(March 18, 2015 at 9:23 pm)Beccs Wrote: Very few atheists claim to have proof that there are no gods - note the plural - not just the Abrahamic deity. So claims that they need to produce this proof is deliberately ignorant, at best.This is also a reminder that theists discount all other gods except their own, and seem to have no qualms dismissing "you can't prove that mine doesn't exist" when it's directed at them. If everyone who ever believed in god believed in the exact same god... that by itself would be pretty compelling. But it's easy enough to turn many theist arguments against them by simply changing the name of the god in question. Why is proving a negative only okay when it's used to defend this one god out of the handful, or dozen, or thousands claimed to exist?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
