Posted: Sep 17, 2017 1:22 pm
Thomas Eshuis wrote:Pebble wrote:VazScep wrote:The issue was this claim of yours:Pebble wrote:To me you are simply skirting around the issue.This is a popular mantra we hear from atheists, and it is evidence to me that people who go on sites called "rationalskepticism" are every bit as incapable of being critical about the crap they read on the internet as anyone else.Short of deduction/mathematics we still have no method of proving negatives.Thommo and I are not talking about the denial of a specific proposition. We're talking about your general claim above, which clearly annoys the both of us, and we want it to stop being repeated.If the definition of atheism is denial of god(s),
Then you are both intent on derailing the thread. Context!
How exactly are they derailing the thread?
I'll give this one more go then.
Thread title: Stanfords new definition of atheism.
Issue under discussion: Therefore, in philosophy at least, atheism should be construed as the proposition that God does not exist
So the challenge is to provide evidence for the negative proposition, rather than for the theists to provide evidence that one simply negates.
In this context - the atheist is charged with providing evidence for the absence of any conceivable god(s).
In this context, proving a negative is impossible. One can certainly provide evidence that such a deity is improbable or logically inconsistent, and one can point to the absence of evidence for the opposing view. However, in so doing one is letting the theists set the agenda and end up unable to force the debate into an arena where the weaknesses of the theistic arguments can be exposed. The theist simply needs to take a scatter gun approach (Trump like) firing out a number of simple questions requiring complex frequently incomplete answers, to ensure no-one apart from committed academics can follow the arguments.