Okay, so here we have a Christian asking the one question that atheists fear most.
Are you ready for it, ’cause here it comes courtesy of YouTuber, Mr. Ministry Man.
I wish I could say that it would be nice if their side could come up with something better, but I suppose that after decade upon decade of watching their beliefs being swept into the dustbin by new scientific discoveries, this is the best they can do.
I do give Mr. Man a few props for his use of semantics here. In the video, he says that atheists believe there is no god, and as a belief, it needs evidence to back it up. But the problem is that this isn’t what many atheists say.
In the spirit of Mr. Man’s video, I’m going to play the semantics game too.
I’m going to use the moon landing as an example, and make two statements about it.
I don’t believe we landed on the moon.
I believe the moon landing didn’t happen.
See the difference?
In the first example I’m simply stating that, for whatever reason, I don’t believe that the moon landing took place. It’s a negative statement and one that I’m not required to prove.
In the second example, I’m making a positive claim, which is that man did not land on the moon. While both statements disagree with the validity of our landing on the moon, one statement does require proof while the other one does not.
Many atheists take the negative approach in regards to the question about gods existing. We don’t believe that they do and ask to be convinced based on evidence provided by those claiming that gods do indeed exist.
Mr. Man misrepresents the atheist position by claiming that we believe that god doesn’t exist, and since all positive beliefs require proof, we should have to prove god’s non-existence. While I can’t speak for all atheists, I can say that many of them take the negative approach by stating that they don’t believe in god.
Not that this really changes much because the burden of proof still lies with the theist, and it would be better if people like Mr. Ministry Man would come up with some solid evidence for god that can be tested by the scientific method rather than perform linguistic gymnastics to shift the burden of proof onto the non-believer.
