Death in the Clouds (Pt. II)

The social sciences and cognitive science, like all empirical disciplines, cannot directly address the question of God's existence, which appears to be a non-empirical matter, i.e., no experiment or observation could either prove or disprove God's existence.

Much ink has been spilled by atheists in giving their numerous objections and responses to any conceivable argument for God's existence, e.g., Paley's watch analogy.

With regards to arguing against God's existence, a common argument from the atheist camp is known as the Problem of Evil. This argument states that the existence of all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God is incompatible with the existence with the unnecessary suffering that we see in the world around us. Since it is unreasonable to deny that unnecessary suffering exists, the atheists argue, the only rational response is to abandon belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God.

In this class, we are leaving the dispute about God's existence as an open question. This allows us to drop the ontological question and unify DCT (atheist version) with DCT (theist version). Moreover, although much data from social psychology demonstrates that the social monitoring hypothesis could be true, there are stunning disconfirmations of the hypothesis too, e.g., Batson's Good Samaritan experiments. Thus, we are labeling the social monitoring hypothesis as an open question. The Big Gods hypothesis fares no better. Turchin and colleagues have recently launched a massive attack on the view and we are awaiting a response by Norenzayan. For now, we will also label it an open question.