“What Can Be Asserted Without Evidence Can Be Dismissed Without Evidence”?
Christopher Hitchens
One reason that people have for being non-believers in God is a lack of evidence to support belief in God. This is obviously a different thing than positive evidence against something. The burden of proof, as they say, is on the claimant. Many times I have talked about evidence with theists and non-theists and always we return to the issue of faith. A theist must have faith that their god is the true one despite a lack of supporting evidence. An atheist may dismiss the theist’s claims because the evidence is weak or, at the very least, unreliable.
I would suggest that we must start from the presumption of disbelief. I do not believe in unicorns, dragons, cosmic teapots, talking animals and a whole plethora of others things not because I have evidence that they do not exist but because I have no evidence that they do. The same holds true for belief in gods of any kind. Furthermore Christians feel precisely the same way about Odin, Ra, Quetzalcoatl, Oghma and all the other gods that human beings have believed in throughout history.
There are reasonable objections to this. People accept many things as true without insisting on good evidence and even in the face of contradictory evidence sometimes. I accept that a coin toss will have exactly a 50% chance of landing heads or tails even when I’ve managed to throw ten heads in a row. Empirical evidence suggests the coin will land heads on each toss but I do not accept this because I know that this is simply a statistical abnormality.
01-12-2009 |
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