Ben Wallis’s counter-apologetics blog

Let us take inductive inference to consist in extrapolating the broadest-according regularities of our experience to universal laws, each within some larger domain or context than the experiences themselves. On a small scale this is easy to envision, and we can appeal to such canonical examples as the inference that all swans are white from a large random sample of uniformly white swans. However, we must also take inductively-inferred laws to "accord broadly" with all of the regularities of our experience. For instance despite the fact that we have only ever personally encountered white swans, perhaps we have heard from a reliable source (wikipedia?) that there exist black swans. To infer that all swans are white under these circumstances might accord narrowly with our first-hand experiences of swans, but not broadly with our other non-swan experiences, namely the experiences which lead us to decide that our source for information on black swans is reliable. So inductive...

In debates over the existence of God, we often find atheists accusing Christians of having "the burden of proof." Defectivebit of choosinghats.com wants to remind negative atheists such as myself that we do indeed make positive claims, and according to him this leaves us with our own burden of proof. Now, in a very trivial sense, it is quite true that we must make a certain claim when identifying ourselves as negative atheists. Namely, we are making the claim that we do not believe in God. Furthermore, this seemingly benign statement draws on various concepts, which in turn suggests that by identifying as negative atheists we must take up the positions that they are collectively (and possibly also individually) meaningful. For instance it appears we must assign some positive meaning to the concepts of belief, God, the self, and so on, if we want to truthfully identify as negative atheists. Further still, what appears to me the usual context of accusations of "burd...

Unfortunately it has become somewhat common for atheists to deny that they have any burden of proof in religious debates. While this may sometimes be true in some limited sense, I find it problematic for at least three reasons: First, it seems quite evident that many of the atheists who employ this tactic are in fact positive atheists, which is to say that they take the assertive position that there is no God, rather than the weaker position of unbelief in the existence of God. Now, it may be more interesting to talk about the justification for theism rather than that for positive atheism, but nevertheless the position of the nonexistence of God does indeed require some justification, and so anyone defending that position certainly has a burden of proof in that regard. Second, even a negative atheist has basic obligations to facilitate communication. In any two-way conversation, each party shares some measure of responsibility not just for communicating clearly, but also for assi...