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Important distinction
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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I'd agree that at least sometimes it is a counter claim, but I don't agree that counter claims aren't claims themselves. The wording "counter claim" seems to me to indicate that "counter claims" are just claims of a particular type?
"God doesn't exist" is surely a statement right? If I tell you "god doesn't exist" (in response or not to something you've said), this feels like I am claiming the statement "god doesn't exist" is true.
I absolutely agree with you on this point.
I don't think we need proof to reject a claim like "god exists". There's no real good evidence for it and all attempts at proofs of this in the history of the philosophy of religion have been analyzed and critiqued to death in some pretty convincing ways.
But, there is to me a difference between rejecting the truth of a claim vs excepting the truth of its denial. So, for example if you tell me tax code says X, that is not a proof of what tax code says. It would make sense for me to not outright believe you (since we are strangers), but you could be telling the truth, so it seems equally silly for me to immediately jump to believing tax code doesn't say X too.
This ties into the part you absolutely agreed with. The word "God" as it is defined now would not exist without the original unproven claims that God. Even if you're not responding "God doesn't exist" directly to someone who said "God exists", you are if nothing else still responding to the original millennia old claim that they do exist. For that reason, it is always a counter-claim.
As for what makes counter-claims different from regular claims, it's simply that the burden of proof lies first with the original claim. A counter-claim has no responsibility to prove their claim until such time as the original claim presents evidence supporting itself.
I absolutely agree. That was kinda my point. If the claim ever did get some actually noteworthy evidence, then it would certainly need to be properly proven or disproven... but I don't think that will ever happen.
The problem with that is I at least in theory could have looked up the tax code, remembered it, and then told you it correctly. Sure, I could have lied or remembered wrong, but it was 100% within my capacity to give you the accurate information, and even show you where I got the information from. With a claim about God's existence, that's impossible for either side of the debate as far as we know, and since the original claim was "God exists", that side is, possibly forever, stuck holding the burden of proof.
If I say god doesn't exist to you I feel like I'm making a true or false factual claim to YOU rather than to a bunch of old dead people or some greater historical/cultural context. The history of the word/definition might be relevant for deciding what the word means, but the claim is aimed at YOU. The actual truth status of the claim (even if we call it a counter-claim) that I might be making is either true or false (assuming we subscribe to bivalence like that) regardless of the history or culture that lead us to the discussion.
It seems like a silly double standard for only one side to have a burden to prove their claim, but the other gets to claim the negation is true with no burden of proof.
For example, if you say "2+2 is 4" and my response is "NO IT IS NOT. IT IS 3! I REFUSE TO PROVE IT THOUGH", not only will I be wrong in a classical arithmetic sense but I have presented no argument for why you ought to believe my new counter claim to your original claim. It would make no sense to believe me without more info in such a case.
The fact that you can look up tax code is not really a problem for my hypothetical example. It is not particularly hard to come up with hypotheticals where you just can't easily obtain the answer. We could rephrase the context, perhaps we are stranded on a desert island? We could rephrase the question, perhaps it is about what some obscure historical figure had in their pockets on the day they died?
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue for or against the existence of god. My issue is that there should be a burden of proof for the CLAIMS "god exists" and "god does not exist" if somebody is claiming either is true. I don't think there's any kind of burden for believing some random claim without proof, but I think it's silly to commit to the negation of a claim without proof unless you have a reason to believe the negation. You can always just not commit and say you don't know in such a case, rather than believing the claim or its negation.
Why is it silly that the claim originally presented should have to present evidence first? The counter-claim only has zero burden of proof so long as the original claim has failed to give any proof of their own.
You wouldn't have to present an argument yet, at that stage. I'd think you're really dumb for needing something like that proven to you, but the initial burden of proof would still be on me. However, when I quickly and easily provide proof that 2 + 2 does equal 4, THEN the burden of proof falls to you to prove your counter-claim.
That's not what I'm claiming. I'm saying the claim AND counter-claim should provide evidence/proof before either one is accepted. Blindly believing not B because you can't prove B is just as bad in my opinion as believing B itself with no proof.
A lack of evidence or proof for some claim B is not sufficient proof for not B. It doesn't really matter what claim we assign to B here.
For example, you might not have evidence/proof that it will rain today (i.e. B is the statement "it will rain today"), that doesn't give you sufficient evidence/proof to now claim that it will not rain today. You just don't know either way.