Illustrating the burden of proof - pay me!

[Neo-Scholastic]

Explain please, Stanford is a bit long winded and dry and I'm not really feeling up to put forth the effort.

Very simply put:

“The Principle of Sufficient Reason is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason, cause, or ground.”

I was going to reply directly to brewer's post but I think this is a good starting point.

My point was this. Burden of Proof and the PSR are both subjective terms of art. Both relate to the evidentiary burden demanded to properly evaluate the truth status of a proposition. The subjectivity of burden of proof is exemplified by the notion that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The subjectivity of the PSR enters when we find ourselves confronted with what appear to be inexplicable brute facts, and start to carve out exceptions for them.

For example, some abstract formal systems track exceptionally well with observed phenomena (like certain maths and physical events) and others have no such obvious connection (astrology). For an advocate of the PSR, this difference between formal systems suggests there is something that needs to be explained. What do effective abstractions have in common that is lacking in apparently useless abstractions? Those who seem to consider the PSR as a quick route to “God did it,” the abstract formal systems that work are distinguished from those that don’t precisely because they work. As such they can be conveniently taken as brute facts. Personally, I do not find that satisfying philosophically.

I guess what I also saying is this. The subjectivity of Burden of Proof gets a lot of air-time on AF because that subjectivity to favor atheistic arguements grounded in foundationalism. In comparision, the PSR favors theism because it suggests that foundation of reality go deeper that many atheists suppose.