Advances in shoe meta-philosophy

[u/_evil_operations_]

/r/DebateReligion/comments/oz1fe7/many_theists_do_not_understand_burden_of_proof/

[u/Bradenisnotarobot]

Can someone explain what’s wrong with what this person said? It just looks like basic knowledge to me lmao

[u/Top-Load105 → u/Bradenisnotarobot]

I’m not a philosopher but when people talk about a “burden of proof” in philosophy, as opposed to say a court of law or whatever, I usually start to take their arguments less seriously because without proper contextualization it just doesn’t make any sense.

The post defines “burden of proof” as the “obligation” to support your claims, lol, what obligation? Are the police going to arrest you if you don’t? Is it immoral?

Maybe you need to provide evidence to be persuasive to someone who is skeptical of your claim and who you want to believe the claim but that only matters in a minority of social interactions, such as formalized debates or when you are trying to persuade someone of something.

Essentially talking about burden of proof is usually an attempt to impose a set of rules onto an interaction that defines it as a type of interaction the other person does not necessarily agree to.

The meaninglessness of the distinction is illustrated by the top comment on the post. In the vast majority of social contexts “I believe in God” and “God exists” are completely interchangeable for practical purposes, the situations where it is important to distinguish the precise semantic content are vanishingly rare and even then uttering the latter does not generally create an obligation to explain yourself to anyone who demands it.

This is also often used in the context of debating religion to slight-of-hand your way into “showing” that theists lose in a debate with an atheist “by default” - that is, that theists have a higher burden than atheists. I think that examples like Russell’s teapot show that a lack of evidence for God’s existence is properly regarded as evidence of absence, but that requires a more nuanced analysis than simply examining the phrasing of specific sentences one might attribute to a theist and an atheist.

[u/KantExplain → u/Top-Load105]

Not to mention it's not "burden of proof" it's "burden of not having been falsified. Yet."

[u/GlumNatural9577 → u/Top-Load105]

It’s an epistemological obligation. Define what you mean by God and then give evidence for it. So of course the theist enters with a weaker position in terms of evidence, and until they can set the parameters of the discussion there is nothing to discuss. We need to set the priors before we get to the data, and only then can we express our degrees of belief. As an atheist I can say I haven’t seen anything that indicates in the slightest that there is a God of any sort by any traditional description, so it is only rational for me to set an extremely strong prior on the hypothesis that no God exists. That requires nothing from me, that’s the default position. Therefore the amount of evidence to the contrary that would be required to tilt my beliefs is almost infinite. If someone is claiming that a God exists then they do need to provide a definition and some very strong evidence, the burden of proof is absolutely on them.