(Today is “Respond to Dave Walker Day”)

Believing, Asserting and Burden of Proof

If somebody says to me, “I think its bad luck to walk under a ladder“, I’d think it odd. I wouldn’t, however, demand proof.

If somebody asserted, “It is bad luck to walk under ladders, and this is a reasonable position”, I would demand proof.

Why?? What is different?

The real question here is what is burden of proof and why does one statement incur it and the other does not?

Burden of proof, lest we forget, is a legal concept. The Corpus Juris states “Semper necessitas probandi incumbit qui agit.” Thus Englished, as Locke would say, the claimant is always bound to prove: the burden of proof lies with him.

You make a claim, you assume burden of proof. No claim, no burden of proof. I can think that bad luck lurks in the shadows, and that thought in itself doesn’t incur burden of proof.

But when I assert – i.e., make a claim – that bad luck exists, then I’ve incurred burden of proof.

When something is stated as fact, or as a reasonable position, at that point it is entered into the realm of debate. In essence, you’ve claimed that the other person is in the wrong if he or she refuses to adopt your position. This is true because we see reason as binding on all humanity. For this reason, the claim that somebody is “unreasonable” is of itself a denigration.

Law codifies the expectation of people to be reasonable with the criminal standard of “reasonable doubt”.

To say that somebody is unreasonable is to say that they are in the wrong. To claim that somebody is acting reasonably is to say that their actions are justified.

Thus, one may expect to assume the burden of proof when one asserts that his position is the reasonable.

Often times in atheist debates - the Internet kind - atheists invoke burden of proof. The position held by some atheists is that belief in a god or gods entails burden of proof, and atheism doesn’t.

This is just a quick post to set the record straight.

Whenever a person offers a proposition, the person offering the proposition has the burden of proof. If I, as an agnostic, say “we cannot know whether gods exist”, then the burden of proof is on me to prove that we cannot know.

If an theist asserts that his god exists, then the burden of proof rests with him to prove that his god exists.

If an atheist asserts that gods do not exist, he assumes the burden of proof to prove that gods do not exist.

One of the biggest obstacles to worthwhile intellectual debate is the hopelessly dishonest and counterproductive framing of arguments.

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When I was a child, my parents encouraged us children to solve our differences with verbal sparring. If we wanted to get physical, they allowed that, too. (They were very laissez-faire.) But the preference was for verbal sparring based on formal logic.

We conducted this “fights” in front of witnesses (family) and the victor was declared when the opponent lost his cool and started calling names or cried. (Hey, we were kids. We cried.)

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