(February 9, 2018 at 10:08 am)RoadRunner79 Wrote: There is no reason or rule that states only the one making the positive claim had the burden of proof. It is on anyone making a claim. If if you claim something as false, you are still making a claim of truth
And this is where you have an issue. Atheists, for the most part, do NOT claim no deities exist. Instead, they claim that there is no proof of the existence of deities.
But, again, the *default* is non-existence. This is as true for deities as it is for fundamental particles and it is for Bigfoot. The burden of proof is *always* on the side making the existence claim.
And there is good reason for this. An absolute disproof of non-existence is very rare *for anything*. Again, this is true for deities, Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster. Especially if something can 'hide' effectively, an absolute disproof is impossible.
But a proof of existence is easy if the thing in question does, in fact, exist: produce it.
because of this dichotomy, it is the positive existence statement that has the burden of proof *almost always*.
The one exception I can think of is when the object in question is so well defined that we know *when* it *should* appear. If it fails to then appear, the non-existence is shown. But this is a very rare case.
So the ball is in your court. Either
1) produce a deity to show the existence.
OR
2) Give a situation where that deity is guaranteed to be observable if it does exist. This is a stronger condition, but is required if you demand a proof of non-existence.
In the absence of either 1) or 2), the default is a position of non-existence.
