The Burden of Proof

"god is imaginary"  (Salon comment thread bloviator)

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” 
― Albert Einstein

One of the most silly of atheist strategies for setting up a double standard in their favor is their declaration that the "burden of proof" rests on religious believers.  They assert that since atheism is merely a lack of belief that the burden isn't on them, they can just rest on their pose of saying, "Na-uh" and they've done all they need to do to declare themselves The Winnah!

You would think that, perhaps, the fact that the large majority of humanity has not agreed that they have won, that in places such as the Soviet Union which actively propagandized against religion, killing enormous numbers of people, dynamiting tens of thousands of churches, teaching anti-religious propaganda in the schools, merely suppressed religion and, in the absence of  state oppression, religion came back,  that atheists here declaring themselves the winner with no effort at all is a delusional denial of historical reality.

People get to decide what they find persuasive and, while some insecure people can be hoodwinked into denying their own perception of reality, of their own conclusions about the meaning of their lives,  the majority of people don't seem to be willing to do atheists that favor.   I doubt that the current fad of atheism will prove any more effective in it goals than the Soviet or Albanian or East German governments were in abolishing religious belief.  

Is atheism a mere lack of belief?   Certainly not in the sci-rangers and pseudo-skeptics whose atheism is as intimately tied to scientism and materialism as it could be.   And for a mere, content free "nothing" atheism certainly seems to move its (dis)believers into making an enormous number of positive statements, again quite strikingly about scientism and materialism,  using their atheism to declare all kinds of things to be delusions, many of those things, such as my favorites of equal rights and obligations to respect those, hard fought truths based, not on the abstractions that mathematics and the physical sciences are based in, but in the absolute basis those share with other human knowledge,  individual and collective human experience.  

Mathematics and logic, two of the essential foundations of science,  are based on human experience, it was human experience that validated its historical foundations, on which all further developments in those depend, which can't invalidate those foundations without the entire edifice falling down.   Lacking an absolute logical foundation, logic and mathematics have to fall back on a reliance on that history, on that human experience.   Science, even more so, is dependent on that accumulation of human experience, it is the ultimate source of its validity.  That "it works," the frequent boast of the adherents of scientism, when faced with the lack of an internally logical foundation of science, is an appeal to human experience and a non-formal method of validation.   The other foundations of science are even more obviously based in raw human experience, observation, and the social aspects of science, publication and review by the society of scientists and other reviewers.

Atheism, when it seeks converts, when it seeks to establish its dominance as an ideology isn't attempting to lay out a formal, logical foundation for itself.  It is attempting to persuade people and people can believe what they believe on other bases than those of formal logic.  Human experience happens prior to any logical, quantitative or analytical processing of it.  Because science is based on and dependent on forms of human experience, it is, in a real sense, secondary to it and, since there are realities in human experience that science can't contain, it is not necessary to being persuaded of realities it can't contain.

Since logic and mathematics have no absolute foundation, their acceptance has to be based in the same kinds of raw human experience that observation consists of. No scientist can practice science without having, first, accepted those things on a non-scientific basis, some of those in such early childhood that logic certainly didn't play a role in it, nor mathematics.   Even such arrogant believers in scientism as Sean Carroll and Richard Dawkins base the science that they have turned into an idol on the same foundations that they reject when people come to other conclusions than those they like.  Only they seem to have never gone through the exercise of really looking at the foundations of their own thinking with sufficient rigor to admit that.   Perhaps it's a matter of arrogance winning out over reality.   It's my experience of deeply religious people that they are more likely to have questioned the foundations of what they believe with more rigor than these atheists have.  That gives them every right to demand that the atheists show the same kind of questioning of their faith.