Atheism

[Mister Agenda]

ALL of you say 'atheism' makes no claims. But that is not were MOST of you stop--"you are wrong" is in every other post on this site.  Look the meme in the OP. 'Rejecting' literally means asserting a positive claim of inadequacy. So while technically the definition of atheism may shield a person from shouldering any burden of proof, in actuality, once you say someone is wrong (rejecting), there is a requirement to justify the claim.

I've even had people argue, that only claims of what are true have the burden of proof.  That they can claim that something is false (rejecting) and have no burden.  However this is bad logic, because even when you are claiming something is false, you are still making an objective truth claim.

Any hypothesis has to overcome the null hypothesis (the presumption that proposed hypothesis is not actually the case). A hypothesis could conceivably be true without overcoming the null, but holding the null remains the most reasonable response to a hypothesis that has not overcome it. The null hypothesis is precisely defined in statistics, you know just how much of a result an experiment needs to have to justify saying it has overcome the null, in common language there's much more room for disagreement. It's still a good epistemological principle, especially considering the alternatives.

If I stated that a million people are abducted from NYC each year by space aliens, you ought to hold the null hypothesis until I provide enough evidence to convince you otherwise. Or do you think that doing so is bad logic?