RE: Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?
July 28, 2017 at 1:33 am
(This post was last modified: July 28, 2017 at 1:34 am by pocaracas.)
(July 27, 2017 at 7:00 pm)SteveII Wrote: 3. So what? How does that impact the reasoning? If your going with atheists don't make claims (even though I think most do--even if through ignorance and to ignore the concept of strong atheism) you are still left with the second part of my conclusion: "the distinction of 'extraordinary' becomes meaningless.
People make claims, sure... Whether they're theists or atheists.
But you were saying that atheism is a claim. That it is a more extraordinary claim than theism, on account of the absence of evidence for it.
I'm saying theism is the claim and atheism is simply the position of not accepting the theism claim... Unlike many other possible a[claim]isms, this one developed a name throughout human history... Because the theism claim has had some success for a long time, most of which mankind was mostly ignorant of the world.
But now we know better, we have many tools at our disposal to probe the world and figure out how it works... Thus far, none of those tools has yielded anything resembling a god - not that they're looking for a god, but for something that is claimed to be so omni, it seems remarkably absent. And this renders the theism claim an extraordinary one .
Like a claim that any work of fiction is indeed real. The force, magic, the TARDIS, zylons, Klingons, etc... The claim that any of these is real is an extraordinary claim and would require some hefty evidence. While the default "I don't believe that claim" requires no evidence at all. You just need to go "nothing in the reality that humans agree upon support that such a claim is true".
And no, cosplayers, people talking about those fictional universes, speaking in languages from those universes, or even providing testimony that they're real is not credible evidence.