Atheism, Evidence and the God-of-the-Gaps

[Esquilax]

Actually, since it seems to be an ever increasing favorite of Randy's, let's discuss presuppositions, shall we? Let's talk about the accusation of them as argumentation:

Say you went skydiving, and you're telling your friend about it. Your friend doesn't believe you, and your response is "oh, you only don't believe me because you have a presupposition that I don't skydive." Have you proved that you went skydiving? Have you advanced your position in any way? No, you haven't. You have, in actuality, committed an informal fallacy called the appeal to motive, wherein you attempt to argue a point by merely showing the possibility of malevolent motivation, without actually demonstrating that this motive is present, or responsible for the conclusion your interlocutor has come to. Given this, it's little more than an ad hominem fallacy, where attempts to impugn the arguer take the place of rebutting the argument.

And in Randy's case it's even funnier, because he doesn't know any of us in enough detail to actually sketch out our character sufficient to even deduce such motivation, especially in light of the fact that every conversation we've had with him has been geared around our disbelief of his claims due to the context in which those interactions take place. When Randy points his finger and says "you just have a presupposition!" then the correct response is simply to ask him how he came to that conclusion in the first place. The only evidence he has is that we won't believe his arguments, and "you won't believe it!" is a terrible reason for holding the conclusion "you have a presupposition against it!"

See, there's two possible consequences of that: if one truly believes that there is no reason other than biased presuppositions to disbelieve the claim being made, in light of the additional reasons being given in the posts here, then in actual fact it is the accuser who has the presupposition, that the argument they have made is inherently believable and that anyone who disagrees does not actually believe the reasons they've given for doing so, they just have this bias against the argument. There's certainly no evidence that the accuser has that we don't genuinely believe our reasons for disbelieving, and hence no rational path to concluding that the presupposition exists. The accuser shows his own bias in making the accusation amid a dearth of reasons to come to it.

The other possibility is that other reasons for disbelieving can be thought of by the accuser, in which case he has no reason to discount them in favor of the presupposition accusation without evidence. Either way, this is lazy projection on Randy's part, nothing more.