same reasoning gets aimed at God, the standard has to hold. "I have not seen X" does not entail "X does not exist," whether X is dark matter, Caesar's court, your neighbor's mind, or God. If the rule bends only in the fourth case, it was never a rule about evidence. It was a conclusion that went looking for a rule to hide behind.

Another commenter, arguing the other side, made the point that should have ended the exchange right there: rational arguments for a first cause have existed since Aristotle, refined through Ibn Sina and Aquinas, and none of them rest on anyone's private religious experience. They rest on the observation that contingent, changing things exist, and the argument that something has to account for their existence without itself needing a further cause. You can reject that argument. Serious philosophers have. What you can't do is treat it as the same species of claim as "I felt something in church once," and then knock down the feeling instead of the argument.

The reply, when it came, didn't answer that. It shifted to a different claim: that a brain, once it exists, is sufficient to explain memory, language, culture, and everything downstream of those, without needing anything further. That's a fine account of how minds function once minds exist. It says nothing about why there's a contingent universe capable of producing brains in the first place, which was the actual question on the table. Answering the question you find easier instead of the one you were asked isn't a rebuttal. It's a subject change wearing a rebuttal's clothes.

Here's the part I didn't expect to find useful, but did.

The same commenter linked to a Mark Manson piece as backup, one recommending Martin Hägglund's This Life, a book arguing that our shared mortality is the foundation of all meaning. Manson calls the first two thirds of that book beautiful and profound. Then Hägglund spends his last hundred pages turning that observation about mortality into an argument that religious belief in an afterlife is at the root of all unethical behavior, and eventually into an explicitly Marxist political program. Manson, no friend of religion and no defender of theism, breaks from the book right there. He calls that stretch naive at best and plain wrong at worst. He says he hated the last third.

Notice what happened. A secular reader, sympathetic to the entire premise, still drew a hard line between a description he found compelling, we die, and a conclusion piled on top of it that he thought didn't follow: therefore Marxism, therefore religion causes unethical behavior. He applied the exact discipline my workshop is trying to teach. Separate what's observed or reasonably inferred from what's being smuggled in on top of it, and don't let the second thing borrow the first thing's credibility. He did it without a five-question test, a workshop, or a stake in the theological fight. He just noticed the seam where the argument stopped describing something and started prescribing something, and said so.

That's the whole exercise. It isn't a religious skill or a secular one. It's honesty about which parts of an argument are earning their keep.

The commenter who wanted symmetry between "God exists, I felt it" and "God doesn't exist, I never felt it" also wrote, earlier in the same thread, that a lot of people favor critical thinking right up until it touches their own belief. He's right. I'd only add that he demonstrated it in the same comment. A universal negative about the supernatural, built on one life's non-encounter, is a metaphysical conclusion wearing the clothes of empiricism. So is a universal claim about what mortality proves, once you've decided in advance where the argument has to end up.

The rule has to run in every direction it's aimed, or it was never a rule. It was a preference with a lab coat on.