(March 6, 2017 at 3:38 pm)Nonpareil Wrote:(March 6, 2017 at 3:01 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: To quote myself from another thread, it seems rather odd when a proposition like "'God exists' is true" can be considered either true or not true because it is a belief, whereas its negation, "'God exists' is not true", cannot be either true or not true because it isn't considered a belief.
No one says that the proposition "God does not exist" has no truth value. They say that it has an unknown truth value, as does "God exists", and that lack of belief is all that is required to be labeled an atheist.
That's all well and good except if that is your position then you have no right to say whether someone should or should not be theist, including yourself. When someone says "I am not a theist because of insufficient evidence" he or she is tacitly admitting that one should prefer one epistemological position over another. I do not believe atheists can sufficiently justify disbelief as the better default position since (as I've argued elsewhere A Better Default ) our instincts, common experience and thousands of years of cross cultural reports point us in the direction of God's existence.
Actually that's kind of funny. I think I just argued that atheists have a burden of proof to show that people should have an epistemological preference for disbelief.
