From: "James"
Subject: hey jack***
Can you prove god does not exist...and what did that guy neitche say on his death bed .i heard rumor that he denounced his atheism/agnosticism...you better keep thinking your position...go to rzim.com if you need help thinking!
I wish a had a nickel -- or even just a penny -- for every time I've seen someone who insists that their god exists yet also insists it's up to nonbelievers to prove that their god does not exist. Why is that? Why do believers in something imagine that they don't have any obligation to support their claim that they believe something real? Why do they think that everyone else is obligated to prove them wrong?
Well, this isn't true of every believer in everything. It seems to be more common with those who believe something popular -- those who keep getting their beliefs reinforced over and over by the rest of society. Constantly told by everyone else that they are right, it doesn't seem to occur to them that they could even possibly be wrong, much less that they might have to defend and support their beliefs to someone who disagrees.
That's certainly the situation for Christianity in modern America. Just about every aspect of society tells people that they are right to believe -- it's not quite as prevalent as it once was, but it's still out there and the culture continues to beat the drums of faith on a regular basis. For this reason it may be that many Christians just can't quite conceive of the possibility of being wrong. It's true that many speak of having a crisis of faith, but faith has more than one meaning.
In Christianity at least, faith has two theological uses: faith that God exists and faith that God will fulfill all promises and making everything OK in the end. People who experience a crisis of faith may begin to doubt that God will make everything OK, but how many seriously question whether there are any gods at all? How many seriously investigate other religions and philosophies in order to arrive at a rational decision about whether theism is truly justified or not.
It's curious that the author above would recommend reading material written by Ravi Zacharias because Zacharias is not an honest critic of atheism. He has insisted, for example, that "backed away from it's absolute negation of god's existence, is because it is a logical fallacy to make a negation in the absolute sense..." This is false because defining atheism as simply the absence of belief in god goes back at least to 1772. Moreover, asserting an absolute negative is not logical fallacy. Sometimes it's not possible to do; sometimes it is. Whether it is or not depends upon the nature of what is being discussed. Even when it is wrong, though, it is not strictly speaking a fallacy -- it's just an error.
If Zacharias knows these things, then asserting the opposite would be deliberately deceitful and lying -- lying to believers to make them feel better about being believers and lying to nonbelievers in the hopes that his deception, if it goes unnoticed long enough, will discourage atheism. Since it is also a falsehood that Nietzsche "denounced his atheism/agnosticism" on his death bed, perhaps it's not surprising that James would cite someone else who uses falsehoods to attack atheism.
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