Is Lack of Belief the Best You Can Do?

[Neo-Scholastic]

That is not the take of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, to name three. Their standard is that people are obligated not to believe things for which they have not yet justified with supporting evidence. That notion implies that there was a time in each person’s life when they believed nothing at all. It holds people culpable for untrue beliefs they haven’t yet pondered and even irrational for holding true beliefs if they are insufficiently or wrongfully supported.

I don't think you understood what I meant, or I wasn't clear. What you just said above is exactly what I was trying to say.

But, pushing forward; I have a comment/question: I think one reason many atheists stop before gnostic atheism is because declaring knowledge that an unfalsifiable claim is false, is logically fallacious.

From your article:

It is possible to prove a negative by demonstrating a logical contradiction: there are no married bachelors, or square circles. Those paired concepts are mutually incompatible, and rule each other out. If the concept of god is incoherent, then the thing it points to can’t exist. And that’s the end of the story.

Furthermore, it’s possible to argue for a negative with an ‘absence of evidence’ argument. If X exists, I should expect to find evidence Z. If evidence Z isn’t found, X is not likely to exist. While not irrefutable, we don’t need it to be to say with a high probability that X doesn’t exist. If you think we do need it to be irrefutable to say X doesn’t exist, then you’re an infallibilist about knowledge, and I’ve already written about why that’s not a desirable position. Other arguments against the existence of a theistic god like the Argument from Hiddeness, Problem of Evil, and Argument of Divine Lies also deal significant blows to the probability of such a being existing."

So, if it can be argued that the existence of God is in fact falsifiable, might atheists feel more comfortable placing themselves in the "gnostic" category? What does everyone think?

Chad, what do you think? Is the author's reasoning satisfactory to consider God falsifiable?

"God exists" is not falsifiable in the sense of finding a tangible disqualifying object or physical circumstance but it is to the extent that properties attributed to God can be shown to be incoherent.

The question is whether falsifiability is a necessarily feature of all the propositions someone can justifiably believe. A self-evident fundamental principle cannot be falsified because no one can conceive of its contrary. Does that mean that belief in a fundamental principle cannot be justified or rather that it requires no justification?