RE: There is no God.
June 19, 2014 at 10:28 pm
(This post was last modified: June 19, 2014 at 10:33 pm by Ryantology.)
(June 19, 2014 at 7:00 am)fr0d0 Wrote: Don't let him off the hook. He made a claim.
Otherwise you will look incredibly hypocritical asking for empirical evidence for anything from now on.
The problem for theists is that they are not just making one claim. Theists, as a rule, believe in specific gods rather than gods in general. In the case of Christianity, they further make the claim that there is only one true god. So, in addition to meeting the burden of proving your god's existence, you have to prove that all competing gods don't. That compounds the burden of proof for any positive theist claims, and makes the theist position weaker than a positive atheist claim by orders of magnitude.
Gods appear to be one of the only things which are nonexistent according to any objective measure, yet we're not supposed to claim there are none. We can do this with leprechauns and unicorns and nobody bats an eye. We can say that there isn't an invisible planet between Earth and Mars and the fact that there's no evidence of any planet in this area is considered sufficient enough to make a positive claim about it.
If after the entirety of human civilization 0% of god claims produce anything of even the tiniest substance, it should be okay to make the claim that they aren't there, especially when theists hold the conceit that they don't have to prove any of their claims.
