The Burden of Proof
Isn't the believer the one who has to prove God, like a teapot orbiting the sun?
The objection, at its strongest:
- Whoever asserts a claim carries the burden of proving it.
- The believer asserts that God exists; the non-believer merely withholds assent.
- We rightly reject unfalsifiable claims — an invisible teapot orbiting the sun — for lack of evidence.
- So in the absence of proof, the default is atheism, and the believer has failed to meet the burden.
In response:
The teapot is a bad analogy. A teapot is a contingent physical object that would leave detectable traces: its absence of evidence really is evidence of absence. God is not proposed as an object within the universe, but as the necessary ground of the universe. The two claims are in entirely different categories, so the intuition doesn't transfer.
"Lack of belief" still owes an account. If the question is "does an ultimate explanation of contingent reality exist?", then both answers are substantive positions about the way things are. Saying "I simply lack belief" does not exempt one from explaining why contingent things exist at all. There is also no neutral default here: treating disbelief as the automatic starting point is not neutrality but a conclusion smuggled in as a premise: the true zero point is "I do not know," which is itself a substantive stance, not an exemption from the question.
There is an argument, not a mere assertion. The believer is not saying "prove me wrong." Classical natural theology offers positive arguments — from contingency, causation, and order — that reason from features of the world to their necessary source. One may dispute those arguments, but they are evidence offered, which is exactly what "meeting the burden" looks like.
Aquinas insists the burden can be met, not by inspecting God directly, but by reasoning from his effects, the same logic by which we infer any unseen cause from what it produces:
When an effect is better known to us than its cause, from the effect we proceed to the knowledge of the cause. And from every effect the existence of its proper cause can be demonstrated, so long as its effects are better known to us; because since every effect depends upon its cause, if the effect exists, the cause must pre-exist. Hence the existence of God... can be demonstrated from those of His effects which are known to us.
Everyone reasons past strict proof. We accept other minds, the reliability of memory, and the external world without deductive proof. Demanding a standard for God that we apply to nothing else we actually believe is special pleading in the other direction.
The positive arguments offered in place of mere assertion are laid out in The Five Ways.