There's a Dragon in My Garage!

Kevin Harris: Bill, our listeners often send material for your feedback. Case in point: this tweet from The Skeptic, as he calls himself, has more than 20,000 views so far, and his profile summary says his purpose is “debunking religions while searching for objective truth. I believe a world without religion is a world with more room for humanity. Let’s talk about it.” So you may want to comment on that, Bill, before we check out the video. For one thing, he apparently thinks the search for objective truth rules out anything religious.

Dr. Craig: I’d like to see him justify that. It seems that his conclusions are all made up in advance and his mind is set in concrete.

Kevin Harris: Well, here’s the video. It’s about a minute and a half. Let’s watch the entire tweet and then we’ll see if there’s anything interesting to divide up and comment on. Here it is.

The Skeptic: There’s a dragon in my garage. You cannot see it because it’s invisible, and you cannot hear it because it is silent. You cannot touch it because it floats above our heads, and you cannot even feel its fiery breath because its flames are heatless. Do you believe in my dragon?

This is the thought experiment that Carl Sagan introduces to show that if somebody makes a claim that cannot be tested or proven or disproven, what is the difference between an invisible dragon and no dragon at all? It’s all to do with what philosophers call the burden of proof, which says that if somebody makes a claim, it is up to them to prove it and not for everybody else to disprove it.

If I say there is a dragon in my garage and you say you don’t believe me, I can’t then turn around to you and say, “Well, can you prove that there isn’t a dragon in my garage?” Because there is an infinity of imaginary and invisible things that we could try and disprove every second.

As Christopher Hitchens put it, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” If somebody offers you no proof, there is no need to rebut them.

And yet we fall for this all of the time in arguments, in politics, and in online debates. Somebody will make a bold and outlandish claim and expect other people to do the hard work of trying to disprove them. There are invisible dragons everywhere. It’s the conspiracy theory without any proof whatsoever. It’s the accusation without any evidence at all.

What Sagan and Hitchens are saying is that in a world full of dragons in garages, we only have one question to ask. Can you show me?

Kevin Harris: My initial impression is that he’s implying that God and invisible dragons are in the same category. But aside from that, maybe we can break the video down line by line. There are some principles that we can examine. Maybe give your first impressions of the message of this video.

Dr. Craig: My first impression was how old-fashioned it is. It’s a throwback not just to the so-called New Atheism, but even further to the old positivism of the 1930s and ’40s, which has long been refuted and discarded by philosophers. I think what the little tweet shows really is how philosophically naïve Carl Sagan was in his assertions.

Kevin Harris: Let’s take it line by line. He introduces the dragon as being essentially immaterial. It’s invisible and its fire is heatless so it can’t be felt. I suppose we could put God in that broad category: that he is immaterial.

Dr. Craig: Yes, that’s right. God would be an entity that is not directly discernible by the five senses, and so he would be in that category along with things like quarks, electrons, mathematical objects, time, space, even dinosaurs.

Kevin Harris: After introducing this invisible dragon, he asks if we believe in this dragon. I think we need to ask what he means by “believe” and distinguish between perhaps a belief in something and belief that something exists, for example.

Dr. Craig: I think it’s pretty clear that he is using the expression to mean, “Do you believe that the invisible dragon exists?”

Kevin Harris: Next he credits Carl Sagan with this dragon thought experiment, which claims that there’s no difference between an invisible dragon which can’t be tested, proven, or disproven and no dragon at all. Is this a valid principle when stated that way, Bill?

Dr. Craig: Obviously not. The sort of entities that I mentioned just a moment ago can have evidence for their existence in their causal effects upon the world, even if we cannot directly detect them with our five senses.

Kevin Harris: Continuing, he gets to what I think is the central subject of this whole message: the burden of proof. He says if someone makes a claim, it’s up to them to prove it and not up to everyone else to disprove it. You’ve talked about the difference between a resolution being debated and a question being debated in an academic formal debate and an everyday conversation about something in one’s garage. Talk to us about “burden of proof,” if you would.

Dr. Craig: Here The Skeptic is quite mistaken. The late philosopher George Mavrodes once pointed out to me that the question of a burden of proof only arises in a forensic context where one is shouldering the responsibility for proving a proposition, such as a case for the prosecution in a criminal case in the law court. But if one is not in such a forensic context, he has no burden of proof to prove anything to anyone.

Moreover, The Skeptic assumes that there is a differential burden of proof between theism and atheism. But both of these are claims to knowledge and are therefore exactly on a par. The person who claims there is a God is claiming to know something, and similarly the person who claims there is no God is also making a knowledge claim. And so there is no differential burden of proof between them. Each of them can be asked for the justification for their assertion.

Kevin Harris: Next, a couple of things that he says here I want you to comment on, Bill. The Skeptic says there are an infinity of imaginary and invisible things that we could try to disprove every second. Are we in the territory of whether one can prove a negative here? And the other thing I’m curious about is how his statement relates to Platonism and abstract objects if we take his use of an infinity of things seriously.

Dr. Craig: The point here is, as I say, that the atheist is making a positive claim to knowledge – that God does not exist – and in that case he has exactly the same burden of proof as the person who claims that God does exist. I think your example of Platonism is interesting because Platonists believe that an infinity of mathematical and other abstract objects exist even though they are not detectable by the five senses.

So if you claim to know that Platonism is true, we can ask, “What justification do you have for Platonism?”. And if you claim that Platonism is false, then we can equally ask, “What justification do you have for that knowledge claim?”. There is no differential burden of proof here.

Kevin Harris: Then he quotes Christopher Hitchens’ statement that whatever can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. That seems to be a sensible statement. What about it?

Dr. Craig: That depends on what you mean by “dismiss.” If by dismissal you mean to regard as false, then Hitchens’ claim is wholly unreasonable. Suppose someone asserts that there is gold on Mars, but that he has no evidence for that claim. That in no way justifies me in asserting that there is no gold on Mars.

Kevin Harris: Next up, he complains that we fall for this shifting of the burden of proof all the time in politics, online debates, and general conversations. Someone makes a bold claim and expects you to do the hard work of trying to disprove them. He concludes the video. He says, “What Sagan and Hitchens are saying, in a world of dragons in garages, we only have one question to ask: Can you show me?” And there are a lot of nuances to what one means by “show me,” aren’t there? One could mean prove it with certainty, or offer proofs, or show where the evidence points—things like that.

Dr. Craig: Right. And the implicit assumption here is the one made by the old-line positivist that the evidence in question has to be empirical evidence – the evidence of the five senses. If something cannot be verified by the five senses, then it’s meaningless. But positivism was shown to be not only wholly unreasonable but even self-defeating. So this fellow, I’m afraid, is completely out of touch with contemporary epistemology in demanding empirical evidence for any positive assertion.

Kevin Harris: Hey, let’s pause the action for just a moment. I want to remind you that you will get a lot out of the free Reasonable Faith newsletter. Dr. Craig talks about a lot of things in the newsletter that he doesn’t discuss anywhere else. It’s a look behind the scenes of Reasonable Faith. There’s always some extra teaching, the latest news and events, and usually some things that are just on Dr. Craig’s mind. Go to ReasonableFaith.org and sign up. Again, it’s free. While you’re there, take advantage of all the free resources at ReasonableFaith.org. As always, thanks so much for your prayer and financial support. Now, let’s get back to the studio with Dr. Craig.

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Kevin Harris: Let’s conclude with some of the comments on this tweet, on this video. Let me run a few of these past you. Alawisha comments. He says “Hume, the Scottish philosopher, noted that one cannot logically go from ‘is’ to ‘ought.’ One cannot use what is real to prove what is said to be magical or supernatural. It is nonsense to say there is a real thing; therefore, we ought to believe gods are real.”

Dr. Craig: Oh man, it is so discouraging to read such silly comments as this. The is–ought distinction has nothing to do with using the real to prove what is magical or supernatural. Hume’s claim is that you cannot derive a moral obligation from a factual statement, and that’s obviously not what this question is about. The relevant question here is whether we can have any good reasons to think that God exists.

Kevin Harris: I was wondering about that. I always thought that the is–ought fallacy – and Hume talking about going from “is” to “ought” – was in the moral realm.

Dr. Craig: Right.

Kevin Harris: And here he is applying it to this. Okay, thanks for straightening that out.

Rob Roars says, “There is historical evidence for the acts of God. There is scientific evidence for the teleological nature of the universe. There is the cosmological evidence that fits our claim in the cosmological argument. Belief without evidence is your straw man. The problem isn’t a lack of evidence. It’s stubbornness of those who refuse to see it and incompetence of those who train themselves to miss it.”

Dr. Craig: What Rob is pointing out is that one can have evidence of various kinds for supersensible entities—that is to say, entities that are not directly detectable by the five senses. And that is obviously true and commonplace in science and other fields of inquiry.

Kevin Harris: Michael James Kilby says, “Evidence isn’t even enough to change people’s minds. This has never been about evidence. People have been presented evidence that they live on a ball, but they still insist that they live on a flat earth. Evidence is like 25% of people’s belief systems, if that.” I couldn’t find that anywhere. I wonder if he’s citing a study about evidence being only 25% of people’s belief systems, or he’s just being rhetorical.

Dr. Craig: It sounds rhetorical to me. It’s true that people’s beliefs are not shaped solely by the evidence, but his example of the flat earth really backfires on him. Scarcely anyone familiar with the evidence believes in the flat earth. So that would show that evidence is indeed important to belief formation.

Kevin Harris: Bolt the Snow Leopard says, “So the dragon in your garage is not a dragon at all and does not fit classical definitions, yet somehow is a dragon. Is this supposed to be similar to how atheists try to disprove God by presenting him being something he isn’t and winning the argument?” He’s right about that not being the classical definition of a dragon. Dragons are not generally invisible. You can feel their flame, as I understand. And so I suppose this is an accusation of a straw man?

Dr. Craig: Yes, I think this is a fair critique. The Skeptic is not talking about a dragon. What he’s postulating is incoherent.

Kevin Harris: Proto Renaissance Man says, “My wife is cooking breakfast for me as I type. I know she will not poison me. I cannot prove it. And yet, by the logic used here, atheists would by necessity do all their own cooking.” That’s at least funny. But what do you think about his point?

Dr. Craig: I think there’s good evidence that she would not poison him. Remember, we’re not asking for certainty here. The evidence can make a conclusion highly probable or more probable than not. And so I think there’s good evidence for the fidelity of one’s wife and that she doesn’t have murderous intentions.

Kevin Harris: Speak Freely credits the Reasonable Faith tweets here. He says, “@RFUpdates can ultimately show why this skeptic might not be someone you want to pattern your thinking after. Dr. Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology shows that a person can have rational warrant for belief in God as a properly basic belief, just like we believe in the existence of other minds or in the past apart from any absolute proof. Furthermore, the idea of God’s existence isn’t just thrown out willy-nilly but has mountains of argument and support behind it, unlike the invisible dragon. And if someone said, ‘Well, God is just like the invisible dragon,’ then all you’ve done is call God a dragon.”

By the way, Bill, several commenters pointed people to Reasonable Faith in all the comments, and that’s good to know.

Dr. Craig: It’s wonderful to see that someone knows the work of Alvin Plantinga, and I think he’s absolutely correct about properly basic beliefs. In this tweet The Skeptic is assuming an old-line epistemology called Classical Foundationalism that, perhaps appropriate to his moniker, would lead to absolute skepticism. And this commentator, Speak Freely, correctly sees that Plantinga’s epistemology provides a good corrective to that sort of Classical Foundationalist understanding of knowledge.

Kevin Harris: Here’s one more. Michael Klein asks, “Is the imaginary dragon a necessary being?” I think that’s a good point. We can wrap it up with your response to that and your final thoughts, Bill.

Dr. Craig: Well, I don’t think that’s a good point. The question is: Does a necessary being exist? And he could develop an ontological argument for God’s existence which doesn’t depend on empirical evidence. So in the case of God, we can offer an argument for God as a necessary being that would not be dependent upon evidence of the five senses.

Kevin Harris: How should he have said that? He’s asking the question, “Is the imaginary dragon a necessary being?” It seems to me, in other words, a dragon would be contingent by its very definition, and that’s not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about God.

Dr. Craig: Right. And then he would need to go on to develop, say, an ontological argument or a cosmological argument from contingency to show that, in fact, a necessary being exists. So his answer is just an initial question, but he needs to do more.^[1]