What is God?

[Redbeard The Pink]

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.

Ok...technically you're correct, and I absolutely understand what you're saying. I'm talking specifically about burden of proof, however, and dealing with what it's possible to prove. Yes, technically a position of non-knowledge is usually the most scientifically responsible, but I would also contend that if you go around believing there is no reason to affirmatively believe something does exist and you live your life as if that thing does not exist, that is effectively the same thing as believing that said thing does not exist. Technically, the default position is to "not believe" that god exists, but to me that difference is semantic. Believing something does not exist and not believing it does exist are basically the same thing because all you have to do to flip the argument is clarify yourself to mean that you do not believe god exists. There is no way for a theist to pin a non-theist into having to prove his beliefs in either case, whereas the theist is ALWAYS making a positive claim that must be proven.


Burden of proof only deals with possible objects, though, and as I've stated elsewhere, I consider god to be an impossible object for a lot of reasons, some if which you mentioned. In terms of burden of proof, the default position is "we don't know" and/or "We hold a position of non-belief that thing X exists until evidence shows up," but in terms of possibility vs. impossibility, there is just no way god could exist under the terms of any satisfying definition of the word. For one thing, he's supposed to be materially non-existent, yet able to affect the material universe, which to me is a paradox. He's supposed to be all-loving and have the power to do anything, yet he prizes the free will of the rapist over that of the raped and does nothing to stop human suffering; he can either be all-loving or a rape-apologist, but not both. If it's the Christian Gaud we're talking about, that thing is pretending so hard to be fictional that it couldn't possibly be anything like what's written about it; he's got to be some Wizard-of-Oz-esque dick-bag just hiding behind a curtain and feeding us bullshit to fuck with/control us. I could go on, but you get the idea. The only way to get away from this problem is to strip god down until he's devoid of all meaning and amounts to "some...like, thing...that we just, like...haven't found yet or...just don't really understand...or something..."


As for your thing with the elephant, the picture without the elephant wouldn't necessarily be evidence of the absence of the elephant, if we really want to play this game. As a magician, I can think of a few ways to hide a baby elephant in a kitchen and take a picture without the elephant in it (depending on the elephant, and the kitchen, and the floor pattern, and my access to appropriately sized mirrors), and that's just the line of knowledge I would employ to come up with reasonable explanations. We could get all elephant-apologist and start saying it's a special elephant that's small enough to hide in the cabinets, smart enough to evade cameras, fast and quiet enough to evade detection by human senses, and able to vanish from all means of scientific detection at will. At that point, the only option is to turn around and say "Alright then, prove it. How do you know there's an elephant in your kitchen?"


Now, the table isn't an unreasonable claim, but if (for whatever reason) I didn't believe you had a table, the burden would still be on you to produce evidence of the table, and the default position of the question would still be non-belief (however you want to state it) in the table until evidence is produced. Yes, it's reasonable to assume the table does exist because of other external factors, but in terms of burden of proof, it's still on the guy who claims the table exists to prove that the table exists, and the default position is still non-existence (however you want to state it) as soon as the question of the table's existence is raised.