(Or the defendant is a lousy witness and there are no other evidence for them and the defence is hoping desperately that the prosecution won’t be able to make out their case.) The point is that this is possible because the procedural rules put the burden on the prosecution. Courtroom procedural rules are not legally mandated in a social discussion. Some people mistakenly assume that the fact that there is a burden of proof on the prosecution in court means that burden of proof is a matter of logic and can be extended to social discussions. But it isn’t.

”Why make claims that you're going to have to back if you don't yet have anything to prove?’

It all started when you seemed to accept atheist porn writers sleight of the hand in hiding behind the imaginary burden of proof. Whoever has a better argument is a separate issue.

’Firstly, your claim that you were responding in a manner that would keep things sequential is discredited by the fact that there was never any need to respond in the first place considering I had already pointed out that your entire argument was a mere fallacy to begin with.’

If you put a 14 point list up it invites a response. If you want to simply rely upon the subsequent logical fallacy claim (whether or not previously hinted at) then why didn’t you just do so?

’...I just thought I’d point out the fact that my arguments last night actually also disprove your asinine claim that atheists have faith. According to your logic, a juror’s initial presumption of innocence is a “faith”.’

I would have thought that jurors (hopefully) don’t have a preconceived idea and will listen to the evidence until both prosecution and defence have presented their case. They are then tasked with deciding whether the prosecution has proved things beyond reasonable doubt (in light of the defence’s evidence and argument). They are not tasked with deciding what is true and what isn’t. However hopefully if something is proved beyond reasonable doubt it will normally be true. I believe that is the idea in the first place. The consequences of successful criminal prosecution are grave so the preference is to be biased toward guilty getting off rather than innocent being punished. In real life we have to make a decision in varying situations. Sometimes neither side can prove their case beyond reasonable doubt and we need to decide which is more likely if we are to have an opinion.

’Let’s face it, mjpb, despite holding it, you have no idea what faith is. Either that or your application of it to atheism is pure dishonesty. And my claim that Philo was simply making it up as he went applies to you and CS Lewis too since your definitions of faith are much more far-removed from the Bible’s definition than mine.’

You are entitled to your opinion. However the Bible commands us to know what to believe and why we believe it. Could you please revisit 1 Peter 3:15. The same can be inferred by the requirement in 2 Corinthians 10:4-5. We are told that God is reasonable Isiaih 1:18 so naturally He wants us to use our reason. Being ignorant and operating on blind faith isn’t what our religion teaches (as convenient a straw man as it is to wield by atheist porn writers). We are told to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and relevantly mind (Matthew 22:37).

Sorry when I typed:

"I wouldn’t but some do and some don’t. However the point is not whether or not I or anyone else would believe it. The point is that if someone asserted that the Lochness monster exists if that someone wanted to argue the toss and wanted the Lochness monster believer to take them seriously they would need to argue it. They share the burden. This is different to a courtroom situation where procedural rules dictate the burden of proof."

I garbled it. What I meant was:

I wouldn’t but some do and some don’t. However the point is not whether or not I or anyone else would believe it. The point is that if someone asserted that the Lochness monster exists and the other someone wanted to argue the toss and wanted the Lochness monster believer to take them seriously they would need to argue it. They share the burden. This is different to a courtroom situation where procedural rules dictate the burden of proof.

mjpb,

Do you have any idea of just how tautological it is to express surprise in being able to exist in a universe in which you are capable of expressing surprise in being able to exist?

Didn’t think so.

Since you’re struggling with this fine tuning argument, I’ll point out another reason as to why it doesn’t work by giving you a little analogy. We can even have cute little characters if it helps you out. Let’s call them “Space Duck” and “Cosmic Bunny”.

Suppose Space Duck shows Cosmic Bunny an object he’s never seen before. Because it’s the only one he’s seen, it’s unique as far as he’s concerned and it’s all one colour - red.

Cosmic Bunny: “What are the chances of this object being this exact colour?”
Space Duck: “What do you mean? It’s the only one you’ve encountered. How can you ask this question?”
Cosmic Bunny: “Well, the colour is so finely tuned and precise. The exact collection of wavelengths has produced a convenient result, because red is visible to my eyes.”
Space Duck: “Yes, but...”
Cosmic Bunny: “I’m off to write a book called the ‘Anthropic Cosmological Principal’.”

Do you catch my drift here, mjpb?

A probability analysis with a sample size of 1 is meaningless. We have one universe to analyse. If we knew of any number of universes other than 1, then we could start to talk about probabilities.

This is why it doesn’t matter if there are 122 constants or 122 million constants. It makes no difference. The notion of altering constants is something dishonest theists have invented for the sake of introducing probability as an argument. You have no evidence or reason to believe that the constants were mutable in any way. And without a basis for assuming the mutability of the universal attributes, your fine tuning argument is nothing but a fallacy - an error in logic and reasoning.

Now to ‘burden of proof’- another subject you seem to be struggling immensely with.

Continued...

...Continued

You introduce the topic of Roman law to bolster your position (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3814#101888), but as soon the law goes against your largely improvised arguments on this topic, you drop it like a hot potato and switch to another argument which goes against the only other accepted form of ‘burden of proof' the ‘philosophic burden of proof’...

<<The point is that if someone asserted that the Lochness monster exists and the other someone wanted to argue the toss and wanted the Lochness monster believer to take them seriously they would need to argue it. They share the burden. This is different to a courtroom situation where procedural rules dictate the burden of proof. >>

Wrong.

It doesn’t matter who wants who to take them seriously. In this situation, it goes by... funnily enough... PROBABILITIES!

Out of the following two claims, which has the burden of proof?

- x is y
- x is not y

According to your logic, until one proves their point, they both have the burden of proof.

But this is wrong.

The initial burden of proof lies on the positive claim (x is y), because only a small minority of statements in the form "x is y" are actually true. You could randomly assemble an infinite combination of nouns and adjectives with 'x is y' and only a very small number of them will be true; whereas if you were to do this with "x is not y", most of them would be true.

So since ‘x is not y’ is more likely to be true, the burden of proof rests on the positive claim.

But how does this relate to an ‘atheist vs theist’ scenario?

Easy.

Like I said, the burden of proof always lies with the least likely claim. In an ‘atheist vs theist’ scenario, the least likely claim is that “God exists” since “God does not exist” allows for an infinite number of other possibilities. In other words, an infinite number of possibilities/scenarios would disprove “God exists”, while only one scenario would disprove “God does not exist”.

Continued...

...Continued

This is also yet another reason as to why atheism is the default position - regardless of what Plantinga has argued in your fallacious ‘appeal to authority’.

So once again - and god knows how many times now - the burden of proof initially lies on the theist.

Probabilities just don’t seem to be a friend of theists now, do they?

This just leaves us now with your “Atheists have faith too” claim.

You never even addressed my example of absurdity using your demonstrably false claim that you didn’t have enough faith to be an atheist. You didn’t make any effort to explain how it really happened in order to correct my scenario and prove your point. Why? Because you know your claim isn’t true to begin with.

Instead, all you did was waffle on about how you’d hope things would be in a court of law, demonstrating that you have no idea of how they actually are.

Unfortunately though, in amongst all that waffle, you failed to realise that whether there is a presumption of innocence or no presumption at all, both scenarios still work fine in my analogy that discredits your claim that atheists have a faith.

<<Being ignorant and operating on blind faith isn’t what our religion teaches (as convenient a straw man as it is to wield by atheist porn writers).>>

No one has ever said that that is what Christianity teaches, so it appears that the only real “convenient strawman” here is your claim.

Anyway, to summarise the discussion thus far:

- My point about the burden of proof still stands;
- You still haven’t provided any evidence - certainly no evidence that warrants calling others “extremists”;
- Atheism is still the default position, and;
- You’ve still failed to demonstrate that atheists have a faith - proving that you were either never an atheist to begin with, or you’re just being untruthful.

That’s a clean sweep, mjpb.

Like I was saying months ago: Back to the drawing board for you.