If God exists, should He be scientifically observable?

There is a bad idea that has been making it’s rotation around the skeptic club over the last several years. This idea states that if God exists, we would be able to observe Him ‘under a microscope.’ This statement has been transmitted by such prominent atheists as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet. Their appeal is obviously strictly to science. It is their belief that God, like everything else in existence, should be observable by science.

The key problem with this point of view is that if they were to truly apply that idea to their own studies of science, they could not hold their believe in anything. Not even science itself. In a debate between William Lane Craig and Peter Atkins in 1998, Atkins protested that everything can be explained or disproven with science. Craig, being aware of the position his opponent held, stated that there are a good number of things that cannot be proven scientifically but that we are all rational to accept. When asked Craig provided the following five points:

1. Logical and Mathematical Truths - Science actually presupposes logic and math. To say that science can or does prove logic and math is to argue in a circle and therefore is self-defeating.
2. Metaphysical Truths - Such as “there are other minds besides my own,” or that “there the external world is real,” or that “the past was created five minutes ago with an appearance of age” are all rational beliefs that cannot be scientifically proven.
3. Ethical beliefs about statements of value are not accessible by the scientific method. You cannot show by science whether the Nazi scientists in the camps did anything evil as opposed to the scientists in Western Democracy.
4. Aesthetic Judgements cannot be accessed by science, because the beautiful like the good cannot be scientifically proven.
5. Science cannot be justified by the scientific methods. Science is permeated by unprovable assumptions. There are numerous entities in the field of physics that are simply unobservable, such as the speed of light, quarks, point particles, strings, black holes, parallel universes, and so on.

At this point a skeptic may point out that while it is true that these things cannot be observed directly, there is overwhelming evidence to support the belief in their existence. For example we can observe the movement of certain celestial objects and notice an unseen gravitational pull on them to provide evidence for the existence of black holes.

While I completely agree with such statements, I think it is also important to point out that we as theists do the same exact thing. We can employ an overwhelming amount of evidence to back up our claims that there is a God of the cosmos. There are various arguments used by many believers that do just that. Arguments such as the Kalaam Cosmological Argument, the Argument from Design, the Moral Argument and so on. To say that we (creationists) are simply wrong in our justification for our belief is to also denounce the justification that almost every scientist uses to proclaim his or her belief in critical points of the scientific method.

I firmly believe that people who appeal to science as proving God’s non-existence are experiencing a severe case of intellectual dishonesty that needs to be overcome in order to see and understand both sides of the spectrum.