(August 9, 2015 at 6:05 am)Redbeard The Pink Wrote:
What's missing from your understanding is the word "positive."
The person making a positive claim is the one who has the burden of proof; in this case, it would be the person claiming that god does exist. "God does NOT exist" is a negative claim or not a claim at all, depending on how you want to define it, but it definitely isn't a positive claim any way you slice it. Positive claims are the ones that have to be proven with evidence because, in general, they're non-falsifiable. Negative claims (pertaining to existence, anyway) are easily falsifiable because all it takes is one shred of observable evidence that something exists to establish that it does.
Basically, the reason the burden of proof is on the positive claim is that the positive claim (god exists) is non-falsifiable. The negative claim (god does not exist), is falsifiable. Because of this, the negative claim is the default position until it is falsified with evidence. It's simply a matter of what it's logically possible to prove.
"God exists" can be proven but not disproven, and "God does not exist" cannot be proven, but it can be disproven. As such, it is never up to the atheist to prove their claim because that's impossible, and it is never right for the theist to demand their claim be disproven because that's also impossible.
No. The default position is not "there is no god." The default position is that one does not know if there is a god or not. It is only after one considers evidence that it could become reasonable to say that there is a god or that there is not a god.
Also, your characterization of positive claims is not quite right either. If we consider the claim:
There is an elephant in my dining room.
That is a claim that is such that, theoretically, evidence could be provided either for it or against it. If I showed a picture of an elephant in my dining room, that would be evidence that it is there. On the other hand, if I took a video of my dining room, with me standing in the room and rotating around the room, which does not show an elephant, that would be evidence that there is no elephant in my dining room.
Other than the fact that you know that most people do not have elephants in their dining room (which changes things from what I am about to say), the default position, before you had any evidence, would be that you do not know if there is an elephant in my dining room or not. However, due to considerations of how often people have elephants in their dining rooms, the default position on this would be that there is no elephant in my dining room. That, however, is dependent on the knowledge of the rarity of elephants being in dining rooms, and so that is evidence that one brings to the situation. It is not a judgement made without any evidence.
It would be quite different if we were looking at the following claim:
There is a table in my dining room.
That is quite common, but you also know that people sometimes repurpose rooms in their homes, and so there may be no table in one, or one may have just gotten rid of an old table, in anticipation of moving in a new one. Or it could be a new home, and no table has been moved into it yet, or there could be some other reason there is presently no table in my dining room. So you do not really know if there is a table in my dining room or not. Either claim that there is a table in my dining room, or the claim that there is not a table in my dining room, are both very plausible from your knowledge of how the world works, so either one could easily be true. And so you ought not believe that there is a table in my dining room, nor that there is not a table in my dining room, until you have some evidence of some sort. In this sort of case, one typically accepts very flimsy evidence, as either situation is common, and neither claim is likely to be of much importance to you.
Going back to the god question, many gods have been disproven. For example, the problem of evil proves that there cannot be an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly benevolent god, as it would not be compatible with the world we observe. And we also can know that the gods that are supposed to live on Mount Olympus do not exist, due to visiting Mount Olympus and observing that there is no god there and no home for any god there. So there are many sorts of gods that we reasonably know do not exist.
Now, if you say that we cannot prove that everything that might be called a god does not exist, that is true enough, because some people say things like "Brad Pitt is a god," and I defy you or anyone else to prove that Brad Pitt does not exist. So in any specific instance, we first will need to know what someone is talking about before we are going to be able to make a determination of whether the thing in question exists or not. If we find they are speaking gibberish (which is common enough when people speak of "god"), then we can reject their pretended claims, though we would not then negate their nonsensical sentences, but would reject them as nonsensical.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
