Jim Holt, in The New York Times book review of “The God Delusion” by scientist and skeptic Richard Dawkins, writes:
“As long as there are no decisive arguments for or against the existence of God, a certain number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective values, or the existence of other minds.
“Richard Dawkins asserts that ‘the presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.’ But what possible evidence could verify or falsify the God hypothesis? The doctrine that we are presided over by a loving deity has become so rounded and elastic that no earthly evil or natural disaster, it seems, can come into collision with it.
“Nor is it obvious what sort of event might unsettle an atheist’s conviction to the contrary. [Famous atheist Bertrand] Russell, when asked about this by a Look magazine interviewer in 1953, said he might be convinced there was a God ‘if I heard a voice from the sky predicting all that was going to happen to me during the next 24 hours.’ Short of such a miraculous occurrence, the only thing that might resolve the matter is an experience beyond the grave — what theologians used to call, rather pompously, ‘eschatological verification.’
“If the after-death options are either a beatific vision (God) or oblivion (no God), then it is poignant to think that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right.”