I've decided that if atheists can invent self-serving "laws" and spout them endlessly, so can we. Here's one I just did up on being told by an atheist that "the burden of proof isn't on atheists".
Atheists don't get to decide who has a burden of proof and anyone who accepts their double standards, inevitably set up to favor them is allowing them way too much. Religious people can decide what they require of atheists and if atheists don't like that they can lump it.
As long as atheists demand that there is a double standard of their own invention that rules internet discourse operate under, all previous rules are suspended and it's anything goes.
I'd say the "burden of proof" is on empiricism, and the first thing it must prove is the reality of "love."
ReplyDeleteIndustries are devoted to it, holidays even, yet can they identify the reality of "love"? Hume couldn't. It took Kant, the Idealist, to do that again, and his answer wasn't all that satisfactory. In the end, everyone shrugged and went back to accepting it without much question. But if we're going to argue everything must be proven empirically, let's go back to Hume and recognize that is a dead end.
And reinvent the Kantian wheel while we're at it; if they're up to that.
Honestly, it's like trying to discuss soteriology with children; or, better, wrestling with a pig. You just get dirty, and the pig likes it that way.
Your point that if someone demands evidence for any question that they should be willing to accept that burden on themselves is an excellent one. I do find, though, that atheists want it to be the other way round, they want to impose that burden, claiming that "the burden of evidence...." always falls on people who don't agree with them.
ReplyDeleteThey don't know what "burden of proof" or even the term "evidence" means.
ReplyDeleteWhat it really means (as you say) is that "evidence" is what they accept without question, and "proof" is what affirms what they already believe.
They are no more skeptical than the most ardent fundamentalist. Descartes "Method" is so far beyond their understanding they are, as I say, like children discussing string theory.
They don't have the first clue.