A flaw in the Atheists "You Can't Prove A Negative" Argument -

By well-wisher

Mon, 08 Feb 2016
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Atheists often give the argument that you can't prove a negative when challenged to "Prove God doesn't exist".
But if they can prove a positive then they should be able to prove that reality is real (ie not a virtual reality).
Can atheists prove that reality is real?
They may say to people of faith, "But you can't prove reality isn't real".
To which people of faith should respond, "But I can't prove a negative. The onus is on you to prove that reality is real".
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Submitted by loquaciousicity on

If you define "reality" and "real", maybe an atheist could prove "reality" to be "real".

More to your point: define "virtual reality"... I doubt if atheists would bother arguing that "virtual reality" does not exist, assuming that they could understand what that even means (even if it should mean god).

Submitted by well-wisher on

Terry. Proving that reality is real is really quite a difficult thing to do. "Is reality real?" is one of the big unanswered questions of philosophy. The question of "What can we know?"  has a whole branch of philosophy devoted to it; Epistemology. Its not a trivial matter and the philosopher who could come up with proof that reality was real would be incredibly famous.
Furthermore, if our reality were proven to be a virtual reality it could undermine all of human scientific knowledge throughout history.
My definition of reality is the common definition of reality; the world that you percieve with your five senses.
"I doubt if atheists would bother arguing that "virtual reality" does not exist" - Terry O' Leary
I didn't say that atheists would argue that virtual reality does not exist. You're misreading my argument.
But the question of wether reality is real or not is relevent to the question of whether God exists. Not only, as I said earlier, could proof that reality is not real undermine all of human scientific knowledge but it would also allow for the existence of a reality creator that could, among other possibilities, be god aswell as an afterlife.
In other words proving that reality wasn't real would be one possible way of proving Gods existence thus proving that reality IS real should be important to atheists and proving that reality IS real is proving a positive and yet a positive as difficult to prove as a negative, as difficult to prove as the non-existence of God.

Oh look, a link. I wonder where it leads.

JoHn