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FAQ: "How can you be an atheist? You can not prove that God does not exist! "

I can answer that question in two different ways, and any of them is enough.

1 - Not to me that it is doing so.

You have probably heard somewhere east or the term "burden of proof." In this context, it works like this: when someone says something new, it is his responsibility to prove that something, or at least sufficient to provide evidence that something, as far as we know, more likely than the opposite. There are others who have to disprove the assertion. In other words, the burden of proof belongs to those who make the statement - especially if an unusual or extraordinary claim.

Imagine if someone accuses you of being an alien disguised as a human. Would you feel you have the obligation to prove himself and the world that are a normal human? Of course not. Is the other person has to prove what you said, you have to provide evidence for his claim. The same for those who accuse you you've committed a crime.

So it is in the case of statements like "there is a god, and he is exactly as I believe he is." Who is making the claim has the burden of proof. A question like "can not prove that this happened?" Only works in the film Ed Wood . :)

2 - You can prove that X does not exist then?

Another way to nullify the statement "you can not prove that God does not exist" is to answer the same question. Can you prove that Zeus does not exist? Aphrodite? Odin? Thor? Allah? Kali? Nanabozho?

You have to admit you can not. Plus, you could spend the rest of your life trying to prove that any of them there, and you would fail miserably. Should I then assume that they all believe in? Or at least to consider them as likely to exist as you believe in God?

No? So why not? Believing in a particular god because you can not prove that it does not exist, but not apply the same logic to all other gods, is a classic example of "double standard" ... the intellectually honest approach would be to apply the same "standard" to any god ... or belief.

(Note: please restrict any comment that you make to the previous question and answer, and not to other matters as the existence or nonexistence of God. Thank you.)

Possibly related posts:

  1. FAQ: "To say that there is no god, it takes as much faith to believe in one."
  2. FAQ: "The atheism / materialism does not explain the love / friendship / good and evil / poetry / beauty / irrational numbers in mathematics / <another abstracto> example of human concept, then they are wrong / God exists!"
  3. FAQ: "Without belief in eternal reward or punishment, how is it possible to be moral?"
  4. FAQ: "But if God does not exist, and do not persist after death, what is the meaning of all this?"
  5. FAQ: "Without God / religion / the Bible, how can there be morality?"

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This work by Dehumanizer is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal .