The central fallacy of all atheism is that it demands proof for God while at the same time refusing to offer proof of no God. Atheism is a one-way street.
I only read the first page of this thread, then skipped here to the last, but at the beginning and end of the thread as it stands, I see a delicious irony here in the efforts of the faithful to identity logical fallacies given by atheists. Atheists are certainly prone to offer weak and fallacious arguments for atheism, and my favorite bogus argument for atheism –
God doesn’t exist because if he did exist he would be unjust or cruel or repugnant – didn’t make the list somehow at the beginning there. That’s a big, popular one, maybe it go mentioned in the middle pages of the thread.
But here you are offering something patently illogical in your attempts to shirk your burden of proof for your beliefs – the idea that the existence of God from the start somehow demands “proof of non-existence”.
Think about that for a moment… proof of non-existence.
Existence, by any measure we use the term by, is a positive existential quality. There is no proof that pink unicorns don’t exist, and there can’t be, because proof of non-existence is a confused concept. We can say we have a conspicuous lack of evidence for God, similar to our conspicuous lack of evidence for pink unicorns, and that provides a reasonable basis for concluding that belief in pink unicorns or God is unwarranted, but there cannot be any evidence as you demand for anything that does not exist.
Man does not start at some kind of “tie” concerning pink unicorns or God, or anything else that we expect to identify as existing. We begin by noting that “God” is not visible, tangible, hearable, or accessible in any of the objective methods we validate existence, by direct observation or through instrumentation (you can’t touch or “see” an atom directly, but via instrumentation, we can indeed provide objective observations of them).
The starting point is simple, but disastrous for Christians: we begin with no God obviously in view, and we don’t fair any better in applying reasonable tests that might validate the existence of such a being in less immediate and direct ways. So the burden of proof for the existence of God, lacking any manifest presence to begin with that we might objectively base our belief on, rests squarely on the theist. The atheist does not, and cannot bear the burden of proof for the non-existence of God, anymore than disbelievers in the existence of pink unicorns bear the burden of proof for the imaginative nature of pink unicorns. All a disbeliever can do in either case is note that the positive case for the existence of God and the pink unicorn fails any reasonable test for warrant.
That’s just the way reality is. I didn’t make it that way. Theists carry the burden of proof on this question. It really is a one way street, and it’s a logical error to think otherwise.
One sees this in all atheist writings. For example, you will hardly ever see an atheist admit to the good things accomplished by religion in this world. The only things admitted to are the bad things that supposedly religious people have done. Another one-way street.
Overly broad, and irrelevant to the question of God’s existence. This is a “fallacy theists offer in proposing fallacies they identify in atheist arguments”. Religious people do lots of good things across the world, and religion is a significant factor in encouraging and facilitating a lot of those good works. But it’s a red herring. It has no bearing on whether God exists, and more particularly no bearing on the logical soundness of atheist arguments that focus on existential proof for God. As an atheist, my understanding of religion has me expecting many good works and benevolent attitudes from practitions of the faith, BECUASE it is false. That is how falsehoods get sustained, and persist in the culutre. They may be quite outrageous as metaphysical claims, but if they provide positive organizing social principles nevertheless like charity, social stability, industry and support for human dignity, it hardly diminishes those benefits to note that the subject of all that is a fiction.
It would be as if a person of religion condemned all science because some scientists did terrible things … like creating an arsenal of nuclear weapons sufficient to obliterate the human race.
We’re off the reservation on this topic already, but for the record, I think the important atheist arguments do not make this mistake, but instead focus on the
dogma of the religion itself as problematic. Of course some practitioners embrace the dogma, that’s the goal of the religion, for many streams of religion, anyway. It’s not nearly so important to realize that Joe down the street hates homosexuals with a passion as it is to realize that that hatred was fed and nourished by religious indulgences in hateful metaphysics: *God considers homosexual sex a cosmic abomination. *We can fault Joe for being a hater towards his fellow man, those who are homosexuals,
because they are homoesexuals, but where we find religion providing an institutional and culture seed bed for that hatred, as we do in many Western religions, we have an institutional class problem, evil being wrought by religion in a systematized way.
In my experience, and I’ve read a whole lot of this genre of polemic, the criticisms don’t focus on individual failures, but the insitutionalized evil that religion often represents.
Richard Dawkins is one of the main culprits who think about religion without really thinking. He rarely gets his history or his facts correct, and there is an electric hostility toward religion that permeates his prose. If you don’t think so, read The God Delusion. Then read *The Dawkins Delusion? *by Alister McGrath. Point by point, McGrath shows up Dawkins for the intellectual lightweight he really is.
You just diminish your credibility when you run roughshod over the facts. It’s facile to be such a partisan hack in presenting arguments like this. Dawkins is no intellectual lightweight, no matter what the truth is regarding God’s existences. McGrath has a sharp, subtle mind as well, and while I don’t think a whole lot of his arguments, and less of his conclusions, I’d be a fool to think people would take me seriously if I struck a similar pose, namely that McGrath is some lightweight who’s been spectacularly unmasked by his encounters with Dawkins. That’d be just feeding myself happy little falsehoods to feel good about my position.
I think there are good, solid criticisms to make against many points in
The God Delusion, but your conclusion here just means you can’t be taken seriously on this subject.
-Touchstone
