A collection of essays and rants, inspired and taken from a series that I have been writing for several years concerning this subject. A stirring account of how certain issues are poisoned by organized religions and why we as a society would be much...
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"It annoys me that the burden of proof is on us. It should be: you came up with the idea. Why do you believe it?" - Ricky Gervais
Let's say that I walked up to you one day and informed you that you could no longer drink coffee ever again because it leads to colon cancer. Here is my question: would you stop drinking coffee and take what I said on faith? Would you stop making your morning trips to Tim Horton's or Starbucks because I said so, or would you demand that I prove that coffee causes colon cancer before making any changes to your daily routine?
Instead of providing spreadsheets and statistics that proved coffee caused cancer, what if I told you that I believed it because no one proved that it was not true? If I tried to get away with such an incoherent argument, would change their routine or would they keep drinking coffee every morning and at work without hesitation? The reason why many would keep drinking coffee is a clear as day: I have not given you any reason to believe what I said. I have failed to meet my burden of proof.
This is something I absolutely had to address at some point in this book. An issue that is not only relevant to the debates I've been engaging in over the last two decades of my life but the very attitude that others bring towards it, especially when it comes to the tactic of burden shifting.
When someone comes up to you and makes a claim, stating something outrageous like vampires and werewolves are real, we have no reason to believe that person unless they prove to us that it's true. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim that werewolves and vampires exist and not the person who doubts it. Whenever there is a disagreement about something, or a dispute over the validity of something, there are always two sides involved. First we have the claimant, the person who is making the claim in question. This is the person who claims to know or believe something to be true. This person has a claim that they want others to consider or believe. The other person is what we call the Sceptic. This person doesn't believe or have any reason to consider the validity of whatever the claimant is saying.
Let's give another example. Let's say that I tell people there is a flying spaghetti monster that lives on Jupiter that telepathically sends messages to us when we're asleep with instructions to follow in prelude to their invasion. People will no doubt challenge this story, asking for evidence to back up my claim. If I were to respond to my critics, telling them that it's their job to prove me wrong, that is not evidence but a cheap attempt to shift the burden of proof. Just because someone cannot prove something doesn't exist doesn't automatically make the claim true by default. The burden should still and always like with the claim maker rather than the sceptic.
Just because someone is not physically capable of proving me wrong about the flying spaghetti monster on Jupiter doesn't mean that I can champion the idea as correct. I am still obligated as the claimant to prove that there is any truth to the claims that I am making. Encyclopedias are not full of things that we think might be out there, they are full of things that we know about. Every crazy claim can't make the books just because someone thinks them, a burden of proof must be met in order for these claims to be accepted at a minimal level by a civilized society.
