Dodge City part 3

The original Dodge City post featured a Christian Apologist avoiding the issue of verification when he realises he advocated verification but cannot verify the existence of God. That conversation can be viewed here.  We also have examples of question dodging by Christian Apologists which use the same tactics as politicians - as shown here

Here then, are some more examples:

Example 1

Christian Apologist

The early church was profoundly Jewish, as was Jesus. There were those within Judaism who recognized Jesus as the fulfillment of OT promises and those who did not. It's unfortunate that the opposing faction came to be labeled as "the Jews" when in fact both sides were Jewish.

JimC

I am intrigued by your concept of “profoundly Jewish”. Can you explain the difference between "Jewish" and "profoundly Jewish"? Also, when you refer to “Jews” in the context of “Christians” I assume you mean “followers of Judaism” rather than ethnicity? 

Christian Apologist

I'm rather tired of your constant challenges for me to jump through hoops of your choosing on these matters. When--honestly--will you choose to quote me completely and actually offer on topic responses to such? This isn't a one sided conversation, Jim, and you are not The Grand Inquisitor.

Commentary: I've obviously touched on a sore point. There is some decidedly peculiar use of the word "Jewish" and "Jew" which the apologist does not want to have to explain. I don't blame him! It's reminiscent of a previous Evangelical argument which referred to Christians as "Completed Jews" !

Example 2

JimC

The stories of prophecies being fulfilled by Jesus were invented decades after Jesus was dead - they were reverse engineered, as any Rabbi will tell you.

Christian Apologist

Any Rabbi" would of course make that claim--that is what s/he believes in the first place

Commentary: Yes, the follower of particular religion will make claims based on what they believe in the first place. The Christian apologist fails to see the irony in his comment! And... dodges the point about the prophecy stories being reverse engineered. 

Example 3

JimC

A survey by the Pew forum in 2013 revealed that 90% of Evangelical Christians in the USA are absolutely certain in the existence of God. But according to a Christian Apologist, “our understanding of anything and everything could be wrong" and "such is required In the case of Christians, otherwise there would be no such thing as faith... Our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect. When the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. - 1 Corinthians 13:9-10"

So who is right – the 90% of Evangelicals who have absolute certainty, or the 10% who have an element of doubt?

Christian Apologist

One would need to converse with those who apparently claim "absolute" certainty to understand the basis for their claims. We need their take on the issue. 

JimC

I think it would be difficult to "converse" with 75 million people to "understand the reasons for their claims" but we can at least read what they say their reasons for absolute certainty are, such as... "I know that God is real because He has revealed Himself to us." What you appear to be saying is that these Evangelical Christians should not claim to have absolute certainty and they mistakenly do so because they are "conflating objective evidence" with "spiritual experience." Is that right?

Christian Apologist

Again, we would need to hear from those who do claim certainty regarding God's existence to know how they came to their conclusions.

Commentary: The Christian apologist seems to be part of the 10% of American Evangelicals who are not absolutely certain that God exists. There's nothing wrong with that of course. The dodge here is the refusal to be drawn into the results of a poll on the basis that one would have to "converse" with the 75 million respondents who hold a different opinion to him. One assumes the "conversation" would be along the lines of persuading them they are wrong!

Example 4

Christian Apologist

You probably have the option--right now--of dipping your head in a bucket of acid or some other toxic substance. Would you choose to do so? Of course not! Does the fact that you choose not to do so mean that you don't have free will? Of course not! If--in heaven--one realizes that choosing any other option is absolutely foolish, it has everything to do with wisdom and nothing to do with negation of free will!

JimC

The point I think you're trying to make is that we could deliberately and consciously harm ourselves physically at any time, but the fact is we usually don't and if we did we'd likely need psychiatric help. To use your example, it never crosses my mind that I should dip my head in a bucket of acid – it is not a choice for me, and that's why I would never do it. Start from there, and then try and work out why, normally, we don't even think of harming ourselves.

Christian Apologist

Excellent--now read that back to yourself and realize that once we have the clarity that communion with God brings, any choice to do otherwise would be as foolish as dipping one's head in a bucket of acid, or any other ridiculous choice. 

Commentary: This was during a discussion on the concept of free will as an illusion. Notice how the Christian Apologist invents the bizarre "bucket of acid" analogy - only to dismiss it as a "ridiculous choice" later on! Notice also the non-sequitur regarding the "clarity that communion with God brings" - as if someone who has that "clarity" - never makes a "ridiculous choice"!

Example 5

Christian Apologist

Recent discoveries point to the probable existence of billions of earthlike planets throughout the universe. The building blocks for life and intelligence in the very nature of the universe itself seem to manifest themselves throughout such. You fail to acknowledge the ever-increasing evidence of organic and sentient life permeating the universe and the precariousness of your assertions that all came about through mindless mechanistic processes!

JimC

Although I think it is likely that there could be life on those planets, I can't be sure, so I have to remain agnostic until there's more evidence. [The hypothesis of abiogenesis] predicts the "building blocks of life" (and hence intelligence) to appear throughout the universe on comets, meteors and other planets, because it seems likely that life (and hence intelligence) arises from chemistry, and chemistry exists all over the universe, obviously. What I'm not seeing is evidence that intelligence existed before life, before the chemistry life requires and before the physics that chemistry requires. The evidence you are presenting supports the emergence of physics: chemistry: biology: intelligence - in that order. If you could provide evidence of intelligence that is not reliant on biology (and chemistry) - you might be on to something.

Christian Apologist

I'm not suggesting otherwise, although I am pointing out the same matters you do subsequently. You're not seeing evidence of life that is not reliant on biology because our earthbound senses, earthbound experiences of access to intelligence springing from organic life, and the tools (such as physics, chemistry, etc.) that we use to analyze such all limit our ability to recognize the "big picture." Intelligence nonetheless is part and parcel of our experience of reality. We access such through biological means. Through various apparently unlikely processes, our universe allowed for such developments to occur.

JimC

Lots of agreement here - excellent! 

Christian Apologist 

If that's a tacit admission that everything that forms the basis of our outlooks is ultimately based on faith in what we think we know--and that there is no such thing as a "default" position that favors any assumptions regarding such matters--we have made progress indeed!

Commentary: During a discussion no the origins of the universe, the Christian Apologist -  surprisingly, and perhaps by accident, makes a case for the hypothesis of abiogenesis. Having realised we agree, his only option is to dodge the issue with a non-sequitur about faith and default positions. Or something like that! 

Example 6

JimC
It was argued here recently that there is no sin in heaven because its inhabitants are simply unable to sin, because of the "awesome presence of God." 

Christian Apologist
The awesome presence of God and the complete understanding of the evil of other choices become so clear to us that we would never again opt to make the wrong choice.  

JimC
That implies the "awesome presence of God" removes free will and makes those in His "presence" predictable automatons. Can you give an example of the choices available to those who are in the "awesome presence of God"?

Christian Apologist
They retain their free will but the full consequence of choices is made crystal clear. Having been blessed with God's presence they would seek no other option. 

JimC
It seems to me the "awesome presence of God" removes free will from human beings and makes those in His "presence" predictable automatons because the actions of someone in heaven are, by your definition, totally predictable ("they would seek no other option").  Hence, you are unable to give a single example of the choices available to those who are in the "awesome presence of God" in heaven.  No choice=no free will.  

Christian Apologist
You are assuming that in heaven we will be pretty much as we are here on earth, and Jesus has made clear that such is not the case. We will be completely fulfilled in every way and beyond sorrow or discomfort for all eternity--rather we will spend an eternity rejoicing in love and gratitude!  We are promised something greater than eye has seen or ear has heard or anything that we could possibly conceive of from our limited earthbound perspective! 

JimC
I am making no assumptions at all about "how we are in heaven". Can you give an example of the choices available to those who are in the "awesome presence of God" in heaven. For instance, is it physically possible to steal in heaven if one had the power to do so? What does one actually do in heaven?  

Christian Apologist
In terms of many specifics, we just don't know. It will be an experience far beyond that which we can conceive of. I wouldn't be very excited about going somewhere where I'd look something like me but get a white robe and feathered wings and sit on a cloud playing a harp forever and ever.

Commentary: The Christian Apologist makes it clear that the actions of the inhabitants of Heaven are totally predictable. Then realises that having no choice is the same as no free will. He finally dodges the issue by introducing an infantile picture of the afterlife sitting on a cloud playing a harp. Ironically, that image provides more scope for free will than his previous description! 

Example 7

JimC
Do you consider all of Genesis to be metaphorical and if not, what process do you use to decide which parts to take literally and which parts to take metaphorically?

Christian Apologist

It's not really a cut-and-dry issue. I'm sure that there are elements of literalness in all of those accounts--but that's not the point. The point is in the spiritual lessons to be drawn from those accounts.  

Commentary: Notice how the Apologist says the question being asked is "not the point" - but of course the question is the point! This is the politician's tactic of ignoring an awkward question by answering a different question, a question of "spiritual lessons" in this example.

Example 8

JimC
Your reference to "contemporary fundamentalism" is interesting and I'd like to hear more about that and how you think fundamentalism has evolved since it appeared in the 1920s.

Christian Apologist
Rather, I'd be interested in the original debate referenced in your Marsden article, minus Marsden's obvious usage of loaded words such as defining fundamentalism as opposed to "modernism." 

Commentary: Having introduced the concept of "contemporary fundamentalism" into the debate, the Apologist dodges the opportunity to explain what it means, with what he'd "rather" discuss. 

The right not to believe

From God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Chapter 17 - An Objection Anticipated: The Last-Ditch "Case" Against Secularism

If I cannot definitively prove that the usefulness of religion is in the past, and that its foundational books are transparent fables, and that it is a man-made imposition, and that it has been an enemy of science and inquiry, and that it has subsisted largely on lies and fears, and been the accomplice of ignorance and guilt as well as of slavery, genocide, racism, and tyranny, I can most certainly claim that religion is now fully aware of these criticisms. It is also fully aware of the ever-mounting evidence, concerning the origins of the cosmos and the origin of species, which consign it to marginality if not to irrelevance. I have tried to deal with most faith-based objections as they occur in the unfolding argument, but there is one remaining argument that one may not avoid.

When the worst has been said about the Inquisition and the witch trials and the Crusades and the Islamic imperial conquests and the horrors of the Old Testament, is it not true that secular and atheist regimes have committed crimes and massacres that are, in the scale of things, at least as bad if not worse? And does not the corollary hold, that men freed from religious awe will act in the most unbridled and abandoned manner? Dostoyevsky in his Brothers Karamazov was extremely critical of religion (and lived under a despotism that was sanctified by the church) and he also represented his character Smerdyakov as a vain and credulous and stupid figure, but Smerdyakov's maxim, that "if there is no God there is no morality," understandably resonates with those who look back on the Russian Revolution through the prism of the twentieth century.

One could go further and say that secular totalitarianism has actually provided us with the summa of human evil. The examples most in common use—those of the Hitler and Stalin regimes—show us with terrible clarity what can happen when men usurp the role of gods. When I consult with my secular and atheist friends, I find that this has become the most common and frequent objection that they encounter from religious audiences. The point deserves a detailed reply.

To begin with a slightly inexpensive observation, it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists. One might hope that religion had retained more sense of its dignity than that. I would not say that the ranks of secularism and atheism are exactly crammed with Communists or fascists, but it can be granted for the sake of argument that, just as secularists and atheists have withstood clerical and theocratic tyrannies, so religious believers have resisted pagan and materialistic ones. But this would only be to split the difference. The word "totalitarian" was probably first used by the dissident Marxist Victor Serge, who had become appalled by the harvest of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. It was popularized by the secular Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, who had fled the hell of the Third Reich and who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is a useful term, because it separates "ordinary" forms of despotism—those which merely exact obedience from their subjects—from the absolutist systems which demand that citizens become wholly subjects and surrender their private lives and personalities entirely to the state, or to the supreme leader.

If we accept that latter definition, then the first point to be made is likewise an easy one. For most of human history, the idea of the total or absolute state was intimately bound up with religion. A baron or king might compel you to pay taxes or serve in his army, and he would usually arrange to have priests on hand to remind you that this was your duty, but the truly frightening despotisms were those which also wanted the contents of your heart and your head. Whether we examine the oriental monarchies of China or India or Persia, or the empires of the Aztec or the Incas, or the medieval courts of Spain and Russia and France, it is almost unvaryingly that we find that these dictators were also gods, or the heads of churches. More than mere obedience was owed them: any criticism of them was profane by definition, and millions of people lived and died in pure fear of a ruler who could select you for a sacrifice, or condemn you to eternal punishment, on a whim. The slightest infringement—of a holy day, or a holy object, or an ordinance about sex or food or caste—could bring calamity. The totalitarian principle, which is often represented as "systematic," is also closely bound up with caprice. The rules might change or be extended at any moment, and the rulers had the advantage of knowing that their subjects could never be sure if they were obeying the latest law or not. We now value the few exceptions from antiquity—such as Periclean Athens with all its deformities—precisely because there were a few moments when humanity did not live in permanent terror of a Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar or Darius whose least word was holy law.

This was even true when the divine right of despots began to give way to versions of modernity. The idea of a Utopian state on earth, perhaps modeled on some heavenly ideal, is very hard to efface and has led people to commit terrible crimes in the name of the ideal. One of the very first attempts to create such an ideal Edenic society, patterned on the scheme of human equality, was the totalitarian socialist state established by the Jesuit missionaries in Paraguay. It managed to combine the maximum ofegalitarianism with the maximum of unfreedom, and could only be kept going by the maximum of fear. This ought to have been a warning to those who sought to perfect the human species. Yet the object of perfecting the species—which is the very root and source of the totalitarian impulse—is in essence a religious one. George Orwell, the ascetic unbeliever whose novels gave us an ineradicable picture of what life in a totalitarian state might truly feel like, was in no doubt about this. "From the totalitarian point of view," he wrote in "The Prevention of Literature" in 1946, "history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible." (You will notice that he wrote this in a year when, having fought for more than a decade against fascism, he was turning his guns even more on the sympathizers of Communism.) In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others. What is a totalitarian system if not one where the abject glorification of the perfect leader is matched by the surrender of all privacy and individuality, especially in matters sexual, and in denunciation and punishment—"for their own good"—of those who transgress? The sexual element is probably decisive, in that the dullest mind can grasp what Nathaniel Hawthorne captured in The Scarlet Letter: the deep connection between repression and perversion.

In the early history of mankind, the totalitarian principle was the regnant one. The state religion supplied a complete and "total" answer to all questions, from one's position in the social hierarchy to the rules governing diet and sex. Slave or not, the human was property, and the clerisy was the reinforcement of absolutism. Orwell's most imaginative projection of the totalitarian idea—the offense of "thought crime"—was a commonplace. An impure thought, let alone a heretical one, could lead to your being flayed alive. To be accused of demonic possession or contact with the Evil One was to be convicted of it. Orwell's first realization of the hellishness of this came to him early in life, when he was enclosed in a hermetic school run by Christian sadists in which it was not possible to know when you had broken the rules. Whatever you did, and however many precautions you took, the sins of which you were unaware could always be made to find you out.

It was possible to leave that awful school (traumatized for life, as millions of children have been) but it is not possible, in the religious totalitarian vision, to escape this world of original sin and guilt and pain. An infinity of punishment awaits you even after you die. According to the really extreme religious totalitarians, such as John Calvin, who borrowed his awful doctrine from Augustine, an infinity of punishment can be awaiting you even before you are born. Long ago it was written which souls would be chosen or "elected" when the time came to divide the sheep from the goats. No appeal against this primordial sentence is possible, and no good works or professions of faith can save one who has not been fortunate enough to be picked. Calvin's Geneva was a prototypical totalitarian state, and Calvin himself a sadist and torturer and killer, who burned Servetus (one of the great thinkers and questioners of the day) while the man was still alive. The lesser wretchedness induced in Calvin's followers, compelled to waste their lives worrying if they had been "elected" or not, is well caught in George Eliot's Adam Bede, and in an old English plebeian satire against the other sects, from Jehovah's Witnesses to Plymouth Brethren, who dare to claim that they are of the elect, and that they alone know the exact number of those who will be plucked from the burning:

We are the pure and chosen few, and all the rest are damned. There's room enough in hell for you—we don't want heaven crammed.

I had an innocuous but weak-spirited uncle whose life was ruined and made miserable in just this way. Calvin may seem like a far-off figure to us, but those who used to grab and use power in his name are still among us and go by the softer names of Presbyterians and Baptists. The urge to ban and censor books, silence dissenters, condemn outsiders, invade the private sphere, and invoke an exclusive salvation is the very essence of the totalitarian. The fatalism of Islam, which believes that all is arranged by Allah in advance, has some points of resemblance in its utter denial of human autonomy and liberty, as well as in its arrogant and insufferable belief that its faith already contains everything that anyone might ever need to know.

Thus, when the great anti-totalitarian anthology of the twentieth century came to be published in 1950, its two editors realized that it could only have one possible name. They called it The God That Failed. I slightly knew and sometimes worked for one of these two men—the British socialist Richard Crossman. As he wrote in his introduction to the book:

For the intellectual, material comforts are relatively unimportant; what he cares about most is spiritual freedom. The strength of the Catholic Church has always been that it demands the sacrifice of that freedom uncompromisingly, and condemns spiritual pride as a deadly sin. The Communist novice, subjecting his soul to the canon law of the Kremlin, felt something of the release which Catholicism also brings to the intellectual, wearied and worried by the privilege of freedom.

The only book that had warned of all this in advance, a full thirty years earlier, was a small but brilliant volume published in 1919 and entitled The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. Long before Arthur Koestler and Richard Crossman had begun to survey the wreckage in retrospect, the whole disaster was being predicted in terms that still command admiration for their prescience. The mordant analyst of the new religion was Bertrand Russell, whose atheism made him more far-seeing than many naive "Christian socialists" who claimed to detect in Russia the beginnings of a new paradise on earth. He was also more far-seeing than the Anglican Christian establishment in his native England, whose newspaper of record the London Times took the view that the Russian Revolution could be explained by The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This revolting fabrication by Russian Orthodox secret policemen was republished by Eyre and Spottiswoode, the official printers to the Church of England.

GIVEN ITS OWN RECORD of succumbing to, and of promulgating, dictatorship on earth and absolute control in the life to come, how did religion confront the "secular" totalitarians of our time? One should first consider, in order, fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.

Fascism—the precursor and model of National Socialism—was a movement that believed in an organic and corporate society, presided over by a leader or guide. (The "fasces"—symbol of the "lictors" or enforcers of ancient Rome—were a bundle of rods, tied around an axe, that stood for unity and authority.) Arising out of the misery and humiliation of the First World War, fascist movements were in favor of the defense of traditional values against Bolshevism, and upheld nationalism and piety. It is probably not a coincidence that they arose first and most excitedly in Catholic countries, and it is certainly not a coincidence that the Catholic Church was generally sympathetic to fascism as an idea. Not only did the church regard Communism as a lethal foe, but it also saw its old Jewish enemy in the most senior ranks of Lenin's party. Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him, known as the Lateran Pact of 1929. Under the terms of this deal, Catholicism became the only recognized religion in Italy, with monopoly powers over matters such as birth, marriage, death, and education, and in return urged its followers to vote for Mussolini's party. Pope Pius XI described II Duce ("the leader") as "a man sent by providence." Elections were not to be a feature of Italian life for very long, but the church nonetheless brought about the dissolution of lay Catholic centrist parties and helped sponsor a pseudoparty called "Catholic Action" which was emulated in several countries. Across southern Europe, the church was a reliable ally in the instatement of fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal, and Croatia. General Franco in Spain was allowed to call his invasion of the country, and his destruction of its elected republic, by the honorific title La Crujada, or "the crusade." The Vatican either supported or refused to criticize Mussolini's operatic attempt to re-create a pastiche of the Roman Empire by his invasions of Libya, Abyssinia (today's Ethiopia), and Albania: these territories being populated either by non-Christians or by the wrong kind of Eastern Christian. Mussolini even gave, as one of his Justifications for the use of poison gas and other gruesome measures in Abyssinia, the persistence of its inhabitants in the heresy of Monophysitism: an incorrect dogma of the Incarnation that had been condemned by Pope Leo and the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

In central and eastern Europe the picture was hardly better. The extreme right-wing military coup in Hungary, led by Admiral Horthy, was warmly endorsed by the church, as were similar fascistic movements in Slovakia and Austria. (The Nazi puppet regime in Slovakia was actually led by a man in holy orders named Father Tiso.) The cardinal of Austria proclaimed his enthusiasm at Hitler's takeover of his country at the time of the Anschluss.

In France, the extreme right adopted the slogan of "Meilleur Hitler Que Blum"—in other words, better to have a German racist dictator than an elected French socialist Jew. Catholic fascist organizations such as Charles Maurras's Action Francaise and the Croix de Feu campaigned violently against French democracy and made no bones about their grievance, which was the way in which France had been going downhill since the acquittal of the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1899. When the German conquest of France arrived, these forces eagerly collaborated in the rounding up and murder of French Jews, as well as in the deportation to forced labor of a huge number of other Frenchmen. The Vichy regime conceded to clericalism by wiping the slogan of 1789—"Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite"—off the national currency and replacing it with the Christian ideal motto of "Famille, Travail, Patrie." Even in a country like England, where fascist sympathies were far less prevalent, they still managed to get an audience in respectable circles by the agency of Catholic intellectuals such as T. S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh.

In neighboring Ireland, the Blue Shirt movement of General O'Duffy (which sent volunteers to fight for Franco in Spain) was little more than a dependency of the Catholic Church. As late as April 1945, on the news of the death of Hitler, President Eamon de Valera put on his top hat, called for the state coach, and went to the German embassy in Dublin to offer his official condolences. Attitudes like this meant that several Catholic-dominated states, from Ireland to Spain to Portugal, were ineligible to join the United Nations when it was first founded. The church has made efforts to apologize for all this, but its complicity with fascism is an ineffaceable mark on its history, and was not a short-term or a hasty commitment so much as a working alliance which did not break down until after the fascist period had itself passed into history.

The case of the church's surrender to German National Socialism is considerably more complicated but not very much more elevating. Despite sharing two important principles with Hitler’s movement— those of anti- Semitism and anti-Communism—the Vatican could see that Nazism represented a challenge to itself as well. In the first place, it was a quasi-pagan phenomenon which in the long run sought to replace Christianity with pseudo-Nordic blood rites and sinister race myths, based upon the fantasy of Aryan superiority. In the second place, it advocated an exterminationist attitude to the unwell, the unfit, and the insane, and began quite early on to apply this policy not to Jews but to Germans. To the credit of the church, it must be said that its German pulpits denounced this hideous eugenic culling from a very early date.

But if ethical principle had been the guide, the Vatican would not have had to spend the next fifty years vainly trying to account for, or apologize for, its contemptible passivity and inaction. "Passivity" and "inaction," in fact, may be the wrong choice of words here. To decide to do nothing is itself a policy and a decision, and it is unfortunately easy to record and explain the church's alignment in terms of a realpolitik that sought, not the defeat of Nazism, but an accommodation with it.

The very first diplomatic accord undertaken by Hitler's government was consummated on July 8, 1933, a few months after the seizure of power, and took the form of a treaty with the Vatican. In return for unchallenged control of the education of Catholic children in Germany, the dropping of Nazi propaganda against the abuses inflicted in Catholic schools and orphanages, and the concession of other privileges to the church, the Holy See instructed the Catholic Center Party to disband, and brusquely ordered Catholics to abstain from any political activity on any subject that the regime chose to define as off-limits. At the first meeting of his cabinet after this capitulation was signed, Hitler announced that these new circumstances would be "especially significant in the struggle against international Jewry." He was not wrong about this. In fact, he could have been excused for disbelieving his own luck. The twenty-three million Catholics living in the Third Reich, many of whom had shown great individual courage in resisting the rise of Nazism, had been gutted and gelded as a political force. Their own Holy Father had in effect told them to render everything unto the worst Caesar in human history. From then on, parish records were made available to the Nazi state in order to establish who was and who was not "racially pure" enough to survive endless persecution under the Nuremberg laws.

Not the least appalling consequence of this moral surrender was the parallel moral collapse of the German Protestants, who sought to preempt a special status for Catholics by publishing their own accommodation with the flihrer. None of the Protestant churches, however, went as far as the Catholic hierarchy in ordering an annual celebration for Hitler's birthday on April 20. On this auspicious date, on papal instructions, the cardinal of Berlin regularly transmitted "warmest congratulations to the flihrer in the name of the bishops and dioceses in Germany," these plaudits to be accompanied by "the fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars." The order was obeyed, and faithfully carried out.

To be fair, this disgraceful tradition was not inaugurated until 1939, in which year there was a change of papacy. And to be fair again, Pope Pius XI had always harbored the most profound misgivings about the Hitler system and its evident capacity for radical evil. (During Hitler's first visit to Rome, for example, the Holy Father rather ostentatiously took himself out of town to the papal retreat at Castelgandolfo.) However, this ailing and weak pope was continually outpointed, throughout the 1930S, by his secretary of state, Eugenic Pacelli. We have good reason to think that at least one papal encyclical, expressing at least a modicum of concern about the maltreatment of Europe's Jews, was readied by His Holiness but suppressed by Pacelli, who had another strategy in mind. We now know Pacelli as Pope Pius XII, who succeeded to the office after the death of his former superior in February 1939. Four days after his election by the College of Cardinals, His Holiness composed the following letter to Berlin:

To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Reich! Here at the beginning of Our Pontificate We wish to assure you that We remain devoted to the spiritual welfare of the German people entrusted to your leadership... During the many years We spent in Germany, We did all in Our power to establish harmonious relations between Church and State. Now that the responsibilities of Our pastoral function have increased Our opportunities, how much more ardently do We pray to reach that goal. May the prosperity of the German people and their progress in every domain come, with God's help, to fruition!

Within six years of this evil and fatuous message, the once prosperous and civilized people of Germany could gaze around themselves and see hardly one brick piled upon another, as the godless Red Army swept toward Berlin. But I mention this conjuncture for another reason. Believers are supposed to hold that the pope is the vicar of Christ on earth, and the keeper of the keys of Saint Peter. They are of course free to believe this, and to believe that god decides when to end the tenure of one pope or (more important) to inaugurate the tenure of another. This would involve believing in the death of an anti-Nazi pope, and the accession of a pro-Nazi one, as a matter of divine will, a few months before Hitler's invasion of Poland and the opening of the Second World War. Studying that war, one can perhaps accept that 25 percent of the SS were practicing Catholics and that no Catholic was ever even threatened with excommunication for participating in war crimes. (Joseph Goebbels was excommunicated, but that was earlier on, and he had after all brought it on himself for the offense of marrying a Protestant.) Human beings and institutions are imperfect, to be sure. But there could be no clearer or more vivid proof that holy institutions are man- made.

The collusion continued even after the war, as wanted Nazi criminals were spirited to South America by the infamous "rat line." It was the Vatican itself, with its ability to provide passports, documents, money, and contacts, which organized the escape network and also the necessary shelter and succor at the other end. Bad as this was in itself, it also involved another collaboration with extreme-right dictatorships in the Southern Hemisphere, many of them organized on the fascist model. Fugitive torturers and murderers like Klaus Barbie often found themselves second careers as servants of these regimes, which until they began to collapse in the last decades of the twentieth century had also enjoyed a steady relationship of support from the local Catholic clergy. The connection of the church to fascism and Nazism actually outlasted the Third Reich itself.

Many Christians gave their lives to protect their fellow creatures in this midnight of the century, but the chance that they did so on orders from any priesthood is statistically almost negligible. This is why we revere the memory of the very few believers, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoller, who acted in accordance only with the dictates of conscience. The papacy took until the 1980s to find a candidate for sainthood in the context of the "final solution," and even then could only identify a rather ambivalent priest who—after a long record of political anti-Semitism in Poland—had apparently behaved nobly in Auschwitz. An earlier nominee—a simple Austrian named Franz Jagerstatter—was unfortunately unqualified. He had indeed refused to join Hitler's army on the grounds that he was under higher orders to love his neighbor, but while in prison facing execution had been visited by his confessors who told him that he ought to be obeying the law. The secular left in Europe comes far better out of the anti-Nazi struggle than that, even if many of its adherents believed that there was a worker's paradise beyond the Ural Mountains.

It is often forgotten that the Axis triad included another member— the Empire of Japan—which had not only a religious person as its head of state, but an actual deity. If the appalling heresy of believing that Emperor Hirohito was god was ever denounced from any German or Italian pulpit or by any prelate, I have been unable to discover the fact. In the sacred name of this ridiculously overrated mammal, huge areas of China and Indochina and the Pacific were plundered and enslaved. In his name, too, millions of indoctrinated Japanese were martyred and sacrificed. So imposing and hysterical was the cult of this god-king that it was believed that the whole Japanese people might resort to suicide if his person was threatened at the end of the war. It was accordingly decided that he could "stay on," but that he would henceforward have to claim to be an emperor only, and perhaps somewhat divine, but not strictly speaking a god. This deference to the strength of religious opinion must involve the admission that faith and worship can make people behave very badly indeed.

THUS, THOSE WHO INVOKE "SECULAR" TYRANNY in contrast to religion are hoping that we will forget two things: the connection between the Christian churches and fascism, and the capitulation of the churches to National Socialism. This is not just my assertion: it has been admitted by the religious authorities themselves. Their poor conscience on the point is illustrated by a piece of bad faith that one still has to combat. On religious Web sites and in religious propaganda, you may come across a statement purportedly made by Albert Einstein in 1940: Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came to Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities were silenced in a few short weeks.... Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.

Originally printed in Time magazine (without any verifiable attribution), this supposed statement was once cited in a national broadcast by the famous American Catholic spokesman and cleric Fulton Sheen, and remains in circulation. As the analyst William Waterhouse has pointed out, it does not sound like Einstein at all. Its rhetoric is too florid, for one thing. It makes no mention of the persecution of the Jews. And it makes the cool and careful Einstein look silly, in that he claims to have once "despised" something in which he also "never had any special interest." There is another difficulty, in that the statement never appears in any anthology of Einstein's written or spoken remarks. Eventually, Waterhouse was able to find an unpublished letter in the Einstein Archives in Jerusalem, in which the old man in 1947 complained of having once made a remark praising some German "churchmen" {not "churches") which had since been exaggerated beyond all recognition.

Anyone wanting to know what Einstein did say in the early days of Hitler's barbarism can easily look him up. For example: I hope that healthy conditions will soon supervene in Germany and that in future her great men like Kant and Goethe will not merely be commemorated from time to time but that the principles which they taught will also prevail in public life and in the general consciousness.

It is quite clear from this that he put his "faith," as always, in the Enlightenment tradition. Those who seek to misrepresent the man who gave us an alternative theory of the cosmos (as well as those who remained silent or worse while his fellow Jews were being deported and destroyed) betray the prickings of their bad consciences.

TURNING TO SOVIET AND CHINESE STALINISM, with its exorbitant cult of personality and depraved indifference to human life and human rights, one cannot expect to find too much overlap with preexisting religions. For one thing, the Russian Orthodox Church had been the main prop of the czarist autocracy, while the czar himself was regarded as the formal head of the faith and something a little more than merely human. In China, the Christian churches were overwhelmingly identified with the foreign "concessions" extracted by imperial powers, which were among the principal causes of the revolution in the first place. This is not to explain or excuse the killing of priests and nuns and the desecration of churches—any more than one should excuse the burning of churches and the murder of clergy in Spain during the struggle of the Spanish republic against Catholic fascism—but the long association of religion with corrupt secular power has meant that most nations have to go through at least one anticlerical phase, from Cromwell through Henry VIII to the French Revolution to the Risorgimento, and in the conditions of warfare and collapse that obtained in Russia and China these interludes were exceptionally brutal ones. (I might add, though, that no serious Christian ought to hope for the restoration of religion as it was in either country: the church in Russia was the protector of serfdom and the author of anti-Jewish pogroms, and in China the missionary and the tight-fisted trader and concessionaire were partners in crime.)

Lenin and Trotsky were certainly convinced atheists who believed that illusions in religion could be destroyed by acts of policy and that in the meantime the obscenely rich holdings of the church could be seized and nationalized. In the Bolshevik ranks, as among the Jacobins of 1789, there were also those who saw the revolution as a sort of alternative religion, with connections to myths of redemption and messianism. For Joseph Stalin, who had trained to be a priest in a seminary in Georgia, the whole thing was ultimately a question of power. "How many divisions," he famously and stupidly inquired, "has the pope?" (The true answer to his boorish sarcasm was, "More than you think.") Stalin then pedantically repeated the papal routine of making science conform to dogma, by insisting that the shaman and charlatan Trofim Lysenko had disclosed the key to genetics and promised extra harvests of specially inspired vegetables. (Millions of innocents died of gnawing internal pain as a consequence of this "revelation.") This Caesar unto whom all things were dutifully rendered took care, as his regime became a more nationalist and statist one, to maintain at least a puppet church that could attach its traditional appeal to his. This was especially true during the Second World War, when (he "Internationale" was dropped as the Russian anthem and replaced by the sort of hymnal propaganda that had defeated Bonaparte in 1812 (this at a time when "volunteers" from several European fascist states were invading Russian territory under the holy banner of a crusade against "godless" Communism). In a much- neglected passage of Animal Farm, Orwell allowed Moses the raven, long the croaking advocate of a heaven beyond the skies, to return to the farm and preach to the more credulous creatures after Napoleon had vanquished Snowball. His analogy to Stalin's manipulation of the Russian Orthodox Church was, as ever, quite exact. (The postwar Polish Stalinists had recourse to much the same tactic, legalizing a Catholic front organization called Pax Christi and giving it seats in the Warsaw parliament, much to the delight of fellow-traveling Catholic Communists such as Graham Greene.) Antireligious propaganda in the Soviet Union was of the most banal materialist sort: a shrine to Lenin often had stained glass while in the official museum of atheism there was testimony offered by a Russian astronaut, who had seen no god in outer space. This idiocy expressed at least as much contempt for the gullible yokels as any wonder-working icon. As the great laureate of Poland, Czeslaw Milosz, phrased it in his antitotalitarian classic The Captive Mind, first published in 1953:

I have known many Christians—Poles, Frenchmen, Spaniards— who were strict Stalinists in the field of politics but who retained certain inner reservations, believing God would make corrections once the bloody sentences of the all-mighties of History were carried out.

They pushed their reasoning rather far. They argue that history develops according to immutable laws that exist by the will of God; one of these laws is the class struggle; the twentieth century marks the victory of the proletariat, which is led in its struggle by the Communist Party; Stalin, the leader of the Communist Party, fulfils the law of history, or in other words acts by : the will of God, therefore one must obey him. Mankind can be renewed only on the Russian pattern; that is why no Christian can oppose the one—cruel, it is true—idea which will create a new kind of man over the entire planet. Such reasoning is often used by clerics who are Party tools. "Christ is a new man. The new man is the Soviet man. Therefore Christ is a Soviet man!" said Justinian Marina, the Rumanian patriarch.

Men like Marina were hateful and pathetic no doubt, and hateful and pathetic simultaneously, but this is no worse in principle than the numberless pacts made between church and empire, church and monarchy, church and fascism, and church and state, all of them justified by the need of the faithful to make temporal alliances for the sake of "higher" goals, while rendering unto Caesar (the word from which "czar" is derived) even if he is "godless."

A political scientist or anthropologist would have little difficulty in recognizing what the editors and contributors of The God That Failed put into such immortal secular prose: Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it. The solemn elevation of infallible leaders who were a source of endless bounty and blessing; the permanent search for heretics and schismatics; the mummification of dead leaders as icons and relics; the lurid show trials that elicited incredible confessions by means of torture . . . none of this was very difficult to interpret in traditional terms. Nor was the hysteria during times of plague and famine, when the authorities unleashed a mad search for any culprit but the real one. (The great Doris Lessing once told me that she left the Communist Party when she discovered that Stalin's inquisitors had plundered the museums of Russian Orthodoxy and czarism and reemployed the old instruments of torture.)

Nor was the ceaseless invocation of a "Radiant Future," the arrival of which would one day justify all crimes and dissolve all petty doubts. "Extra ecclesiam, nulla salus," as the older faith used to say. "Within the revolution anything," as Fidel Castro was fond of remarking. "Outside the revolution—nothing." Indeed, within Castro's periphery there evolved a bizarre mutation known oxymoronically as "liberation theology," where priests and even some bishops adopted "alternative" liturgies enshrining the ludicrous notion that Jesus of Nazareth was really a dues-paying socialist. For a combination of good and bad reasons (Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a man of courage and principle, in the way that some Nicaraguan "base community" clerics were not), the papacy put this down as a heresy. Would that it could have condemned fascism and Nazism in the same unhesitating and unambiguous tones.

In a very few cases, such as Albania, Communism tried to extirpate religion completely and to proclaim an entirely atheist state. This only led to even more extreme cults of mediocre human beings, such as the dictator Enver Hoxha, and to secret baptisms and ceremonies that proved the utter alienation of the common people from the regime. There is nothing in modern secular argument that even hints at any ban on religious observance. Sigmund Freud was quite correct to describe the religious impulse, in The Future of an Illusion, as essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish-thinking. Neither contingency seems very probable. All that the totalitarians have demonstrated is that the religious impulse—the need to worship—can take even more monstrous forms if it is repressed. This might not necessarily be a compliment to our worshipping tendency.

In the early months of this century, I made a visit to North Korea. Here, contained within a hermetic quadrilateral of territory enclosed either by sea or by near-impenetrable frontiers, is a land entirely given over to adulation. Every waking moment of the citizen—the subject— is consecrated to praise of the Supreme Being and his Father. Every schoolroom resounds with it, every film and opera and play is devoted to it, every radio and television transmission is given up to it. So are all books and magazines and newspaper articles, all sporting events and all workplaces. I used to wonder what it would be like to have to sing everlasting praises, and now I know. Nor is the devil forgotten: the unsleeping evil of outsiders and unbelievers is warded off with a perpetual vigilance, which includes daily moments of ritual in the workplace in which hatred of the "other" is inculcated. The North Korean state was born at about the same time that Nineteen Eighty- Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father of the state, Kim II Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he could make it work in practice. Yet even Orwell did not dare to have it said that "Big Brother's" birth was attended by miraculous signs and portents—such as birds hailing the glorious event by singing in human words. Nor did the Inner Party of Airstrip One/Oceania spend billions of scarce dollars, at a time of horrific famine, to prove that the ludicrous mammal Kim II Sung and his pathetic mammal son, Kim Jong II, were two incarnations of the same person. (In this version of the Arian heresy so much condemned by Athanasius, North Korea is unique in having a dead man as head of state: Kim Jong II is the head of the party and the army but the presidency is held in perpetuity by his deceased father, which makes the country a necrocracy or mausolocracy as well as a regime that is only one figure short of a Trinity.) The afterlife is not mentioned in North Korea, because the idea of a defection in any direction is very strongly discouraged, but as against that it is not claimed that the two Kims will continue to dominate you after you are dead. Students of the subject can easily see that what we have in North Korea is not so much an extreme form of Communism—the term is hardly mentioned amid the storms of ecstatic dedication—as a debased yet refined form of Confucianism and ancestor worship.

When I left North Korea, which I did with a sense of mingled relief, outrage, and pity so strong that I can still summon it, I was leaving a totalitarian state and also a religious one. I have since talked with many of the brave people who are trying to undermine this atrocious system from within and without. Let me admit at once that some of the bravest of these resisters are fundamentalist Christian anti-Communists. One of these courageous men gave an interview not long ago in which he was honest enough to say that he had a difficult time preaching the idea of a savior to the half-starved and terrified few who had managed to escape their prison-state. The whole idea of an infallible and all-powerful redeemer, they said, struck them as a bit too familiar. A bowl of rice and some exposure to some wider culture, and a little relief from the hideous din of compulsory enthusiasm, would be the most they could ask for, for now. Those who are fortunate enough to get as far as South Korea, or the United States, may find themselves confronted with yet another Messiah. The jailbird and tax evader Sun Myung Moon, undisputed head of the "Unification Church" and major contributor to the extreme right in the United States, is one of the patrons of the "intelligent design" racket. A leading figure of this so- called movement, and a man who never fails to award his god-man guru his proper name of "Father," is Jonathan Wells, the author of a laughable antievolutionist diatribe entitled The Icons of Evolution. As Wells himself touchingly put it, "Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to do battle." Mr. Wells's book is unlikely even to rate a footnote in the history of piffle, but having seen "fatherhood" at work in both of the two Koreas, I have an idea of what the "Burned-Over District" of upstate New York must have looked and felt like when the believers had everything their own way.

Religion even at its meekest has to admit that what it is proposing is a "total" solution, in which faith must be to some extent blind, and in which all aspects of the private and public life must be submitted to a permanent higher supervision. This constant surveillance and continual subjection, usually reinforced by fear in the shape of infinite vengeance, does not invariably bring out the best mammalian characteristics. It is certainly true that emancipation from religion does not always produce the best mammal either. To take two salient examples: one of the greatest and most enlightening scientists of the twentieth century, J. D. Bernal, was an abject votary of Stalin and wasted much of his life defending the crimes of his leader. H. L. Mencken, one of the best satirists of religion, was too keen on Nietzsche and advocated a form of "social Darwinism" which included eugenics and a contempt for the weak and sick. He also had a soft spot for Adolf Hitler and wrote an unpardonably indulgent review of Mein Kampf. Humanism has many crimes for which to apologize. But it can apologize for them, and also correct them, in its own terms and without having to shake or challenge the basis of any unalterable system of belief. Totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are fundamentalist and, as we would now say, "faith- based." In her magisterial examination of the totalitarian phenomenon, Hannah Arendt was not merely being a tribalist when she gave a special place to anti-Semitism. The idea that a group of people—whether defined as a nation or as a religion—could be condemned for all time and without the possibility of an appeal was (and is) essentially a totalitarian one. It is horribly fascinating that Hitler began by being a propagator of this deranged prejudice, and that Stalin ended by being both a victim and an advocate of it. But the virus was kept alive for centuries by religion. Saint Augustine positively relished the myth of the Wandering Jew, and the exile of the Jews in general, as a proof of divine justice. The Orthodox Jews are not blameless here. By claiming to be "chosen" in a special exclusive covenant with the Almighty, they invited hatred and suspicion and evinced their own form of racism. However, it was the secular Jews above all who were and are hated by the totalitarians, so no question of "blaming the victim" need arise. The Jesuit order, right up until the twentieth century, refused by statute to admit a man unless he could prove that he had no "Jewish blood" for several generations. The Vatican preached that all Jews inherited the responsibility for deicide. The French church aroused the mob against Dreyfus and "the intellectuals." Islam has never forgiven "the Jews" for encountering Muhammad and deciding that he was not the authentic messenger. For emphasizing tribe and dynasty and racial provenance in its holy books, religion must accept the responsibility for transmitting one of mankind s most primitive illusions down through the generations.

The connection between religion, racism, and totalitarianism is also to be found in the other most hateful dictatorship of the twentieth century: the vile system of apartheid in South Africa. This was not just the ideology of a Dutch-speaking tribe bent on extorting forced labor from peoples of a different shade of pigmentation, it was also a form of Calvinism in practice. The Dutch Reformed Church preached as a dogma that black and white were biblically forbidden to mix, let alone to coexist in terms of equality. Racism is totalitarian by definition: it marks the victim in perpetuity and denies him, or her, the right to even a rag of dignity or privacy, even the elemental right to make love or marry or produce children with a loved one of the "wrong" tribe, without having love nullified by law . . . And this was the life of millions living in the "Christian West" in our own time. The ruling National Party, which was also heavily infected with anti- Semitism and had taken the Nazi side in the Second World War, relied on the ravings of the pulpit to justify its own blood myth of a Boer "Exodus" that awarded it exclusive rights in a "promised land." As a result, an Afrikaner permutation of Zionism created a backward and despotic state, in which the rights of all other peoples were abolished and in which eventually the survival of Afrikaners themselves was threatened by corruption, chaos, and brutality. At that point the bovine elders of the church had a revelation which allowed the gradual abandonment of apartheid. But this can never permit forgiveness for the evil that religion did while it felt strong enough to do so. It is to the credit of many secular Christians and Jews, and many atheist and agnostic militants of the African National Congress, that South African society was saved from complete barbarism and implosion.

The last century saw many other improvisations on the old idea of a dictatorship that could take care of more than merely secular or everyday problems. These ranged from the mildly offensive and insulting—the Greek Orthodox Church baptized the usurping military junta of 1967, with its eyeshades and steel helmets, as "a Greece for Christian Greeks"—to the all-enslaving "Angka" of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which sought its authority in prehistoric temples and legends. (Their sometime friend and sometime rival, the aforementioned King Sihanouk, who took a playboy's refuge under the protection of the Chinese Stalinists, was also adept at being a god-king when it suited him.) In between lies the shah of Iran, who claimed to be "the shadow of god" as well as "the light of the Aryans," and who repressed the secular opposition and took extreme care to be represented as the guardian of the Shiite shrines. His megalomania was succeeded by one of its close cousins, the Khomeinist heresy of the velayet-i- faqui, or total societal control by mullahs (who also display their deceased leader as their founder, and assert that his holy words can never be rescinded). At the very extreme edge can be found the primeval puritanism of the Taliban, which devoted itself to discovering new things to forbid (everything from music to recycled paper, which might contain a tiny fleck of pulp from a discarded Koran) and new methods of punishment (the burial alive of homosexuals). The alternative to these grotesque phenomena is not the chimera of secular dictatorship, but the defense of secular pluralism and of the right not to believe or be compelled to believe. This defense has now become an urgent and inescapable responsibility: a matter of survival.

The Appeal to Authority

Also known as argumentum ab auctoritate)

This is a common fallacy which attempts to establish an inductive argument from a generalisation or a cherry picked example. It takes this form:

A is an authority on a particular topic
A says something about that topic
A is probably correct

The argument is fallacious because, although authorities can be correct in judgments related to their area of expertise more often than laypersons, they can still come to the wrong judgments. Therefore, the appeal to authority is not a generally reliable argument for establishing facts.

It is often used by referring to an expert whilst ignoring the fact that other experts disagree.  

A variation is the Appeal to Anonymous Authorities where the authority is not mentioned (for example "scientists say...")

Example:
Scientists agree that the universe is finely tuned.

Explanation:
Which scientists? What about the scientists that don't agree? In what sense are these scientists using the term "finely tuned"? How can a scientist be an authority on "fine tuning" when it is not a scientific concept? And so on.

Burden of Proof FAQ

A Religious Apologist argues that my opinion of his arguments for God's existence is not enough - I must validate my perspective that the existence of God is unlikely. This demonstrates the Apologist does not understand the concepts of burden of proof, or verification, or faith.  

Perhaps the most famous example of burden of proof was provided by Bertrand Russell... 

"Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes."

"But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."

And a good overview of burden of proof can be found here


INTRODUCTION

Some examples which illustrate the concept:

• Person A claims God exits, the burden of proof is on Person A.
• Person B does not believe the claim from Person A, the burden of proof is still on Person A.
• Person B claims God does not exist, the burden of proof is on Person B.

• Stephen Hawking claims the universe had a quantum origin as described in M-Theory, so the burden of proof is on Hawking.
• A Creationist doesn't believe M-Theory, the burden of proof is still on Hawking.
• A Creationist claims M-Theory is wrong, the burden of proof is on the Creationist.

Here's a list of questions about Burden of Proof, faith & verification from a Christian Apologist (and I promise I haven't made these up)...

1 Your position that there is/are no god/gods relies on speculation and ignores evidence.

1a This statement begins with a fallacious straw man because that's not my position. I have an opinion that the existence of gods is extremely unlikely but they could exist. I am not stating that there is no God. I am not stating that there are no gods. 

1b My opinion that gods are unlikely comes entirely from the weakness of the arguments that are used to support the hypothesis that a god or gods exist.  

1c My opinion that the existence of gods is unlikely does not come from the strength of scientific explanations for the existence of universes, rainbows, earthquakes, plagues, or any natural phenomenon explained by science.  

1d It would be interesting to know what the evidence is that's being ignored. Christian Apologists are reluctant to provide this evidence when asked!

2 You believe that all religion is nothing more than superstition and a misunderstanding of the way the mechanics of the universe operate, and you draw conclusions from that.

2a This statement begins with a fallacious straw man argument. There is an element of superstition to the mainstream religions (nearly all religions in fact), but religion provides a lot of benefits that have nothing to do with superstitions or indeed God. So religion is a lot more than just superstition, delusion and misunderstanding.

2b My opinion regarding the existence God does not come from religion. My opinion that the existence of God is unlikely comes entirely from the weakness of the arguments that are used to support the hypothesis that God exists. These arguments come from philosophers and religious apologists, not from religion itself which simply assumes a god or gods exist.

3 You state that there are no gods with at least 95% faith. You assert that there is/are no god/gods based on a 95-97% surety per your own admission.  

3a This is another fallacious straw man argument because I have never made any such statement or assertion. In my opinion, the existence of a god or gods is highly unlikely but not impossible. It is also not a position of faith – it is a position of doubt.

3b If I had to measure my level of confidence in the existence of a god or gods it would be around 95% but it can vary between 80% and 97% depending who is making the arguments, and for which god(s).  That's how I answer the question of my belief in gods should anyone ask, but it is not an assertion. 

3.1 If you are quite sure that god/s don't exist, then does your worldview require the universe to not be constructed by god/s?

3.1.a A faithless worldview does not require the universe to be constructed in a certain way. For one thing, we can't assume the universe is "constructed."  

3.1.b Logically speaking, if Person A proposes that X created the universe, but they can't demonstrate that X exists,  then it is not surprising if Person B considers such an explanation unlikely (unless they use faith to believe it). X could be a god, or a quantum fluctuation, or a singularity, or a race of aliens in another universe, or colliding branes, etc. 

3.2 Google the matter yourself - there is no dearth of arguments for God's existence from just about any perspective that one might choose! 

3.2.a Very true. And so far I've been unable to find anything convincing. The arguments seem to be either purely inductive, or fallacious, or both.  

3.3 You reject theistic explanations because you find them "unconvincing" or based on "weak" arguments. 

3.3.a It is true that theistic explanations are unlikely because they are based on inductive arguments which are also flawed, and I find such arguments unconvincing. But my approach is not limited to "theistic arguments" - it applies to any claim. The person making a claim - any claim - has the burden of proof.  

  

4 You have stated that it is only natural for Bronze Age humans to see a "god or gods" as being responsible for natural phenomena.

4a True. And not just gods but also fairies, demons, sprites, pixies, gremlins... et.  And not just in the Bronze Age. It is part of human nature. It can be argued that not believing in such entities is unnatural.

5 You say I can't demonstrate that fairies don't exist but that is irrelevant.

5a It's extremely relevant because being unable to demonstrate the non-existence of fairies illustrates the concept of burden of proof, and illustrates why it is not possible for someone to demonstrate that a god or gods do not exist. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not the listener.

6 Fairies are irrelevant to the existence of an intelligent entity that created our universe

6a A false statement because one could argue that fairies created the universe and that would suddenly make them relevant! But the problem here is the introduction of the creation of the universe into the argument. The debate was about the existence of a god or gods – not the creation of the universe.

6b If I claim our universe could have been created naturally, the burden of proof is on me, and I am obliged to present the deductive arguments, validation and evidence which support that claim. But even if I could demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that God was not necessary for our universe to be created, that does not demonstrate that God does not exist!

6c There are probably some atheists who say that scientific explanations of reality provide evidence that gods do not exist, but I don't agree with that point of view. In my opinion, anyone who states that a scientific theory for the creation of the universe (or any theory come to that) can disprove God, is mistaken. There are no theories that there is/are no god/gods and there never can be.

6d A natural explanation for the creation of our universe means that the existence of a god or god is not necessary for the creation of our universe. It does not mean that a god or god is not necessary. The same logic applies to any phenomenon. A god or gods could still exist and might be necessary for explaining other phenomena such as the existence of the multiverse. 

6.1 Fairies are not analogous to God

Yes they are, in the sense that they are both unfalsifiable. 

7 I am claiming that there is more to reality than "naturalism" and you have as much to prove as I do.

7a This is true in that we both have to prove (or at least demonstrate to a reasonable level of confidence) the claims we make.

7b You are claiming the existence of a range of supernatural entities, but this claim is just a hypothesis that has not been tested, has no deductive arguments to support it and is also unsupported by evidence. Therefore I find the existence of these supernatural beings to be very unlikely (but not impossible).

7c If I provide a natural explanation for a phenomenon, I have to first explain whether that explanation is a hypothesis or a theory. Then I have to describe the evidence and arguments which support the hypothesis, and if it's a theory I have to explain how it was validated. 

8 I am waiting for you to validate your viewpoint that God does not exist

8a You will be waiting a long time! First of all my viewpoint has been misrepresented - is that God might exist, but is unlikely. My viewpoint is not a claim, hypothesis or theory. It is an opinion which is based on the weakness of the claim that God exists.

9 If the Christian Apologist position rests on evidence, why do you choose to ignore and/or dismiss it out of hand?

9a The problem is that no evidence is being presented, so there are two flaws in the question:

9b The Christian Apologist position does not rest on evidence, or any kind of robust argument. It rests on inductive arguments, which form a hypothesis, which is believed to be true (therefore requiring faith).

9c Far from ignoring and dismissing Religious Apologist inductive arguments, I have provided detailed refutations of every argument I've been presented with.

9.1 How can you ignore the four specific categories of evidence (anecdotal, testimonial and statistical, analogical) defined by Zachary Seech in his book "Writing Philosophy Papers"?

Far from ignoring them, I think we should use them! Sadly, I have yet to see any evidence for God presented in any of those categories. 

9.2 If God is defined as being an intelligent entity responsible for the creation and maintenance of the universe, my evidence supports that type of being.

Defining God to be X does not demonstrate that God exists. And defining something as being a thing responsible for the cause of something is just a circular argument. As for the evidence, until it is presented I have to assume there is no evidence. To assume such evidence exists without it being presented would require faith, which I don't have. 

9.3 How can you be sure there is no evidence for intelligent guidance in the universe's affairs?

One can't be absolutely sure of anything. It's possible that reality is part of some pre-programmed and controlled computer simulation, or that gods interfere and guide in the affairs of the universe. Nothing can be ruled out. But there is currently no evidence to support the idea, and no way to verify such a hypothesis.   

10 Present your scientific theory for the creation of the universe, and explain how this theory leads you to the conclusion that the existence of a god or gods is unlikely.

10a There are several hypotheses for the creation of the universe, and the most robust in my opinion is M-Theory. But there are several other explanations, including God and gods and other supernatural beings.

10b Scientific explanations for the creation of the universe do not lead me to the conclusion that the existence of a god or gods is unlikely. My opinion regarding the existence of gods comes entirely from the arguments provide by Religious Apologists. It does not – and cannot – come from science.

11 The atheist bears the burden of proof in making the claim, “God does not exist.”

11a If someone asserts "God does not exist" then they do indeed have the burden of proof. It depends how we define "atheist".  Many make no such claim.  Rather, they are being presented with a claim that God exists, and they don't find that claim convincing.

11b In any case, the claim for God came before anyone refuted it (obviously). No one ever said "God does not exist" without first having been told about God.

11c It is easy to illustrate the point by asking religious apologists to bear the burden of proof for the non-existence of fairies (see point 5).

12 You are pretending that your position is merely "disbelief" when there's more to it than that. 

12a No I'm not! See 1b

12.1 Your logic is analogous to a person who believes that the earth is flat claiming that s/he "disbelieves" that the earth is round and that therefore the entire burden of proof rests with you to prove otherwise.

12.1a No it isn’t.  If I find the claim of a flat earth unlikely, the burden of proof is with the flat earther. If I claim the earth is a globe, the burden of proof is on me. If a flat earther disbelieves my claim that the earth is a globe, then the burden of proof is indeed with me.

12.1b Note that the flat vs round earth argument is not analogous to the argument for God’s existence (or fairies) argument, because the shape of the earth is falsifiable (it can be tested and measured). However, the existence of God is unfalsifiable (ditto fairies).

12.1 Can there be an absolute "proof" of anything?

There can be "absolute proof" in mathematics and pure logic, but otherwise no, nothing can be proven 

12.2 Does deductive reasoning rely on assumptions which are taken on a degree of faith?

Any type of reasoning begins with premises, which are could be assumptions, or or facts. But there is no faith involved unless one believes the premises are absolute truth.  

12.3 Is it possible to have degrees of faith?

It depends which definition of the word "faith" is being used. One definition is confidence, and it is perfectly logical to have a degree of confidence, to be "fairly sure" and so on. Scientists use statistical methods to calculate the level of confidence in the results of an experiment.   

But another definition of faith is the belief that something is true when it has not been verified (e.g. religious faith). Religious faith rests on the assertion that God is real, for example: 

"We know that God is real because He has revealed Himself to us in three ways: in creation, in His Word, and in His Son, Jesus Christ." http://www.gotquestions.org/is-God-real.html#ixzz3JvBHzFLn  

Religious apologists will often fallaciously equivocate these two very different meanings of the word "faith" to try and demonstrate that people who don't have faith, have faith!

12.4 Why do you claim that "validation" leads to "facts"?

I don't. Validation leads to a hypothesis or theory being validated (or invalidated). A hypothesis or theory can never be a fact. Hypotheses and theories are models which explain certain facts. More information here

12.5  Surely hypotheses and theories explain observations or other uncertain phenomena. One can never distill ANY models of reality as referencing, on any level, any incontrovertible "facts."

The question illustrates a misunderstanding of what a fact is. (see definition here). An observation is a fact.  For example, it's a fact that the sun appears to move across the sky, There have been various theories over the centuries to explain this fact. The best current theory is that the earth is rotating and this is what makes the sun appear to rise, travel across the sky and then set below the horizon.

12.6 Why do you claim that validation completely removes the need for faith in whatever is supposedly "validated?"

I don't. Validation is the process which tests whether the predictions made by a theory are true or false. A theory is a model that provides a certain level of confidence, but it could be wrong (or incomplete). The validation process never ends. Faith is required to believe the theory is a fact.

12.7 Why do you keep ignoring the necessity of "faith" in order to accept--even tentatively--any matter as a "fact?"

Because a fact does not require faith (that's why it is a fact). Faith is required to believe that a hypothesis or theory is a fact. Hence the need for faith in religion.

12.8 Now insert the answer to 12.6 in place of the one you provided in 12.7 

That doesn't make sense - they are two different answers to two different questions.  To clarify - faith is required to believe a theory is a fact. It is not required to believe a fact is a fact. 

12.9 Why do you keep ignoring other kinds of evidence than that which follows the specific methodology of what you proffer to be "validation?"

This question doesn't make sense. Evidence doesn't follow a methodology of validation. An example of evidence would be apples falling from a tree. A theory explains evidence. In this example, the theory of gravity.

12.10 You still refer to only one type of evidence: observation, from which a conclusion is drawn. Same as the methodology of scientific evidence, which was my point. What of other evidence, such as listed here, and here ?

Evidence is defined as the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid and here are indeed many types of evidence, some stronger than others. However, not all evidence is factual. 

13 You are arguing FOR a universe that was created and is sustained entirely by mindless mechanistic forces.

13a You could put it that way I suppose.  The strongest explanations I've come across for the creation and existence of the universe are natural explanations which do not require the existence of God.  However, that doesn't eliminate the existence of God.  See 6b and 6c

13.1 You say "God" is a simple answer, but you also argue on behalf of Occam's Razor and claim that "simple" answers are the best. So are you suggesting that "God" is the best answer?

13.1a Occam's razor does not advocate that "simple answers are the best".   Occam's razor is a principle used to assess competing hypotheses. It suggests that the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.  A simple description can refer to a more complex hypothesis, and a more complex description may refer to a simple hypothesis. "God" is a simple answer, but it relies on a huge list of assumptions, and therefore fails the Occam's razor test. 

13.2 You say there are "natural explanations" that DO NOT require the existence of God. You do not support that statement

13.2a The statement that: "there are natural explanations that do not require the existence of God" is a fact. It doesn't need supporting other than to point out that every science, history and geography text book is full of such explanations.   

13.2.b What I do need to support are the specific, natural explanations. For example, thunder is the sound of an electrostatic discharge between the electrically charged regions inside a thundercloud and the ground. This theory has been verified.  But it is still possible that Thor creates thunder with his magic hammer, Mjölnir.  I consider the Thor explanation to be unlikely given the weakness of the arguments provided by believers in Thor. But Thor could still exist. See 6a, 6b and 6c.

14  If a person can't present a good argument for the existence of--say--Mongolia, do you reject their testimony (or lack of) as the basis of an assumption that Mongolia does not exist? 

14a If a person presents an argument for the existence of something (including Mongolia), my level of confidence in their argument will depend on how good their argument is. I have seen and heard overwhelming arguments for the existence of Mongolia; arguments based on evidence, deduction and which make predictions that have been tested to demonstrate Mongolia exists.    

14b I have yet to see an argument for the existence of God which is anywhere near as good as the argument for the existence of Mongolia.  So in my opinion, the existence of Mongolia is highly likely, the existence of God is highly unlikely. 

14.1 Your level of confidence in an argument depends on how good the argument is, but you also base your decision on additional evidence that has nothing to do with the argument. 

14.1.a My opinion on a claim is based on all of the arguments and all of the evidence - not just the argument from one person.

14.1.1 How would you go about calculating your "confidence level," say, that the world will experience catastrophic climate change in the next ten years? Or the next twenty? Fifty? A century from now?

14.1.1a Confidence levels are calculated from data and verification of hypotheses. In your example of climate change, a wide range of hypotheses have been tested based on data such as rise in the global sea level, increases in surface and ocean temperatures, shrinking and thinning ice sheets, etc. The verified hypotheses become theories, and the confidence level of those theories comes from a statistical analysis of the data. (Note that a theory is a model of reality).  These theories are tested every year, as more data is gathered, providing a more accurate set of theories, and so on. The confidence level of a future event depends on the complexity of the data. So for example, the confidence level in the prediction of the swing of a pendulum is very high because the data and the theory are very simple and highly predictable. But predicting the temperature of the ocean in 2027 is less certain because it is based on a complex model which is refined on a regular basis, and has many variables, some of which are unpredictable and which is also subject to random events. Hence the confidence level drops as you go further into the future. So a prediction of the climate in the year 2117 is going to be at a very low confidence level compared to a prediction for 2018.

14.2 Your conclusion regarding Mongolia's existence has a more comprehensive basis than your conclusion regarding God's existence

14.2.a  I suppose it does because my conclusion regarding Mongolia's existence is based on evidence that is more comprehensive than the evidence for God, and the arguments for Mongolia's existence are better, and far more comprehensive, than the arguments regarding God's existence.  Therefore my level of confidence in the existence of Mongolia is much higher than my level of confidence in the existence of God. 

14.3 Deduction begins with assumptions, therefore conclusions are conditional, so surely every conclusion requires faith? 

14.3.a A deductive argument begins with premises. The conclusion of a deductive argument (and indeed any argument) depends on the validity of the premises. If the premises for a deductive argument are factual then one can have a high level of confidence in the conclusion. 

14.3.1 All "verification" processes rest on faith, don't they?

I'm not sure about the use of the word "all" as I consider verification to be a single process and a united concept. There are various methods and techniques that can be used within the process, but they are not the process. In any case, the verification process does not rest on faith. It rests on making predictions which can be tested. The results lead to confidence in a hypothesis. But anyone who assumes a hypothesis or a theory is truth, is relying on faith.   

14.3.2 We all have a world view, or a fundamental viewpoint, or whatever you choose to call it. All such views are ultimately based on assumptions. Why don't you present and attempt to justify yours?

Speaking of assumptions, there are some false assumptions in that question!

First of all, the definition of "worldview" that use is: "A particular philosophy of life or conception of the world."  My particular "philosophy of life" can be summarised very simply: Do not rely on faith. (In fact it's more fundamental than that - I seem to be incapable of relying on faith even if I wanted to). 

This worldview is obviously not "ultimately based on assumptions".  So it's not my worldview that is based on assumptions. However, arguments are based on assumptions. That's true of any argument on any subject. And when I present an argument, the assumptions it is based on are always clear.   

14.3.3 Everything presumed to be a "fact" rests, at best, on a "theory" does it not?
No. This is back to front. Theories explain facts. A fact is self evident. For example, it is a fact that the sun appears to track across the sky. There are theories which explain why. The theory rests on facts. A fact does not rest on a theory. 

14.4 Surely it is nonsense to say that you only believe in deductive reasoning to make your conclusions rather than faith?

14.4a Yes that would be nonsense if someone was to say that! Deductive reasoning is only part of the validation process, which overall provides a level of confidence, rather than relying on faith.   

14.5 If I'm pretty confident that a bridge will hold me and I attempt to cross it, I act in faith, even with an element of doubt.  This is analogous to someone acting as if God doesn't exist. 

This is actually a disanalogy because it confuses two very different meanings of the word "faith". The first definition of "faith" is confidence based on verification. The bridge you are crossing has been carefully designed, tested and crossed many times.  There is a chance it could collapse, but because of the verification process, we can have a high level of confidence that we can cross safely, and we take a (subconsciously calculated risk in crossing it). 

Someone who acts as if God doesn't exist does so because unlike the bridge, God has not been verified or tested. Someone who believes God exists is using the second meaning of faith, where something is assumed to be true when it has not been verified or tested. 

14.6 Doesn't faith just mean confidence in something unproven?

No. The word faith has several meanings. It can mean confidence in something that's been tried and tested, (such as a bridge, or a text book), or it can mean believing that an explanation which is unproven must be true (such as M-theory or the existence of gods or fairies). See 14.5

15 You say that faith means believing that an untested hypothesis is true.  That applies to your belief in Mongolia assuming that you have never personally been there to see for yourself. 

15a It is completely wrong to assume that the only way to be confident in Mongolia's existence is to go there and "see for yourself." A theory can provide a very high level of confidence without us having to be somewhere or see something for oursfairies, as any lawyer or policeman will explain.   No one has to go to Mongolia to be confident that it exists.  The hypothesis that Mongolia exists has been thoroughly tested and validated.

15.1 It requires faith to draw conclusions from experiments, for example, we may witness wood burning every time we apply a heat source, but if we douse the wood with water or remove oxygen, we would observe a different result. 

15.1a You accurately describe the combustible properties of wood, and the requirement of oxygen for combustion, both of which are excellent case studies of the verification process.  The combustibility of wood is perhaps the most repeated experiment in the history of the human race! That's why we can be so confident about the combustible properties of wood under different conditions.  However, there are no such tests for the existence of God, hence the need for faith.

16 I find the evidence for God to be compelling, so it's wrong for explanations of nature to exclude that possibility.

16a I fully agree that the possibility of God should not be excluded.

16b The reason I find the existence of God unlikely is not because of evidence (which forms the basis of contradictory explanations). I consider the existence of God to be unlikely because of the weakness (or absence) of the explanations from people who claim God exists.

17 You believe that atheism fits with our best understanding of the world in science more than theism does

17a I would generally agree with the statement but perhaps disagree with the use of the word "atheism" - perhaps "atheistic explanations" is better than "atheism" (especially given the range of opinions of what "atheism" means).   It does indeed seem the world around us can be explained in a verifiable way without the necessity for gods, fairies, demons, etc. Theistic explanations cannot be verified therefore they are inherently weaker than explanations which can be verified.    However...

17b One cannot assume gods, fairies and demons do not exist just because there are scientific explanations of the world which do not require those supernatural entities for that particular explanation. 

17c There are some atheists who will claim that the number of explanations of the world which rely on gods has diminished steadily as human knowledge increases, and this is a fact. But I think it's wrong for anyone to assume that this trend demonstrates that gods definitely don't exist.  It can be argued that it implies gods don't exist, but not with absolute certainty.

17d So, If a theist proposes that God is the best explanation for a particular phenomenon (X), they need to address the question: "How is God the best explanation for X?" This question more than any other reveals the weakness in theistic explanations for the natural world. 

18 Unless you experience something personally, you are relying on "faith" for anything and everything that you take at someone else's word, including every bit of education that we've received that we haven't personally substantiated through our own actions

18a This is a fallacious argument. Accepting a theory to be the best explanation does not require personal experience. It requires evidence, a hypothesis, a deductive argument, and validation.  If one was to assume that a theory is 100% true then that would require faith. But I don't hold that position.

18b One should always challenge what we are taught in school or wherever. Where is the teacher getting their information from? How reliable is it? Has it been tested or is it just a hypothesis? How is the teacher being assessed? And so on. A good teacher should make all this clear. 

18c A religious teacher who asserts God exists, is asking the students to have faith in an untested hypothesis.  A teacher who says the best current explanation for the variety of life on earth is evolution by natural selection, does not require his or her students to have faith.

18.1 Your worldview is based on faith rather than the "proof"
Absolutely not!  My default worldview is "I don't know." If I am presented with an explanation for something, I classify it as speculation, hypothesis, theory or fact, depending on the evidence and level of verification. I then have a level of confidence in the truth of that explanation. That level of confidence can never be 100% -  Proof is a word that should be avoided – I don’t think it exists outside of pure mathematics or pure logic. 

19 I'm not asking you to "prove" a negative! I'm asking you for evidence that the universe is governed and maintained through mindless mechanistic forces! 

19a The word "evidence" is misused again, but I assume this means that I'm being asked for a strong argument which demonstrates that the creation and existence of the universe is natural. These are the theories that science, history, mathematics and logic provide, and they are freely available in a vast number of textbooks and online resources.  But an argument isn't evidence. An argument explains evidence.  So for example, we have evidence that the moon orbits the earth, and one explanation is gravity. We know gravity exists. Another explanation is that a god keeps the moon in orbit. But there's no evidence that a god is doing that.   

19b It's not possible to provide a single over-arching argument that the universe is purely natural. The best one can do is to select specific aspects of the universe, and examine the explanations for that aspect.  For example, the explanation for the natural formation of our planet, and other planets, is a very robust and tested theory. But for all we know, there might be planets that did not occur naturally, which a god or gods designed and created. 

19c The assertion that the universe is governed or maintained is not supported by evidence. In fact, evidence shows far from being maintained, the entropy of the universe is steadily increasing. 

19.1 Anyway - you can prove a negative!
19.1a It depends what is meant by proving a negative. Let's assume a negative claim is a claim that a thing does not exist. So referring to the introduction: If someone claims God does not exist, they have the burden of proof. If someone makes a claim that God exists, they have the burden of proof. If someone finds that claim unlikely, the person making the claim that God exists still has the burden of proof.  The sceptic has no obligation to prove the claim false

19.1b The only way to prove something does not exist is if that thing is specific and measurable. (See 12.1a and 12.1b for the example of the shape of the earth). If a thing is unfalsifiable (for example God or fairies or Russel's teapot), then there is no way to prove that thing does not exist.

19.2 Absence of Evidence (for God) is not Evidence of Absence
And the same logic applies to fairies and elves! The philosopher Irving Copi makes an interesting point: Some things, such as gods or fairies, have been talked about for hundreds of thousands of years and furthermore believers claim these entities intervene in human affairs. It is therefore reasonable to assume that after so much time, there would be some evidence for them by now. In such a situation it is reasonable to assume the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. 

19.3 What you refer to as "evidence" referred to by scientists is actually their own all-but-proven-to-be-wrong assumptions behind much of scientific theory in the first place--at least as applied to the likelihood/unlikelihood of the existence of our universe on such terms. 
No, the evidence referred to by scientists is factual evidence. You can argue that a hypothesis is an assumption, but evidence is not an assumption. 


19.4 Hypotheses are  "explanations" which attempt to justify their own discredited assumptions or in other words the proposition is supported by the premises, which is supported by the proposition, in a classic example of the fallacy of circular reasoning
A hypothesis can only be justified if it explains certain facts, and if it can be tested it then becomes a theory. That is not circular reasoning. 

20 It is not logical to base one's opinions regarding the existence of anything on the supposed weakness of another's argument on the matter! 

20a In fact that approach is entirely logical when the weak argument is the only source of information. 

21  Spot the fallacy:  I've never personally been to Mongolia. Neither Jack nor Jill nor Joe nor Jim have offered a good case for Mongolia's existence.  Therefore I conclude with 95% to 97% certainty that Mongolia does not exist.

21a There is no fallacy to spot. If my knowledge of Mongolia is limited to poor arguments for Mongolia's existence from four people, then I have no reason to believe Mongolia exists. 

22 What evidence would convince you that God exists?

22a There is a long answer but assuming it's the Christian God in this case, the short answer is that if I were to see Christians praying to Jesus for amputees' missing limbs to grow back, and the limbs grew back, then I would believe their God exists. (More precisely - my level of belief would shift from 5% to at least 95% which in my view qualifies as belief as I don't think anything can be 100% certain)

22.1 The resurrection has been validated as much as any other presumed "fact" has been validated.
This is false for two reasons:

(a) The resurrection has not been validated (it's a hypothesis) and 
(b) Facts do not require validation. If they did they would not be facts. 

22.2 The resurrection references evidence--in this case eyewitness accounts--and the reasoned evidence of the lengths that those eyewitnesses went to in order to insist on the factuality of what they observed

The only evidence is what's in the Bible, which is hearsay at best but just because it refers to evidence doesn't make it more than a hypothesis. As for eyewitnesses, the accounts in the Bible are anonymous and we doh't know what lengths any alleged witnesses went to. 

23 You are using the "argument from ignorance" fallacy. You say there is no evidence that God exists. Therefore, God does not exist.

23a If I was to say that there is no evidence for God, therefore God does not exist, that would indeed be fallacious. But I'm not saying that. 

24 It is fallacious to say that gods probably don't exist just because the person making the claim has a weak argument, because the person making the argument could not possibly know all the necessary evidence.

24a The first problem here is the use of the word "evidence". Evidence is the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid. My lack of belief in the existence of a god is based on the weakness of the arguments supporting the claim that a god exists exist. The same evidence can be used to support both sides of the same argument.

24b The second problem is why would someone make an argument for something without knowing about the necessary evidence?  If they are raging from a position of ignorance then that's hardly my problem!

24c In any case, my opinion is based on all the claims for the existence of gods that I've ever heard or read, not the claim from a single person.

25 Speaking as a Christian Apologist, my verification processes refer more directly to the matter of intelligent input in the creation and maintenance of the universe.

The concept of someone having "their" verification processes is one I can't understand, especially as this personal verification process has never been described. In my worldview there is a generic verification process, as described here

The claim that the universe was created by God is a hypothesis. The idea that the universe is maintained by God is another hypothesis. Both of those hypotheses assume the existence of God (which in itself is another hypothesis).  

The statement implies there are "verification processes" which exist specifically to verify supernatural hypotheses. But without knowing what those verification processes are, and in the absence any explanation of how those hypothesis have been tested, the claims are merely bald assertions with no justification, and to believe they are true requires faith.
   

26 My definition of God is that which is involved in the creation and maintenance of the universe. 

Defining something as being the thing responsible for the cause of something is just a circular argument. See 9.2. For example. One could say "My definition of a singularity is that which is involved in the creation and maintenance of the universe". 

27 Why do you keep ignoring that non-theistic explanations of our existence and its fundamental basis rely on the unsupported philosophical assumptions of "scientific naturalism" and "logical positivism?"

Non-theistic explanations are simply explanations that do not require God. Scientific naturalism and logical positivism are two types of philosophy among hundreds of others. Personally I don't see the point of adopting a specific philosophical approach to provide explanations as that's unnecessarily limiting. My approach is to look at any explanation and determine if it's speculation, hypothesis or theory. That applies to theistic and non-theistic explanations.

28 You are relying on special pleading--in this case the assertion that one accept the default basis of basic reality being non-theistic

Firstly, that's not an example of special pleading. Secondly  I have never made that assertion. What I have said is that the default basis of reality is "I don't know"  See #17.1   here. To clarify - I don't know what "default basis of basic reality" is. 

29 You have no logical basis whatsoever for supporting your claim that God "probably doesn't exist."

I think gods are unlikely to exist given the lack of evidence. That is a perfectly logical basis. But of course, unlikely does not mean impossible. Perhaps gods do exist. Perhaps our universe was created by a god or other type of intelligent being. We just don't know. 

30 You claim that God’s existence seems unlikely to you. Please rationally justify that claim!

The rational justification for doubting God’s existence, is the lack of evidence for God’s existence.

31) You can't reference the evidence you purport to rely on for your claim that God’s existence is unlikely!

My opinion that God is unlikely to exist comes from the lack of evidence for God’s existence. How can I reference evidence of a lack of evidence?

32) I claim that God is likely to exist. the claim from your perspective is that He isn't. Two perspectives between us and two claims made--but only my perspective has been supported with logic and reason!

I am not making a claim. The claim that God exists must come before it can be doubted.  It is logically impossible for someone to disbelieve in God’s existence until the claim that God exists has been made. The person claiming God exists has the burden of proof.  

33) You proffered a conclusion, Jim--"I find that claim unlikely given the lack of evidence"--and you can't even tell us what the evidence or reasoned basis for your conclusion is?

How can there be evidence for a lack of evidence, other than the lack of evidence itself? The reasoned basis for my opinion is the lack of evidence.

34) You say your reasoned basis for considering the existence of God to be unlikely is the lack of evidence. But a "reasoned basis" requires "reasoning," Jim, and you're not providing it!

The lack of evidence is my reasoning. The lack of evidence for gods is the reason I find their existence unlikely. Ditto fairies.

35) I'm asking you to provide reasoning and evidence in support of your actual expressed claim, Jim--that "God is unlikely to exist"

That's not a claim - it's the response to a claim. The reasoning that God is unlikely to exist comes from the lack of evidence.  If God intervened in our world or our lives, surely there would be evidence?  

36) In spite of your best efforts to try to make this all about my claim and not yours, we are both making claims and both of us are responsible for justifying such on their own bases.

The claim that God exists comes before anyone can doubt it. The person making that claim has the burden of proof. Trying to shift the burden of proof on to the person who doubts the claim is essentially an admission that the argument is lost.

37) A "lack of evidence" means just that--no evidence has been presented for a position. That's where YOU stand, not me!

The person making the claim that X exists has the burden of proof. If they can’t present evidence, then there is no reason to believe their claim, other than faith. 

38) You are making a claim - you've admitted to reaching the conclusion that God's existence is "unlikely," remember?

Yes, but that’s not a claim. That’s my reaction to the claim that God exists.

39) I'm thoroughly unconvinced by your claim that God is unlikely to exist, especially since you have offered no reasoned support for your conclusion!

Firstly, it’s not a claim. Secondly, the reasoned support for my conclusion is the lack of evidence to support the claim that God exists.

40) You provide no evidence whatsoever to support your claim on its own basis.

My opinion that God’s existence is unlikely is based on the lack of evidence for God’s existence. How can I provide evidence of a lack of evidence, other than the lack of evidence? Even if my claim is unsupported, it doesn't strengthen the claim that God exists. 

41) It is undeniable that god(s) might not exist. If you claim God existence is "unlikely," then you need to provide evidence for that claim.

It is impossible to provide evidence of the non-existence of something, unless that thing is measurable with specific coordinates. It’s not possible to demonstrate the existence, or non-existence, of something that is unfalsifiable.  Hence it’s possible to provide evidence that a bottle of milk does not exist in my fridge.  It’s impossible to provide evidence that God does not exist in my fridge.

42) Your claim that God is "unlikely" to exist has not been supported by reasoning or evidence at all. On that basis alone I can demonstrate that my claim God exists is far more rational than yours.

Several issues here. First, I am not making a claim – I am responding to the claim that God exists. The reasoning for my response that God is unlikely to exist, is the lack of evidence provided by the person making the claim. The second issue is that the claim God exists does not become more rational just because there is no evidence of non-existence. The claim that God exists can only be rational if it is supported by evidence. Finally, let's assume that my opinion regarding God's unlikely existence didn't exist. Let's assume I was never born. That doesn't make the claim for God's existence any more likely. 

CONCLUSION

Rejecting inadequate answers does not automatically oblige us to know the actual answer. Rejecting divine pseudo explanations does not mean we have to know everything about the universe. Some insist that saying you don't have a belief in God because of the absence of evidence isn't good enough. You must give an argument for divine non-existence, or more emphatically, failing to give arguments for non-existence is virtually to concede the debate to the person who at least gives some arguments, however weak, for divine existence.