The way that some theists keep trying to shift their burden of proof onto atheists, demanding that atheists “prove” that God doesn’t exist instead of offering any credible evidence or arguments for their assertion that God does exist. As if “you can’t prove it doesn’t exist” were some sort of rational justification for believing in, well, anything.
On a seemingly unrelated note, I have noticed that one of the most popular questions that theists love to ask atheists is what it would take to convince an atheist to believe in God or what would atheists accept as proof of the existence of God.
Now, I can’t say for sure why so many of these questions keep being asked. Perhaps theists expect atheists to be so dead set in their “atheist beliefs” that no amount of proof would ever satisfy them (which would then provide rhetorical ammunition to theists who want to claim that atheists have “blind faith” or are otherwise irrational in their “atheist beliefs.”) Regardless of why these questions get asked, however, they tend to actually get a lot of responses from atheists who are only too happy to specify exactly what would convince them. For some it’s as simple as seeing a single amputee regrow a limb after praying for it to happen. For others, it would require that the various promises made in the Bible to the faithful be consistently fulfilled instead of constantly being told that “God moves in mysterious ways” or “God promised to answer prayers, but sometimes the answer is no.” Some hard-core atheist would require a demonstration of universe creation, since that is the only thing that would definitively distinguish God from, say, an advanced alien race. But regardless of the type of proof that would expected by various atheists, you don’t tend to see atheists just claim that it would be impossible to ever prove the existence of God and therefore nothing you say will ever change my mind LA LA LA LA LA I AM NOT LISTENING!!!
And yet, what happens when a theist is asked what could possibly convince them that God doesn’t exist? What proof would they accept for the non-existence of God? Would it be, say, a demonstration that that many prayers of the faithful go unfulfilled? Or perhaps the existence of evil in the world (including natural disasters)? What about evidence that definitively shows that the events described in various holy books never actually took place?
No, when faced with questions like these, some theists state that NOTHING could ever convince them that God doesn’t exist because they know deep in their heart with every fiber of their being that God does, in fact, exist. Their faith is not contingent on things like evidence or rational arguments. They know because they know because they know.
Other theists, however, take an entirely different tack (and I suspect these are the type of theists who ask atheists what would convince them to believe in the first place). When asked what would they accept as proof of the non-existence of God, they suddenly claim that no such proof is possible because its actually impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God and therefore nothing you say will ever change my mind LA LA LA LA LA I AM NOT LISTENING!!!
Hmmmmm…
And this is where it all comes back to the original discussion regarding the shifting of the burden of proof that theists love to engage in. Seriously, if theists honestly and truly don’t believe it is possible to prove or disprove the existence of God and are not just trying to weasel out of their burden of proof yet again, why would they expect atheists to be able to tell them what they would accept as proof of God’s existence? And if theists don’t actually believe it’s impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God, then please, by all means, they should be willing to tell us what would constitute proof in their eyes for the non-existence of God. Come on, fair is fair. If they’re going to demand that atheists “prove” that God doesn’t exist, they should at least be willing to first tell us what they would actually consider to be sufficient proof.