{"id":8670,"date":"2002-09-10T18:20:44","date_gmt":"2002-09-10T23:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/2002\/09\/10\/atheists-and-leprechauns\/"},"modified":"2002-09-10T18:20:44","modified_gmt":"2002-09-10T23:20:44","slug":"atheists-and-leprechauns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/2002\/09\/atheists-and-leprechauns\/","title":{"rendered":"Atheists and Leprechauns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font color=#3333ff>When making an<br \/>\nexistential claim (a claim that a thing exists), the burden of proof is on the<br \/>\none making the claim. If I were to tell you that an invisible green leprechaun<br \/>\nlives under my Chicago Cups cap, you&#8217;d be right in asking me to prove my claim.<br \/>\nIf I didn&#8217;t or couldn&#8217;t (or if I hemmed and hawed and changed the subject or<br \/>\nengaged in other forms of sophistry to evade your demand for proof), you&#8217;d be<br \/>\nperfectly right in doubting my claim or in dismissing it altogether. However,<br \/>\nyou could never prove that this invisible green leprechaun doesn&#8217;t exist. You&#8217;d<br \/>\nhave to know a lot more than we currently know in order to prove that I am not<br \/>\ntelling the truth, that my claim is falsehood. (In this specific case, you could<br \/>\nlogically disprove my claim in that a thing cannot be both green and invisible<br \/>\n&#8212; in one sense of the term invisible &#8212; but this is as far as you could<br \/>\ngo.)<\/font> <\/p>\n<p>In my days as a fervent atheist I would read books on atheism that normally<br \/>\nwould contain the leprechaun argument. I think there is a major problem with<br \/>\nthis comparison as an argument. In the history of philosophy no one has ever<br \/>\ncome up with the need for the existence of a leprechaun to explain the world<br \/>\naround them. Nothing that their senses detected required the need for such<br \/>\ncreature to exist.<\/p>\n<p>If the universe and matter had always existed than the an infinite amount of<br \/>\ntime would of had to pass to get to the present time. Obviously an infinite<br \/>\namount of time has not passed so the universe started at a point of time.<\/p>\n<p>Materialist would then have to hold that out of nothing the universe came<br \/>\ninto being. Generally they will respond that the theist can&#8217;t explain why God<br \/>\nhas always existed and thus sidestep it and don&#8217;t explain how the universe<br \/>\noccurred.<\/p>\n<p>Just at this level they they make an act of faith that this is<br \/>\nwhat happened. So atheists also have faith in something that they can&#8217;t<br \/>\nscientifically prove or they have faith that one day scientists can show how<br \/>\nthis occurred. So this is how the leprechaun argument can be turned around by<br \/>\nasking them, since they now have the burden of proof, to explain Ex Nihilo Nihil<br \/>\n(nothing comes from nothing).<\/p>\n<p>There is a web site called <a\nhref=\"http:\/\/www.nihilo.com\/\">http:\/\/www.nihilo.com\/<\/a> it stays black and<br \/>\nnever does anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When making an existential claim (a claim that a thing exists), the burden of proof is on the one making the claim. If I were to tell you that an&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}