(September 7, 2009 at 12:06 pm)Darwinian Wrote: The thing is though that it is not atheists who are making any claims or have a belief system in which to work, certainly not in the theistic sense. We simply ask those who make specific claims that they provide evidence to support them. We also ask that this evidence be logical, falsifiable and testable.Wasn't that the point he was talking about? We are asking theists to work within materialism and empiricism. What if God was not material and not empirically testable; then there would literally be no evidence that would be accepted by us.
The counter-argument which I presented is that to argue from another belief system (some form of mysticism or spiritualism, etc) you need to reason why it works. We can reason why materialism and empiricism works, because are predictions based on the two turn out to be correct. If the theist wants to use something other than materialism and empiricism to argue about God's existence, they first need to provide reasoning as to why and how those other systems work.
