What is the message of this meme?
- Science improves our knowledge over time. We have better images now of things that were previously inaccessible to us.
- Science couldn't then nor can it now observe God.
- Therefore, God must not be real because science cannot see him.
How to respond?
- Science is a wonderful enterprise that does indeed improve our knowledge, and Christians should embrace, rather than fear, it.
- The traditional Christian conception of God is that he is not physical, so we should not expect to be able to physically see him.
- This world is full of things that skeptics, atheists, and scientists in general have good reason to believe exist even though they cannot see them, such as magnetic fields, quarks, a mathematical point or line, past genetic mutations, past transitional forms for which there are no fossils, force carriers in physics like photons or gluons, and past historical events for which there are no records.
- The epistemology (or way of knowing) of this meme and of the average skeptic is weak sauce. If we limited our knowledge to only that which we could see, then we would know very few things indeed.
If atheists and skeptics want to claim that they can be confident in their lack of belief in God because science hasn't observed him, then to be consistent they must also claim to lack a belief in many other things that are not controversial.
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