Extraordinary Claims Requires Extraordinary Evidence
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Burden of proof
The burden of proof relies on the one making the outrageous and extraordinary claims (I.E. a god exist) not the atheist due to the fact that atheism is the denial of gods due to lack of evidence from the theistic side. Assuming that God exists is known as presuppositionalism and has always been a key tenet of Christian apologetics but is usually rejected by more sensible scholars. The absurdity of being asked to prove a negative is demonstrated in Bertrand Russell's teapot thought experiment - where no matter how hard you look, you can't thoroughly disprove the theory that a teapot is out there in space, orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars. |
This sort of presuppositional thinking is illogical, so asking an atheist to disprove God is an unreasonable request.Now, imagine if someone were to walk up to you randomly and say to you "I can fly" you would automatically say "No you can't, prove that you can fly". Then just like many of the theist out there, the guy says "no you must prove that I cannot fly, and if you cant, then obviously i can fly! HAHAHAHA" see how absurd that is?
Creationist don't seem to understand logical thinking.
Creationist don't seem to understand logical thinking.
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Logical
Logical arguments try to show that God cannot possibly exist (at least as described). Barring any escape hatch arguments like God did it, some properties of God are not compatible with each other or known facts about the world, and thus a creator-god cannot be a logically consistent and existent entity. These arguments are heavily dependent on the use of common descriptions of the Abrahamic God as a target; things such as omnipotence, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence. As a result, they are not as useful in trying to refute the claims of, say, Neopaganism, and are also vulnerable to the tactic of moving the goalposts by changing the descriptions of God. |
The omnipotence paradox postulates that true omnipotence is not logically possible or not compatible with omniscience. This is primarily a logical argument based on the general question of whether an omnipotent being could limit its own power - if yes, it would cease to be omnipotent, if no, it wouldn't be omnipotent. Hence the paradox that shows, through contradiction, that God cannot exist as usually described. The Problem of evil states that a good god wouldn't permit gratuitous evil, yet such evil occurs, so a good god does not exist.The argument from design is often given as proof of a creator, but it raise the following logical question: if the world is so complex that it must have had a creator, then the creator must be at least as complex and must therefore have a creator, and this would have to have had a more complex creator. While believers hasten to point out that their gods don't need to follow logic, let alone the known laws of physics, this is really a case of special pleading and doesn't so much prove anything itself. Atheists therefore tend to reject these counters to the logical arguments as they mostly beg the question of a creator's existence and, very arbitrarily, plead that a creator can be exempt from the same logic that was used to "prove" its existence.
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Evidential
The worldview of most atheists is evidence, and atheists point out that sufficient evidence for the existence of gods is currently extremely lacking, and thus there is no reason to believe in them. Evidential arguments are less ambitious than logical arguments because, rather than proving that there is reason not to believe in a god, they prove that there is no reason to believe in a god (See Burden of proof above). |
It is important to remember that what constitutes sufficient evidence can be quite subjective, although rationalism and science do offer some standardization. Various "holy books" exist that testify to the existence of gods, and claim that alleged miracles and personal experiences all constitute evidence in favor of the existence of a god character of some sort. However, atheists reject these as insufficient because the naturalistic explanations behind them (tracing authors of the holy texts, psychological experiments, and scientific experiments to explain experiences, and so on) are more plausible - indeed, the very existence of plausible naturalistic explanations renders the supernatural explanations obsolete. Atheists often cite evidence that processes attributed to a god might also occur naturally as evidential arguments. If evolution and the big bang are true, then why would a creator god have needed them?
