Do you believe in God? Why/Why not?

[setsunatenshi]

mZuzek said:

setsunatenshi said:

and finally on the only on topic point you brought, yeah it "might" have been Y, but first you would need to demonstrate Y is even real. that logical fallacy isn't only applied to religious debates, could be as simple as "i can't see how that person knew I had a brother, he must be psychic" 

I can't say I understood most of what you were trying to say, but anyway. Why do I need to demonstrate Y is real? If I can't demonstrate it is, and you can't demonstrate it isn't, as long as we're not forcing anyone to think about it a certain way, we're allowed to believe it either does or doesn't. There's no logical fallacy here, only a guy who accepts that the unknown is, indeed, unknown.

in the context of a theological argument the believer is posing a positive claim for the existence of X (whatever god represents X in his/her opinion)

as such, the burden of proof falls on the person making the positive claim.  The person evaluating that claim (in this example the atheist) is simply rejecting it because no sufficient evidence was put forward to support the original claim. 

No atheist is going to demonstrate some god anyone made up is not true. It's the story of the teapot flying through space... you can't demonstrate there isn't one. But you're not justified in believing there is one either.