Comfy Café #4

@Kagerou
Weren't you going to close this thread and make a new one?

 

itching to have the first post

 

atleast its not like NB where my post were being posted in between the discussion

 

was about Las Vegas terrorist attack i think

 

We're describing different things though. I wasn't advocating anyone shifting the burden of proof nor was I presenting unbelief as something epistemically unjustified.

I was instead talking about a scenario where the atheist is making a claim to knowledge (I believe X is false) rather than a mere suspension of belief (I do not believe X is true).

The difference between the two (although subtle) lies in the fact that the former is making a positive case (hence dubbed positive atheism) while the latter is merely waiting for sufficient support in order to believe (hence dubbed negative atheism though this boils down to simply a sort of agnosticism with respect to one's confidence level).

This is a bit touchy but you should check the paper The Presumption of Atheism by Anthony Flew since he describes all this in a much better way than I can.

If I were to put it in practical terms, a positive atheist will say something like this:

"Because of the severe amount of Evil in the world there is likely (some said certainly) no God."

In contrast a negative atheist would say:

"There is insufficient evidence to support the belief in the existence of God therefore belief in God is unjustified."

The first aims to make an objective claim about reality by providing positive arguments for the claim "There is no God" (dealing with their share of the burden of proof) while the latter bases their unbelief on a general view that if something isn't supported by evidence then we shouldn't accept it (the negative side however does not explicitly reject that something).

To further simplify, one has to do with what is (ontology) the other has to do with what should we believe (epistemology) what is our epistemic (and moral) right to believe.

Ofcourse, all of this is further blurred by the fact that in some cases absence of evidence does present evidence for absence which is a case some positive atheists have tried to make (which is again trying to meet their burden of proof but in an interesting way of simply pointing out that the other side failed to meet their). All of these ride on further 'hidden' assumptions which I won't mention here but I hope you got the gist of what I was talking about.

Regardless, I never said you have to prove a lack of belief or that running away from one's burden of proof and blaming it on the opponent is a good thing to do. Theists commonly have a burden of proof to bear (unless we are talking about fideism or reformed epistemology) but in some cases so do the atheists.

 

transistor at it again

 

Guardians Of the galaxy vol 2 is amazing oh my gosh cant believe i havent watched it before now

 

Yes yes and yes

 

1 was better

 

So... I am the only one who founds them to be horrible?

 

Shit taste