Religion

In the debate between theists and atheists/agnostics, which side has the burden of proof? Are believers supposed to prove that God must exist, or must atheists demonstrate that God cannot exist?

Comments

What is the purpose of this "debate"? Is there a trophy? a financial reward? Or is the purpose supposed to be to determine the truth? or to determine what we should believe? I think the answer to your question very much depends upon the answer to this question.

Let's suppose the purpose of the debate is to determine what one should rationally believe. What who should rationally believe? Does the person already have a view on this question? That is: Is she already a believer or a non-believer? Or is he or she utterly agnostic? This question, too, matters, at least according to some epistemologists, since these philosophers would take seriously the idea that the question we thinkers face is always whether to change our existing beliefs.

And there's another crucial question, at least on some religious epistemologies: If one bases one's belief upon religious experience, how is that supposed to enter the debate?

"Burden tennis", batting the burden of proof to and fro over the net, is rarely a very profitable pastime!

But still, maybe this case is an exception. After all, conventional theists when you come down to it are making some pretty exotic claims (claims that make the beliefs, say, of ancient Greek religion look very modest and humdrum). Not just powerful gods, but an omnipotent God. Not just intermittently casting an amused eye over mortal folly, but omniscient. Not just occasionally taking a passing interest in some of us, for good or ill (and occasionally, understandably, running off with a particularly pretty nymph) but incomprehensibly loving us all equally. And so it goes (for example, perhaps add claims about the Trinity here!). By the workaday epistemic standards we use in most of our lives, those extravagant claims look very fanciful indeed. So we can reasonably insist that someone who advances such claims literally, and expects to be taken seriously, had better have some very good arguments. Pending such arguments, the atheist doesn't have much to do.

Of course, some will say that that is all thumpingly crass, and that religious beliefs aren't to be construed literally, as involving exotic claims about what or Who exists. Indeed. I have some considerable sympathy with that. But the question as posed is naturally read as one concerning traditional debates about the existence of God: and in this case, the burden of proof surely does lie with the proponent of the extravagant ontological claim.

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