re burden of proof in article apr batman bmd trw com jbrown batman bmd trw com writes the default condition in the absence of a preponderance of evidence either way is that the proposition or assertion is undecidable and the person who takes the undecidable position and says that he she simply disbelieves that the proposition is true is the only one who holds no burden of proof this is why the so called weak atheist position is virtually unassailable not because it stands on a firm foundation of logical argument but because it s proponents simply disbelieve in the existence of god s and therefore they hold no burden of proof when you don t assert anything you don t have to prove anything that s where weak atheism draws its strength but its strength is also its achilles heel without assertions axioms one has no foundation upon which to build as a philosophy it s virtually worthless imo of course yes as a philosophy weak atheism is worthless this is true in exactly the same sense that as a philosophy christians disbelief in zeus is worthless atheists construct their personal philosophies from many different sources building non god based ideas in the same way as christians build non zeus based ideas of thunderbolts atheists no more base their philosophy on atheism than christians base theirs on the nonexistence of zeus the weak atheist position is logically extremely assailable any logical demonstration of the existence of a god completely destroys it as soon as the demonstration is made in the presence of a given weak atheist atheists in this newsgroup are barraged regularly with attempts to provide such a logical demonstration and they all fail miserably in fact most of the people around here who claim the strong as opposed to mathematical atheist position do so on this basis not only do we not believe in a god but also all the arguments presented in favor of particular gods have to date proven unsound therefore one can say that those gods as argued by those arguments do not exist this doesn t apply to such philosophers gods as are defined to be logically undemonstrable but these are not the gods of popular religion and the coherence of such claims is quite questionable jim perry perry dsinc com decision support inc matthews nc these are my opinions for a nominal fee they can be yours
