Atheism Has No Burden of Proof

1- DefinitionsCon states that rejecting a claim requires one to take the alternative position. That is simply not the case. If I ask a girl out on a date and she rejects me, that doesn’t mean that she accepted a date with someone else. In the same way, rejecting a claim says absolutely nothing about what claims you accept. To reject, disbelieve, nonbelief, etc… all point to the same thing, which is what a person does not accept. Talking about what a person does accept is a different conversation.Con claims that lack of belief is not an intellectual position. This statement is nonsensical. A position itself is neither intellectual nor non-intellectual. What is or is not intellectual would be the means by which a person arrived at their position. A person who believes in God because it rains, and rain is therefore God tears… is a theist. Yet I am pretty sure Con would not consider that position intellectual. So unless Con is arguing that theism is also non-intellectual, how they arrived at their position is irrelevant to this debate.Con claims that I must either defend “Broad Atheism (there are no deities)” or defend every other application of atheism. That is plain nonsense. The fact that there are many different types of atheists only helps to prove my point. When talking about a strong atheist, weak atheist, gnostic atheist, etc… the commonality between all of them is that none of them accept the proposition “God exists”, aka they all lack belief in a God. And if lack of belief in God is what allows all of them to fit into the label “atheist”, then that is what the word refers to. Everything else is just separate ideas that Con is trying to bootstrap onto the definition. Con tries to offer an alternative term by asserting the lack of belief in a God as a “non-theist”. What Con doesn’t seem to understand is that this is exactly what atheism means when broken down linguistically. “A” in English is used as a negative prefix which simply means “not”[1]. Examples of it are asexual, atypical, apolitical, etc… If someone said they were asexual does that mean they are asserting some opposition to sex? No, it simply means they are not sexual. If an event falls into the category of being apolitical does it mean that it is about anti-politics? No, it simply means that it is not about politics. The word atheist works no differently, so there is no need to invent a new term.3a. Theism and Atheism Address BeliefThere is no contradiction to the resolution on this point as Con seems to think. What he seems to be implying here is that if atheism is a lack of belief then atheism cannot address belief. This is not the case for the same reason that the term asexual still addresses a person’s sexuality. Belief is the topic. Lack of belief is one of the positions a person can hold on that topic. To say otherwise is nonsensical, since “lack of belief” contains the very word being discussed.3b Reality vs Belief about RealityNo apparent disagreement here3c - The Two Prongs of a DilemmaCon completely misunderstands the courtroom analogy. The legal burden of proof is nothing more than the application of the philosophical burden in a legal setting, which just means that there are rules such as which side carries it and to what standard the burden must be met. Con’s claims as to what the legal burden is, is just plain false. Consensus has absolutely nothing to do with it. The legal burden is always on the prosecution. The reason why is the exact same reason why the burden is on theists; because of the proposition being addressed. Jurors are asked to address the proposition “the defendant is guilty” so the prosecution necessarily carries the burden. Since theism/atheism are positions on the proposition “God exists”, theism necessarily has the burden. This is how any BoP works.By misunderstanding the legal burden Con has completely missed the point of the analogy. Again, the reason my hypothetical trial went nowhere was because there were two different sides defending two different propositions, so both sides had a burden of proof. This is how discussion on any subject gets extremely muddled. Conspiracy theory debates are famous for this. Typically in conspiracy debates you have one side arguing that the conspiracy theory is nonsense while the other argues that the “official account” is nonsense. Those arguments tend to go nowhere very fast, because in that case neither side is accepting the burden. The problem in both of these example is the same; the sides have not agreed on a specific proposition to discuss. Without a proposition it cannot be determined who has the burden because it is not made clear what either side is supposed to be accomplishing. And without each side knowing what they are supposed to be accomplishing the discussion becomes a free for all where each side argues whatever they wish. This was the point, and I would argue the most crucial point in this debate. Con has offered no arguments to refute anything I have said about how productive intelligent discussion works. So unless he is arguing that productive intelligent discussion is not the goal, his entire case becomes completely irrelevant.And no, I said nothing about either side not having a burden of rebuttal. The debate is about whether Atheism has a burden of proof. The burden of rebuttal comes afterward and is therefore completely irrelevant.3d- Categorizing the PositionsWill respond in the agnosticism category, since that is all Con attacked here.3e- Not Believing Proposition A =/= Believing proposition BCon is once again trying to manufacture a burden of proof by bootstrapping claims onto atheism. The proposition we are discussing is “God exists”, not “position X is irrational”. A person who believes one may also believe the other and might believe the other in most cases. That is irrelevant because no matter how Con tries to spin it, it is still a different proposition. If Con disagrees then I advise him to Google the first law of logic. 3d- AgnosticismCon here states: “You either have valid reasons of logic or evidence for your belief, or you do not”. The reasons why one holds a belief is completely irrelevant to the question of what belief they hold. Con is yet again tacking on all kinds of things onto the position that have no relevance. The reasons one has to defend their position are discussed in the act of defending their position. That has no bearing on what responsibility they have before that discussion begins which is what the BoP determines.Aside from that Con still does not seem to understand what Agnosticism is. I provided the definition in the previous round, Con ignored it and asserted that agnosticism is what he says it is because he says so. That is not how debate works. So once again, agnosticism deals with a person’s position on whether God claims are knowable. So the proposition is “God claims are knowable”. An agnostic is someone who does not accept this proposition. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether the person holds a belief in God. Agnosticism and atheism are not mutually exclusive.4- ArgumentYet another attempt of bootstrapping by Con. That is still not the proposition the respective positions address.SummaryCon made no attempt to refute my points as to why we address one prong of a dilemma at a time, and what prong theism and atheism address. The burden of proof is determined by these two simple points. Cons attempts to redefine atheism as well fail. He gives no reason why “non-theism” should be accepted when “a-theism” already addresses the same thing, and every other attempt he made relied on distorting other definitions (as with agnosticism) or attempting to manufacture a burden onto a position by bootstrapping on other ideas to it. What I found most interesting here is that he actually lists a number of different types of atheists without realizing that this only proves my point. If they can all be classified as atheists and the only commonality is a lack of belief in a God, then a lack of belief in a God is necessarily what defines an atheist.The resolution stands affirmed.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org...