Justified True Belief

(●) Shifting the burden of proof hands the job of proving a claim to the person who doubted it. + Whoever makes a claim owes the reasons for it. The fallacy is that debt quietly passed across the table. (1) The move puts a demand for disproof where proof should be. - Mrs. Ellis tells the school board that the new maths scheme has pushed results down across the county. A parent asks to see the numbers. "Can you show me it hasn't?" she says, and sits down. Nobody has seen a number, and the parent is on the spot. - The claim was hers, so the reasons were hers to give. Those reasons are the premises; the claim they hold up is the conclusion. She offered none, and her conclusion sits there until somebody knocks it down. - What she offers instead is a fallacy of relevance: support that has nothing to do with whether the claim is true. That nobody has disproved her is a fact about the conversation, not about the schools. Its nearest cousin, the appeal to ignorance, runs from "not shown false" to "true". (2) It tempts because some burdens are real. - In a courtroom the accused is presumed innocent, and nobody thinks the defence is cheating by declining to prove innocence. That is a presumption, a starting position that holds until evidence is brought against it, and it is legitimate where the stakes call for one. - Douglas Walton's Burden of Proof, Presumption and Argumentation (2014) treats the burden as a rule of conversation rather than of logic, and takes two names for it from the law. - The burden of persuasion never moves: whoever's claim is under discussion must make the case for it. The evidential burden is lighter and does pass back and forth, since every good argument one side lays down gives the other something to answer. The fallacy is pretending the burden of persuasion has moved when only the lighter one can. (3) The name is a lawyer's, and the family has three cousins. - Onus probandi, the burden of proving, is a lawyer's phrase. Justinian's Digest puts proof on the one who asserts, not the one who denies. Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric carried the rule into everyday argument in 1830: the presumption goes to the standing view, the burden to whoever would disturb it. - Hitchens's razor, from Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great (2007): what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. True, as far as it goes. Aimed at a claim somebody has actually argued for, it becomes a burden shift. - Russell's teapot, from a 1952 essay by Bertrand Russell: a china teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars, too small for any telescope, cannot be disproved, and nobody need believe in it. Fair, against a claim no evidence could touch. Whether God is such a claim is a question about the analogy, not the burden. - Moving the goalposts shifts the burden after it has been met: "show me one transitional fossil", then, shown one, "now show me the one in between". Therefore, shifting the burden of proof is not declining to prove a negative. It is claiming the defendant's chair for your own assertion.

(●) Simple example: "Prove I didn't put the money back." + The kitchen jar in a shared flat held forty pounds on Monday and twenty on Friday. Asked where the rest went, Tom says that. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - The claim in the air is that Tom took the money. His reply neither denies it nor accounts for the missing twenty; it is a demand, and a demand is not a reason. (2) Why the demand does no work. - Nobody can prove a note was not slipped back, which is exactly why Tom chose that demand. Being impossible to disprove is not evidence for him. - Carl Sagan's dragon in the garage, from The Demon-Haunted World (1995), is this move played to the end. The dragon is invisible, it floats, its fire gives off no heat, and every proposed test is met with a reason it will not work. What, Sagan asks, is the difference between that dragon and no dragon at all? (3) What the reply was really doing. - It swapped a question about the money for a question about proving a negative. The honest answer was about Monday to Friday: where he was, what he spent, who else had a key.

(●) A critic says: "Atheism is just a lack of belief, so I have nothing to prove. You're the one making a claim." + One of the commonest sentences at a table, and it comes from a serious piece of philosophy. Half of it is right. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that the atheist owes no argument, and that nothing can begin until the Christian produces one. The support is a definition: "atheism" names an absence of belief, and an absence has nothing to prove. - The ancestor is Antony Flew's "The Presumption of Atheism" (1972). Just as the accused is presumed innocent, Flew argued, a debate about God should presume atheism, and the theist speaks first. He was candid that this gave "atheist" a new meaning, anyone who is not a theist, and argued for the change rather than assuming it. At full strength the essay is a proposal about where the starting line goes, not a dodge. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The slide comes when the lack of belief starts doing the work a belief would do. A psychological state carries no burden, true enough, but it takes no position either. - Someone who merely lacks belief cannot say "there is no God", or "your belief is irrational", without making a claim of his own, and in practice one of those arrives within a minute. William Lane Craig answers in the Cambridge Companion to Atheism (2007) that an absence is not a view, and that knowing there is no God would still take justification. - Alvin Plantinga's "Reason and Belief in God" (1983) went after the starting line itself. Flew's presumption treats belief in God as guilty until evidence arrives, which is itself a claim about what rational belief requires, and nobody has proved it. - Applied evenly, that standard convicts far more than religion. You have no argument that other people have minds rather than convincing machines, and nobody calls you irrational for believing they do. The presumption needs an argument of its own, and asking for one is not a shift. - Try the mirror. "Christianity is just a lack of belief in a godless universe, so I have nothing to prove." Nobody would accept that, and the reason is the same. (3) The sound version. - Flew's real point is correct, and narrower than the sentence at the table. When the question is "does God exist?", the person who says yes has to make the case, and the atheist may sit back until it arrives. - The arguments for God grant exactly that. The Kalam argument holds each premise to the standard of being more plausible than its denial (Craig, Reasonable Faith, chapter 1), which is the theist shouldering the burden of persuasion. - What the atheist cannot do is decline the burden and keep the verdict. "Not persuaded" is a report about himself. "The case fails" is a claim, and it owes reasons. (4) How to answer it. - "Fair enough: I'm the one saying God exists, so let me make the case. Here's the first argument. Tell me which premise is false and why, and we'll both have something to prove." See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument Philosophical Theology: Meta-Apologetics: Reformed

(●) A Christian says: "You can't prove God doesn't exist, so you should believe." + The same move from our side of the table, and the one a thoughtful skeptic is most tired of hearing. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that belief in God is the reasonable position, and the support is that nobody has shown God to be absent. It comes in the resurrection's key as well, "prove the resurrection didn't happen", as though a missing disproof were evidence for the empty tomb. - The strongest thing in it is true. No one has disproved God, and a confident atheist who says otherwise has a burden of his own that he has not met. But look at what that answers. It answers "science has shown there is no God", and it does nothing at all for "why should I believe there is one?" (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The Christian made a claim, that God exists or that Jesus rose, and the skeptic asked for reasons. "Prove otherwise" takes the burden of persuasion, which sits with the claim, and pushes it across to the person who merely asked. That is Tom and the kitchen jar, and the skeptic can feel it. - It also concedes too much, because it tells the skeptic there is no positive case to be had, only a gap nobody has filled. Scripture asks for something else: "always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15). The one who asks is owed a reason, not a dare. - The resurrection version is worse. A resurrection is a claim about an event in history, and historians do not accept events because nobody has shown they failed to happen. Ask the same Christian whether a phantom really warned Brutus before Philippi, as Plutarch reports, and watch the burden walk straight back to where it belongs. (3) The sound version. - The case for God is a set of arguments with premises a skeptic can examine: a universe that began and needs a cause, physical constants set on a knife edge, moral obligations that bind whether or not anyone agrees. - The case for the resurrection is a body of facts that has to be explained somehow: the death, the burial, the empty tomb, the appearances, the disciples who died for the claim. Whatever explains them has to beat the rival explanations. Each argument carries its own burden and sets out to meet it. - It is fair to say that the skeptic who asserts "there is no God" has a burden too, and to ask him to carry it. But that is the evidential burden moving back to him after a case has been made, and only after. (4) How to answer it, when a fellow Christian says it. - "He asked why we believe, and that's a fair question with a real answer. Let's not tell him to prove a negative. Let's give him the argument." See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument Natural Theology: Cosmic Fine-Tuning Natural Theology: The Moral Argument CE / Resurrection: Minimal Facts Argument (Habermas)

(●) A charge that misses: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a resurrection is the most extraordinary claim there is. Testimony can never be extraordinary evidence." + The first sentence is Carl Sagan's, from Broca's Brain (1979), and it is right. The last one turns a rule for weighing evidence into a refusal to weigh it. (1) What the charge claims. - A resurrection starts so far behind, the charge says, that no first-century report could ever catch up, so offering witnesses is the burden shifted under a new name. The ancestor is David Hume's Enquiry (1748), Section X: no testimony can establish a miracle unless its falsehood would be more miraculous than the event it reports. (2) Why the charge misses. - A doctor who hears a heart murmur does not ask whether murmurs are rare. She asks how much likelier one is in a diseased heart than in a healthy one. - That is what Sagan's principle comes to. A claim's prior probability is how likely it is before any evidence comes in, and for a resurrection it is low. "Extraordinary evidence" then means evidence far likelier to exist if the claim is true than if it is false, a strong likelihood ratio. The rule for putting the two together is Bayes's theorem. - Nothing in that says testimony cannot qualify. Timothy and Lydia McGrew's "The Argument from Miracles" (2009) works the numbers out. The disciples, the women at the tomb, and Paul testified independently and at cost, and independent testimonies multiply rather than add: on the McGrews' stated assumptions the combined ratio is a 1 followed by forty-four zeroes. - The numbers can be argued about, and the McGrews say so. The shape is Sagan's rule taken seriously instead of used as a veto. - Walton draws the line. Presumptions are legitimate, and both sides may name theirs: Flew's presumption of atheism, Plantinga's that belief is innocent until proven guilty, the historian's that events run their ordinary course. What nobody may do is name a presumption and then refuse the evidence brought against it. A presumption no evidence could move is a verdict. - The test to carry away: who made the claim under discussion, and has the other side made one too? The Christian claimed the resurrection and is producing evidence. The critic who says no testimony could ever be enough has made a claim about all testimony everywhere, and that one needs proving. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - It would need to show that the likelihood ratio is small: that people would have said what the disciples said about as readily had Jesus stayed dead. The hallucination, legend and conspiracy hypotheses are attempts at exactly that, and each deserves weighing. - Part of the charge lands. A resurrection does start far behind, one witness would not do, and a Christian who waves the principle away as "bias" has misunderstood it. The case stands on the number, independence and cost of the testimonies, and it falls if they do. (4) How to answer it. - "Agreed, extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. So let's say what that would be: evidence you wouldn't expect if the thing hadn't happened. Then let's ask whether this testimony is that, instead of deciding in advance that no testimony could be." See also: CE / Resurrection: Maximal Data Method (McGrew) CE / Resurrection: Contra Hallucination Hypothesis CE / Resurrection: Contra Legend Hypothesis