Quotes Tagged "burden-of-proof"

I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.
Tags: science, interview, humor, explanation, burden-of-proof, belief, atheism
God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.
Tags: theist, theism, proof, onus-probandi, hypothesis, god, burden-of-proof, atheism
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.
— Bertrand Russell Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Tags: superstition, satan, santa, reason, rational, proof, probability, olympus, knowledge, hypothesis, gods, fiction, egyptian, christian-god, burden-of-proof, belief, babylon
For God to prove himself on demand, physically, would be a grave disappointment, and the strongest Christians should be considerably grateful that he chooses not to do so. The skeptic endlessly demands proof, yet God refuses to insult the true intelligence of man, the '6th sense', the chief quality, the acumen which distinguishes man from the rest of creation, faith.
Tags: theism, supernatural, strength-of-spirit, strength, spiritual-realm, spiritual, skepticism, sixth-sense, senses, scientific-method, science, refusal, quality, proof, physical, philosophy, perception, intelligence, insult, grave, gratefulness, god, faith, existence-of-god, existence, evidence, disappointment, demanding, creation, comprehension, christianity, christian, burden-of-proof, atheist, atheism, apologist, apologetics, agnosticism, acumen, 6th-sense