An arguement for Agnoticism - against Atheism.

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It just seems that the burden of proof lies on the party who believes in the existence of something.  The atheist, or the disbeliever in the Easter Bunny, does not have to shoulder the responsibility of proving the negative, becasue they don't necessarily have to put forward a thesis that "God does not exist" or "the Easter Bunny doesn't exist."  When confronted with an argument by a theist or an Easter Bunny representative, the skeptic merely has to demonstrate that there are no good grounds to believe that the kind of being the believer has faith in exists.

That having been said, I do think the atheist gets into trouble (more trouble than a person who denies the existence of the Easter Bunny) when they posit a thesis that "God does not exist."  If this sort of atheist accepts the definition of God as a being who, under most nornal circumstances, is invisible, intangible, inaudible, and ultimately unconveivable, then they would have to prove that such a being necessarily does not exist, and that sounds to me like a pretty tall order.  So, I basically agree that skepticism, agnosticism, is a more viable position than atheism, but only if the atheist is someone who goes around arguing for God's non-existence.  If the atheist makes no such argument, but only finds the arguments of the theist in favor of God's existence uncompelling, then there is no significant difference between an atheist and an agnostic in this regard.

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I know that a sort of militant scientism such as the one Dawkins shops around does initiate the atheist attempt to disprove belief in God.  What Dawkins doesn't seem to get is that evolutionary theory might demonstrate that God did not have quite the role in the creation of the universe that a literal reading of the Book of Genesis depicts, but that does not necessarily prove that God does not exist in any fashion or mode.  Einstein I have always thought of as less a culprit in this brand of militant scientism, witnessed for instance by Einstein's objection to quantum theory ("God does not play dice with the universe").