Thanks. I'll take it.

It's true. I'm doing that. Mostly because you're making statements that are worthy of being challenged in a tone that exudes improperly placed confidence in your intellectual abilities.

You keep saying that you're making "points" but I keep seeing that you're making false assertions. If you would, perhaps, take the time to think a while before posting, or maybe focus on posting valid arguments, or true statements, or things of that nature, you would have fewer problems with people pointing out errors in your posting.

But this is just a suggestion. You can choose to post however you want.

LOL -- Headshot.

No, the burden of proof does not always lie with the party making the claim.

In both a civil and a criminal legal context, you can have affirmative defenses, where the burden of proof shifts to the defendant.

In non-legal contexts, Occam's Razor tells us that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". The burden of proof is on the party making the more far-fetched claim.

Regardless, the statement "the burden of proof lies with the party making the claim" is nonsensical, because any statement any party in a debate makes can be characterized as as "claim" by this definition. Do you mean literally the person who spoke first or something?

So, again - you propose that god exists, I propose that he doesn't. Where does the burden of proof lie?

Astute readers will note that d2_e4 doesn't want to address the actual argument and content, but wishes to spew ad hominems.

But, that's what trolls do... it's to be expected.

LOL -- You give it up, and then you take it back! You can't help but make yourself look less and less informed about the world around you. PLEASE continue down this line of false assertions.

The philosophical burden of proof lies with the one making the claim.

The only times I can think of where the defendant has to make an affirmative defense is when the defendant willingly offers up an explanation. But in that case, they've made a claim, and are the ones that need to prove it.

Ummmmmm... no. Just.... no. If we both offer up an explanation of something and one is simpler than the other, this does not mean that the one offering up the simpler explanation doesn't have to prove their claim. Occam's Razor is a plausibility heuristic, not an argument.

I literally mean "the burden of proof lies with the party making the claim." If both parties make claims, they both bear the burden of proof.

It lies with both people because they've both made a claim.

In the case of arguing whether something exists or not, the burden of proof is on the person claiming it exists. That's just common sense. Others may be different, but if I think something doesn't exist, a complete lack of evidence for it is good enough for me.

D2 - You aren't going to get them to agree this of course.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof

Of course, a website like rationalwiki is totally biased in favor of religious people, just like the APA and the AAAS are being led around by the nose by religious thinkers. So they're probably not worth listening to. That "common sense" guy is more reliable, I'm sure.

Burden of proof (also known as onus probandi in Latin) is the obligation on somebody presenting a new idea (a claim) to provide evidence to support its truth (a warrant). Once evidence has been presented, it is up to any opposing "side" to prove the evidence presented is not adequate.

Some theists maintain that unless atheists can disprove the existence of a god, or gods, their position is untenable. It does, however, depend on which of the many thousands of mankind's gods one has in mind; strangely, such theists cheerfully accept the arguments against every god except their own preferred one(s).

On similar lines, some anti-theists maintain that because theists cannot prove the existence of their chosen god or gods, their position is untenable. A similar fallacy, from the opposite direction.

The burden of proof lies with whoever is making the assertion. If there's no evidence, either way, it's a matter of faith.


You left out the bolded

When you have a binary proposition, the "burden" of proof can't rest with both sides of the debate. That is pretty much the definition of "burden of proof" - one side is expected to provide evidence meeting a certain standard (e.g. on the balance of probabilities, beyond a reasonable doubt, scientific) and the other side only has to refute this evidence to prevail.

You would have us believe that all possible propositions are equally plausible a priori. This is simply not so. For example The prima facie case for "the area of a circle being proportional to the number of unicorns on the planet Zorgon" is not as persuasive as the case for "the area of a circle being proportional to its radius", therefore the party making the more fantastical claim has to provide more persuasive evidence to make its case.

Edit: Or maybe, my imagination having been dulled by years of applying logic and the scientific method, I am misconstruing your position as fundamentally challenging the nature of debate, whereas you are merely offering the much more reasonable view that "god exists" and "god doesn't exist" are equally probable propositions on their face...

Other posters already addressed your ridiculous points. Personally, I would have just stuck to trolling you, since your position has been refuted ten thousand times before and you still won't listen, so it's not worth anyone's time. If you want to keep trolling, what do you expect in return?

He also conveniently left out the whole section on falsifiability.

I also think the whole quoted passage is misleading at best, outright wrong at worst. The talk of "which god" is purely a red herring, and whole argument falls apart if we reduce the number of possible gods to 1, which then simply reduces to the "exists" vs. "doesn't exist" degenerate case that is not covered here.

I did, but the bolded is irrelevant. Both sides are making a claim. Both sides bear the burden of proof. This isn't complicated.

Why not? Why is it hard to adopt the idea that the "natural" or "neutral" or "default" position is to not agree with either side until one side or the other makes an affirmative case? Why does one side or the other get to assume a default advantage?

No, that's not the definition of burden of proof. The burden of proof lies on the one making the claim. If both sides are making claims, both sides have something to prove. The one that doesn't have anything to prove is the one that's evaluating the debate.

Yes. I would have you believe that, in the absence of information, we should by default NOT assume that one conclusion has an advantage over another.

No? Are you quite certain?

But the case for "the area of a circle being proportional to its radius" is not something we should assume to be true based on the fact that it's simpler than it being proportional to the number of unicorns on the planet Zorgon.

It's not your imagination that's dull.

I did it because it's irrelevant. Falsifiability is just one particular example of a burden of proof, not a fundamental component of it.

You are free to criticize the passage. What you have not yet done is demonstrate that there is an asymmetric burden of proof.

Lie #1: "Other posters already addressed your ridiculous points" - Um,
no actually they didn't.

Lie #2: "Your position has been refuted ten thousand times before and
you still won't listen" - Um, no actually it wasn't.

Care to try again, or are you just going to continue to make up lies?

In after d2_e4: "I'm so convinced of my own beliefs that I deny the academic literature even though I trust HuffPo."

Ahh, my mistake (maybe I'm remembering from that long ago?). I just thought it could be fun to have a couple of Christians going at each other for a change.

To be fair, I mostly hear the term neo-Darwinism from YEC's. As tame_deuces pointed out, that isn't the current paradigm of biology (it's Evolutionary Developmental Biology, aka evo-devo).

Do you apply the same standards to claims about the existence of leprechauns, santa claus and ancient aliens?

I think it's important to distinguish between the following two statements:

-God(s) do(es) not exist
-The burden of proof for the existence of God(s) has not been met, therefore I reject the claim that God(s) exist(s)

Only the former bears a burden of proof. I would hazard a guess that most atheists only ascribe to the latter.
Earlier I posted this quote by Richard Feynman:

The following excerpt is from an interview with Feynman in The Voice of Genius: Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries:

Q: Do you call yourself an agnostic or an atheist?

Feynman: An atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this.

Q: But I thought a scientist couldn't call himself an atheist, because that's like saying "There is no God," and you can't prove a negative.

Feyman: I don't have to prove it. I only say: "Look, I don't know that there is a God; I just don't think there is one."

Q: That makes you an agnostic.

Feynman: No, no, no, no, no.

Q: According to the dictionary (Webster's New World): an agnostic is "a person who thinks it is impossible to know whether there is a God or a future life, or anything beyond material phenomena."

Feynman: That's too refined. There's always an edge. What I mean is this: the probability that the theory of God, the ordinary theory, is right, to my mind is extremely low. That's all. That's the way I look at it.

Yes. My belief in the non-existence of those things are built upon arguments as to why those things don't exist. In the abstract, I would hold a neutral view of those things. But I'm not in the abstract case on the basis of all sorts of cultural experiences and whatnot that inform my understanding of the world around me.

Probably. But that's literally not what's happening in this conversation.

I'm responding exactly to the thing that's right in front of me. Both sides make a proposition, so both side bear the burden of proof. This is among the least complicated things happening in this thread.

I can also demonstrate that I already knew of that distinction going back to the comparison with how jury decisions are made:

I guess I should point out that I would use different language for this part:

-God(s) do(es) not exist
-The burden of proof for the existence of God(s) has not been met, therefore I DO NOT ASSENT to the claim that God(s) exist(s)

Not assenting to a claim is different from rejecting it.

My belief in the non-existence of a supervising and/or intervening God and to a lesser extent of a creating God is also built upon arguments. To me these arguments make the former (nearly) as unlikely as the beliefs I mentioned in my previous post.

Agreed but I would also posit that people who do assent to this claim generally employ modes of reasoning that do not stand logical/skeptical scrutiny.

That's fine. I don't think I've rejected your reasoning in any way. That I would believe X based on the collection of my own experiences does not imply that you're necessarily wrong if you believe not-X based on the collection of your experiences. But that's also true in the opposite direction.

Probably. But I think that quite a wide range of people's beliefs do not stand to logical/skeptical inquiry. Humans are not all that rational.

Nope. Occam's Razor says, "Don't multiply entities beyond necessity." More colloquially, if two different hypotheses have the same level of evidence, we should prefer the simpler one.

You seem to be more knowledgeable on these things than I am, so I am tempted to defer to you on this. Could you please explain to me how what you have said is different to the statement you quoted, though?

Edit: what I was saying is a corollary of Occam's razor, maybe I should have made that clear.

Aaron - in regard to your various posts on this topic:

- The word "burden" has a specific meaning, both colloquially, and in the phrase "burden of proof". You seem to be omitting the meaning the meaning of this word altogether in your responses. If there are two people arguing about something and one has the "burden" of proof, then, by definition, the other one cannot. It's a zero-sum game.

- Notwithstanding the above, I believe what you are suggesting that "All propositions are a priori 50/50, therefore both sides have to make a case on the preponderance of the evidence". As I have pointed out, this is simply not so. This position not only ignores the nuances of standards of evidence in different scenarios, it simply violates common sense.

You can argue this all you want. You just make yourself make look more and more ridiculous the more that you continue to do it. A better play for you at this juncture would be to simply concede and say "I believe what I want". At least that would be an intellectually honest position that your detractors in this thread (myself included) could identify with, if not respect.

Back to what I was saying, when you thought I was being flippant:

I claim you committed murder. You claim you did not commit murder.

Are both of these positions a priori 50/50? Are we both held to the same standards of evidence? We both made a "claim", in your words.

Just think about your position for a second.