(March 17, 2009 at 10:09 pm)athoughtfulman Wrote: Just to check that I understand this correctly, being a newcomer to atheism and philosophy, the OP lost the debate because he made the positive claim that there was no god, but since there is no evidence to prove that, he lost. There is a lack of evidence, which means it is unreasonable to believe in god, with out any claim on whether he exists or not, but the OP didn't take this line of reasoning.Pretty much.
And a philosophical debate starts from ground zero, no one is more right or wrong than the other until the first argument is made.
Correct?
The atheist lost the debate because he fell into the "trying to prove a negative" trap, when he should have said "you can't prove a negative, but you can reject the so-called evidence for theism on grounds of logic". He could have then simply informed them of the burden of proof, and proceeded to refute their "evidence". He also let them make a strawman of his position, saying that he couldn't be an atheist and reduced his position to "agnostic". At this point he could have refuted this by passing them a dictionary and telling them to look up the word "agnostic", but instead he went with it and tried to reject his re-labelling, which failed because the label was correct (i.e. he doesn't believe in god but doesn't think god is unprovable either).
