We’re not claiming that no gods exist. We’re not accepting claims that gods do exist.
So you’re arguing that you’re not arguing? Wrong. To posit atheism means that your are positing “something”. “Atheism” posits the belief that there is no God. So you must prove it.
When a jury votes in this country, they pick either “guilty” or “not guilty” because they are responding to the claim of guilt. Has the claim “The defendent is guilty” met its burden of proof? They vote simply on whether there’s enough evidence to affirm the claim or not: and if there’s not sufficient evidence, they have to vote not guilty. But they do NOT have to be convinced the defendent is innocent (they do not have to support another positive claim).
Sorry, its not the same and your analogy fails. Because juries are also fair and impartial in reviewing and receiving evidence. And not all evidence is physical in trials. There are also witnesses, sworn affidavits, etc. There is even circumstantial evidence that amount to converging clues that point to a conclusion. All of this is considered fairly and impartially by the jury to come to a conclusion. And the burden to meet is “reasonable doubt”.
**Atheists such as yourself are not reasonable because you have eliminated witnesses, sworn affidavits, and circumstantial evidences and have insisted that the only evidence that you will accept is physical.
And you have raised the bar so that the only evidence that will sway is such that proves beyond all doubt.**
Your philosophy excludes you from being reasonable and rational because of what you believe and assume: a closed loop series of causes and effects.
You must prove that this system is true before you can assume it.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that we think they’re innocent of existing, and we’re not necessarily making any claims of our own.
No, by calling it “atheism” you ARE making a claim, whether explicitly, or in your “case”, implicitly.
Sure, when humans make laws they are proscriptive laws – someone had to make them up and people choose whether or not to obey them. But when we use the word “law” in a scientific context, we’re talking about descriptive laws – descriptions of how the universe works.
In other words, we’ve observed that matter acts in certain regular ways. Our descriptions of how matters acts get written down and become what we call “laws.” But there’s no indication that anyone is directing matter to act in the ways that it does.
Sorry, that’s a philosophical claim, not a scientific one. At best you can say that there is nothing that you can abstrct from in your science to account for the way matter acts.
The universe exists and it does what it does. That, in and of itself, cannot be evidence that an intelligent being made it so.
And this is called “begging the question”.
The rest of what you say here is so confused that I can barely make any sense out of it. You can have a go at rephrasing it if you like.
No, I won’t. It just proves my point about how you disregard evidence.
No, I don’t have to prove that those are the only truths that exist.
When I evaluate claims, I do it through the means available to me. We know that evidence-based inquiry (which includes peer-reviewed science but is not limited to it) gives us insight into the actual state of things (if they did not give us insight into the state of things, they wouldn’t enable us to do things like construct computers, fly planes, etc.).
If you’re claiming that there is some other way of arriving at truth (i.e. factual claims about the world), then you’re going to have to demonstrate that these methods are ways of arriving at truth just as much as evidence-based inquiry
Yes you do, because your theory of truth is based on liguistic confusion between what is “sensible” and what is “true”. Some things we sense are NOT true(e.g. mirages or hypnotic images) and some things we know are true are not sensed( the fact that 8x8=64 or the fact that we are considering the nature of thought).
Your theory of truth seems designed
a priori, from the beginning, rather than empirically and from experience, to eliminate soul, spirit, God, heaven, and objective moral law(because if truth is onlty what is “sensed” the morality is subjective and relative). Empiricism itself is an empirical, experimental, experiential report on how we do in fact use words(like "spirit); instead, it as a rationalistic,
a priori ideological doctrine. Empiricism is not empirical enough.
Nor can you
prove that truth is only what can be proved. And’s its not clear that all truth is perfectly clear. In fact, many truths
cannot be proved; such as the law of non-contradiction(x does not equal non-x). This is presupposed in all proofs, so that trying to prove it always begs the question; it assumes what it claims to prove. Many important truths also are not clear: for instance, the truth that most people are both good and bad, mysteriously mixed; or that “life is worth living.”
The bottom line is that you don’t find truth by shutting out proofs that don’t fit your ideology.
To use your analogy, by presupposing atheism and then entering the jury pool you would automatically be excluded because you are a prejudicial potential juror.
By assuming yourself as a juror you have already adquitted the defendent(atheism) while disregarding and misinterpreting the physical evidence and ignoring the sworn witnesses and affidavits as evidence against it.
Your philosophy makes you a bad juror in this case.
