What makes people irrational thinkers?

[Paleophyte]

@Simon Moon, what I question is whether meeting a “burden of proof” is a useful epistemic obligation for a couple of reasons.

Unsurprisingly, this is a position favoured by those who have no epistemological foundation.

First, I agree with @Belacqua; it’s more of a debate tactic than tool of serious inquiry. If the goal is, as you wrote, to “separate fact from fiction” then reliving critics of a proposition from any obligation to defend their opposition to it. If the goal is to increase understanding, allowing "one side" to be a default position is literally half as effective.

How then would you even attempt to formulate any epistemology at all? If the claimant does not bear the basic burden of proof to substantiate their claim then we must spend from now until the universe grows cold examining every flight of fancy, idiocy, and lunacy to pick the smallest iota of pepper out of an ocean of fly shit.

The burden of proof is not an unequal, one-sided handicap, as any successful philosopher or debater can easily demonstrate. It's a minimum bar for the evaluation of any proposition that amounts to "OK, show me the goods." If you can't meet that very low standard you ought to question whether you actually have any goods to show.

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If this physical reality could have been some other different physical reality instead, then it's going to be hard to argue that nevertheless such physical reality would be necessary. It would be a brute fact in such a case (for many atheists), but not metaphysically necessary. But a brute fact at least will also not require any external explanation, so the atheist has that in their favor anyway.

I'm not suggesting that this particular physical reality is necessary. I'm arguing that some arbitrary physical reality is necessary. That we exist to debate this one demonstrates only that we are well-evolved to these conditions.