Absence of evidence for the existence of god is not evidence he doesn’t exist. You cannot prove god doesn’t exist.
How to debunk it
- No, there is no evidence for god’s lack of existence because there’s no such thing as evidence for something’s lack of existence. Evidence can only support a positive claim.
- Speaking of positive evidence to support a positive claim about god’s existence, thank you for admitting you have none.
- There’s also no evidence to support the non-existence of Zeus, Ra, Odin, Santa Claus or any other mythical character. But that’s not a good enough reason to believe they exist. This is the exact same approach you’re taking with Yahweh or Allah, and it’s false for the exact same reason.
- The burden of proof falls on the person making the truth claim, not on the person doubting it. To think otherwise would be to commit the argument from ignorance fallacy. Bertrand Russell demonstrated this point with his famous Celestial Teapot example. His argument was that it’s impossible to prove that a little teapot is not orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. There’s simply too much open space there and a teapot is small enough to evade detection, so we could never definitively prove it doesn’t exist. There’s no evidence to support its absence, but that doesn’t give us a good enough reason to believe it’s there.
Carl Sagan made the same point with his Invisible Dragon example, and the entire Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is dedicated to demonstrating this point as well. - No, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but it is evidence that your argument for god’s existence is baseless.
I think the issue og shifting burden of proof is the most important thing to address with people who use this argument. If they persist once it’s been explained, they do so dishonestly and they then know it. At that point, it’s no use trying to reason with them.
I think your heart is in the right place, but:
> 1. No, there is no evidence for god’s lack of existence because there’s no such thing as evidence for something’s lack of existence. Evidence can only support a positive claim.
This is not true. For example, there is evidence that there is not an elephant in the room I’m currently sitting in. The evidence is that I looked around the room, and I didn’t see an elephant.
Alternatively, there is evidence that there are no square circles. The evidence is the definitions of “square” and “circle,” which logically exclude each other.
Your “looking around the room”, at best is an eyewitness report, which is NOT evidence.
“No square circles” is also not evidence, it’s a logical precept.