Burden of Proof

So I was surfing Reddit, because that's what I do during finals, and I was reading some stuff on /r/atheism. I found several times fallacies by both Christians and atheists on the burden of proof when it comes to God's existence. The usual argument goes a little something like this:

Christian: You can't proof God doesn't exist.
Atheist: Since you're the one arguing for God's existence, then the burden of proof is on you, not us.

Somewhere in there is the Martian teapot fallacy and the trump card of "faith," but most of the arguments are the same: where does the burden of proof lie? So to avoid finishing studying I'm going to write about this.

There is no burden of proof. There can't even be one. It is both fallacious and paradoxical. This I think is best summed up in Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy concerning the babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.

Well said, Doug. I used to think this quote was just poking fun at God, but the paradox is blatantly obvious. Faith can simply be defined as "believing in and asserting anything at truth without evidence." So if the existence of Deity only works on the premise of faith, then there wouldn't be any proof of God's existence. But, if there is proof, then God cannot exist, because the faith fallacy would not allow Deity to exist with proof of existence. It's a bit like Gödel's Incomplete Theorem: you cannot have truth and proof of truth simultaneously; or, put another way, if there's proof of truth, then that truth doesn't exist, and if there is truth, then you cannot prove it.

It is quite a paradox to prove God exist, because that would mean Deity clearly doesn't exist. (That or the faith fallacy is complete bullshit). But I think this is what Stephen Hawking was getting at when he said (and I paraphrase), "It's not that science says, 'God doesn't exist.' It's that we don't need God for the equations to work. The universe doesn't need God in order to work." So where does the burden of proof lie? Nowhere. You can't prove it, and proof is a paradox. There is no burden, at least with the faith fallacy. The burden is a vagary of certainty.

So, does God exist? That's a loaded question, at least if the faith fallacy holds true. If faith is not a factor in God's existence, then we must ask ourselves: either, can God exist without evidence? Or can there be evidence of God's existence?

The latter is the more serious of the two (as in it can actually be taken seriously), at least in our age of scientific reasoning. With or without faith, the question of truth of Deity is a vagary of logic. Logic is, quite simply, a chain of arbitrarily sufficient pieces of evidence, proofs, and/or reasoning of causal relationships. Put it simply, logic is an arbitrary linkage of ideas that would supposedly prove truth. But logic is merely a human fabrication. God, in typical ideology of Deity, is higher than humans, and clearly exists beyond our petty logic. Proof of truth exists beyond our comprehension, because our lesser minds cannot comprehend God. This is what H.P. Lovecraft was getting at when he said (and I paraphrase), "To truly comprehend God would lead to insanity." To go beyond the forms of logic the human brain has fabricated would lead the mind to higher thinking, or, at least, outside standard human reasoning. That's a sufficient way to define insanity.

If there is proof at all, then that proof is either the Martian teapot or it is ubiquitous. Either the only proof of God's existence is meeting him/her in person, and that is the only proof. Like the Martian teapot, if it exists, then we simply have to find it floating somewhere around Mars' orbit. If we could simply fly out on a spaceship and meet up with God for lunch, then clearly he doesn't exist higher than humans, and is little more than another creature in the realm of creation. I think that destroys the concept of what it is to be God. If the proof is ubiquitous, which it clearly is not, then we would find it everywhere, which we have not. If creation itself is the proof, then that is fallacious by our own scientific logic, since Hawking says that the equations don't need God in order to work.

The other option, can God exist without proof, is the more dangerous of the two. How can it be taken seriously? Doesn't this reinstate the faith fallacy? In a sense, yes, but in another sense, no. This, I think, is the mess we have with our religions and science. It is both yes and no because it makes faith both bullshit and quite acceptable. Both faith and disbelief become legitimate ideologies, and that would be the root of the (supposed) war between science and religion.

So which is it? Is faith the paradox of proof? Is faith legitimate? Or is disbelieve legit? Is it the Martian teapot? I cannot really answer this, because clearly our logical constructions of understanding these esoteric matters are far too inferior to really comprehend the essence and existence of Deity, if comprehension is possible at all. In all instances the conclusion is insufficient. It always diverts back to admitting that we have no idea.

"WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE"
~God's last remark on creation, Hitchhiker's Guide