Post Praetorian said:
RicOlie_2 said:
dclarkg said:
Possessed said:
At the end of the day you really can't prove he exists. You can't prove he doesn't exist either though. Arguing about it will always be fruitless because there is no definitive argument for either side.
How I'm going to prove the NOT existence of something? The person who makes a claim has to provide the evidence to support the claim. You can't disprove the unicorns, magic pixies or elfs neither so therefore they exist?
I'm pretty sure this is wrong. Atheists are making the claim, since they're in the minority. Most people believe a god exists. Therefore, the burden of the proof is on the non-believers to show that he does not. If someone thinks a certain god is the right one, the burden of proof is on that person, since their is no majority agreement on any specific god.
It's like if I decided to become an a-atomist, because I believed atoms weren't real. In that case, the burden of proof would be on me, because it's generally accepted that they are. I can't just say "hey, I don't find the reasons for their existence convincing, there just isn't any evidence for them," and expect people to think it a valid position to hold (I'm not saying that atheism isn't, however).
If this may be the case, might a potential future in which God might be disbelieved by the majority then shift the burden of His proving back to the theist?
At what % of belief/disbelief might this burden change?
Certainly, it would shift back onto the theists if the generally accepted view changed. However, I'm not entirely clear on how the burden of proof is generally accepted to work when the majority is asserting a positive. I think the existence or non-existence of God is unprovable, nearly as much as it is impossible to prove or disprove whether or not we are living in an advanced race's computer simulation, excepting personal experiences demonstrating his existence to the person who has that experience.
As for a percentage, since I would say the burden of proof is not an precise rule, but rather more of a good guideline (much like Occam's Razor), a clear majority would not have the burden of proof, but the narrower the gap between the majority and minority becomes, the less clear the burden of proof becomes (probably defaulting to the positive claim, however).
Wikipedia says the following, but I'm having trouble figuring out if this supports what I asserted above, refutes it, or does neither:
Wikipedia said:
When the assertion to prove is a negative claim, the burden takes the form of a negative proof, proof of impossibility, or mere evidence of absence. If this negative assertion is in response to a claim made by another party in a debate, asserting the falsehood of the positive claim shifts the burden of proof from the party making the first claim to the one asserting its falsehood, as the position "I do not believe that X is true" is different from the explicit denial "I believe that X is false".