No Evidence, or No Good Evidence?
Evidentialist atheists often conflate the concepts evidence and good evidence. But I see a world of difference between saying, "You offer no evidence for your belief" and "You offer no good evidence for your belief."It's an important distinction. First off, is it really true that theists offer no evidence whatever? In "Defensor Fidei," Roderick T. Long, an Aristotle and Wittgenstein scholar at Auburn University, says this not usually the case. Theists and atheists clearly use the word faith in different senses, which impedes the conversation. Long writes: It seems to me that what the word [ faith ] means in ordinary language is not belief that goes beyond the evidence, but rather belief that goes beyond one’s personal experience. To someone of skeptical tendencies these might of course come to the same thing, but for most of us they do not. My belief that Stonehenge exists is not based on personal experience (nor on demonstrative deduction therefrom),