(July 28, 2017 at 6:40 am)SteveII Wrote:(July 28, 2017 at 1:33 am)pocaracas Wrote: 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.
If we go with "atheists make no claims" then as to the question of is there a God, we have some evidence that there is and on the other side, we have no evidence there is not (I'll even grant you by definition). My point was and is that if there can only be evidence on one side of the equation, the distinction or need of 'extraordinary evidence' is meaningless. Any evidence is sufficient to increase the probability, because there is no rebuttal evidence to overcome.
For the same reason, I pointed out that strong atheism actually would be the extraordinary claim because it is doing so with no ordinary evidence.
Is the fact that many people have prayed to god and not gotten a response evidence for atheism? Or the fact that many things that were said to be caused by the acts of gods are now shown to be wrong? Looks like there is evidence on both sides.
"The last superstition of the human mind is the superstition that religion in itself is a good thing." - Samuel Porter Putnam