The Logical Atheist

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,...

As a general matter, I accept the idea that he who proposes -- X is true (and thus ought to believed) -- has the burden of proof. But I am not troubled by the idea that propositions of the form X is not true (and ought not to be believed )   -- also require support. Drawing a hard line against this is a mistake. You may not be able to demonstrate a negative proposition  directly --  say, I did not commit a particular murder -- but you can demonstrate it indirectly by showing that a contradictory positive proposition is true -- I was somewhere else at the time . Proof that the earth is round is proof that the earth is not flat. Why can't I demonstrate that the supernatural God does not exist by showing that it is impossible? It seems to me that any negative proposition can be restated in a positive way. The negative claim God does not exist  corresponds to the positive Spinoza-ish claim that the natural world is eternal, self-sufficient, the source of all ex...