Evidence God Does Not Exist

[Caecilian]

Whenever someone makes an extraordinary claim, the burden of proof is very firmly on them...

I know this is standard atheist ideology, but since most of society believes in God, who is really making the extraordinary claim? The theist or the atheist?

Oh ffs. It looks like we're going to have to run through the entire argument. Here goes.

There are some things that are essentially undeniable- these form the bedrock of our experience of living in the world. Most basic of all is perhaps our material existence and the material existence of the world that we all live in. Beyond that, we have the existence of other people simlar to ourselves, and a variety of fundamental human characteristics- our need to eat, breathe, shit, fuck and so on.

The point about these basics is that you can't live your life without accepting their existence- they are a necessary part of our ontology. Some folk (e.g. Buddhists) may deny the material world in theory, but in practice they have to live in it and function in it the same as eveyone else. So Buddhists, despite their theoretical committments, eat, drink, breathe, shit and fuck just like the rest.

Now you might at this stage think 'Aha! god is one of those basics too'. But clearly this is wrong. I've gone through my entire life not believing in god. And so, apparently, has the majority of the population in countries like Japan and Sweden. Neither I nor the Swedes and Japanese have been inconvenienced by our unbelief. Believing in god is optional, in a way that believing that you need food to survive simply isn't.

Beyond the basic givens of our existence there are a variety of different claims re. what is real. These are what we'll call extraordinary claims. The point about extraordinary claims is that they ask us to add extra elements or features to our basic ontology of material existence. Some extraordinary claims are:
- Matter is made up of very small particles called 'atoms'.
- Ghosts exist, and are the spirits of the dead.
- An all-powerful, all-loving, omniscient god exists.
- All extant living things have evolved from a single ancestral lineage.
- When we die, we are reincarnated, either as people or as animals.

Q: How can we assess the validity of these claims?
A: Through the use of inductive reasoning, drawing on the available evidence. That is how scientific theories are developed.

Where there is no evidence, we should reject the claim. Thus I no more believe in the christian god than the FSM or the Tooth Fairie- the evidence for all of these putative entities is nil. This is despite the fact that, unlike the thoroughly vile and malevolent god that christians worship, the FSM and the Tooth Fairie might be rather nice entities to believe in.

If I were to claim that there was a pizza the size of Japan orbiting the Alpha Centauri system, then you would quite reasonably ask for evidence to back up the claim.

And yet my claim about the pizza is far less extraordinary than, say, the claim that there is an all-powerful god...

This statement is based on your own beliefs.

The point here is simple: god requires the addition of immaterial enties, supernatural powers etc to our basic material ontology. The pizza doesn't. So in the absence of evidence for either, the pizza is more plausible than god.