The Equivocation on “Evidence”

Argument

Atheist critiques often insist that “evidence” must be empirical in a narrow laboratory sense. Yet this standard is not the general standard of rational belief across intellectual life. Many disciplines such as history, jurisprudence, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics all use evidential forms that are not reducible to controlled experiments.

Inference to the best explanation, abductive reasoning, testimony, and conceptual analysis are routinely treated as rationally legitimate when properly constrained. A universal empiricist criterion for evidence is therefore self-limiting and, in practice, not actually followed.

This matters because theistic arguments frequently operate at metaphysical or ethical levels where the relevant data include contingency, intelligibility, moral normativity, and consciousness, not merely “detectable objects in a lab.” If atheism preemptively narrows the meaning of evidence to exclude precisely those domains, it's begging the question.

The dispute becomes not about whether theism is rationally warranted, but about whether only one evidential mode is admissible which is a philosophical decision that itself cannot be justified purely by experiment.

Formal Argument

P1. Many rational disciplines (e.g., mathematics, logic, history, law) employ warranted forms of justification that are not laboratory-experimental (e.g., proof, conceptual analysis, inference to the best explanation, testimony under constraints).

P2. The rule “only laboratory-experimental evidence is admissible for rational belief” is not itself justifiable by laboratory-experimental methods.

C1. Therefore, an exclusively laboratory-experimental criterion of evidence cannot serve as a universal rational standard.

P3. Some objections to theism attempt to dismiss all non-laboratory arguments by imposing that exclusively laboratory-experimental criterion.

C2. Therefore, those objections rest on a subjective philosophical criterion (often scientism/verificationism), not a neutral requirement of rationality.

Analogy

Imagine an appellate judge who announces: “I will only accept evidence that can be replicated in a laboratory.” Under that rule, most of the court’s work becomes impossible: witness credibility, intent, motive, contemporaneous documents, and circumstantial inference are essential to legal reasoning but are not laboratory-replicable.

If the judge nonetheless continues to convict or acquit based on transcripts, timelines, and reasoning, the judge is implicitly using broader evidential norms while officially denying them. Likewise, if an atheist accepts mathematical proof, historical inference, and logical entailment, but demands laboratory-style evidence only when God is the subject, the standard functions less as an epistemic principle and more as a gatekeeping definition.