The Burden of Plausibility
I've mentioned before that the burden of proof is not the only burden when it comes to discourse. Before the burden of proof come the burden of coherence and the burden of plausibility. These are critical: if a proposition can't sustain the first two, the third is never even reached! You don't demand evidence for the pseudo-proposition Treblig gainges . Today let's focus on the burden of plausibility. We'll ignore the fact that the notion supernatural and hence God are logically absurd because they require that something exists outside existence. The Abrahamic God story (all the way through Islam and Mormonism) simply defies belief. A very good discussion of why is to be found in Christopher Hitchens's book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything . Hitchens points out that if the human race is 100,000 years old (as conservatively estimated), why did the omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving God wait about 96,000 years before showing itself? (Abram,