Having no evidence against something, isn't evidence....
Posted on: May 9, 2011 - 10:28am
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Having no evidence against something, isn't evidence....
I am an atheist and one of the few around where I am. I'm not an outspoken atheist or anything but if asked about my beliefs I state them so this has attracted a lot of attention. I am bombarded with questions concerning my beliefs, the most common being "why don't you believe in god', i mostly respond with the "there's no evidence" approach which is instantly countered with, 'but there's no evidence that he doesn't exist'. Firstly, that's not true but I'll save that rant for another day. Having no evidence against it isn't a defense! I could say that you can't disprove the midget who loves inside Ashton Kutcher's head who's best friends with the martian who lives in a teapot orbiting Saturn. Okay rant over. 
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How quickly the believer becomes a hypocrite when you ask them why they reject other people's claims.
A ardent Muslim isn't going to become a Christian simply because a Christian says "Prove that the god if Jesus isn't the one true god"
And ardent Christian isn't going to become a Muslim because a Muslim says "Prove that Allah isn't the one true god".
For that "prove it isn't true" logic to work every claim even outside the issue of religion, ever uttered by humans in human history would be true, merely because it wasn't challenged.
NO ONE in reality does that.
It still misses the fact that no good use of logic should default to a 50/50 proposition.
The wise always say "prove it" and don't assume something ON ANY SUBJECT to be fact. To do otherwise is to infect the mind with the treason of credulity.
Until a claim can be kicked around and thrashed to death and still empirically can be falsified and independently peer reviewed to a universal standard, it rightfully should remain a claim and there should be no good reason to buy into it until such time that it has been proven beyond personal bias.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
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Meh, you answered your own question. I like leprechauns. You can't disprove that for which there is no evidence for in the first place. You could only assume they are directly related to other items of the same ilk based on common sense.
Faith is the word but next to that snugged up closely "lie's" the want.
"By simple common sense I don't believe in god, in none."-Charlie Chaplin
they are making are informal logical fallacies - fallacious arguments from ignorance. As Bertrand Russell rather nicely put is: "If I were to say that since my assertion cannot be disproved it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense."
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
If you assume that existing things have a non-zero probability of generating evidence, Bayes' Theorem will tell you that a lack of evidence is evidence of a lack.
If the theist then claims that God has zero probability of generating evidence, ask them why you should care about something they admitted has no chance of impacting your life.
You might have to explain what "evidence" means.
Questions for Theists:
http://silverskeptic.blogspot.com/2011/03/consistent-standards.html
I'm a bit of a lurker. Every now and then I will come out of my cave with a flurry of activity. Then the Ph.D. program calls and I must fall back to the shadows.