Perfide , 6 months ago

“God doesn’t exist” is surely a statement right? If I tell you “god doesn’t exist” (in response or not to something you’ve said), this feels like I am claiming the statement “god doesn’t exist” is true.

This ties into the part you absolutely agreed with. The word “God” as it is defined now would not exist without the original unproven claims that God. Even if you’re not responding “God doesn’t exist” directly to someone who said “God exists”, you are if nothing else still responding to the original millennia old claim that they do exist. For that reason, it is always a counter-claim.

As for what makes counter-claims different from regular claims, it’s simply that the burden of proof lies first with the original claim. A counter-claim has no responsibility to prove their claim until such time as the original claim presents evidence supporting itself.

I don’t think we need proof to reject a claim like “god exists”. There’s no real good evidence for it and all attempts at proofs of this in the history of the philosophy of religion have been analyzed and critiqued to death in some pretty convincing ways.

I absolutely agree. That was kinda my point. If the claim ever did get some actually noteworthy evidence, then it would certainly need to be properly proven or disproven… but I don’t think that will ever happen.

So, for example if you tell me tax code says X, that is not a proof of what tax code says. It would make sense for me to not outright believe you (since we are strangers), but you could be telling the truth, so it seems equally silly for me to immediately jump to believing tax code doesn’t say X too.

The problem with that is I at least in theory could have looked up the tax code, remembered it, and then told you it correctly. Sure, I could have lied or remembered wrong, but it was 100% within my capacity to give you the accurate information, and even show you where I got the information from. With a claim about God’s existence, that’s impossible for either side of the debate as far as we know, and since the original claim was “God exists”, that side is, possibly forever, stuck holding the burden of proof.