There is no evidence for God

The argument

According to the classical widespread definition of explicit knowledge originating in Plato, a belief must be accompanied by a good inference supportive of its truth in order to qualify as knowledge. The requirement does more than raise a standard: it separates believing something that happens to be true from knowing it, since a belief held for no good reason would be true only by accident even where it turned out to be correct. Arguments from lack of evidence/proof of God combine this notion with the idea that knowledge is the only form of belief one should seek. This is simply an epistemological commitment to forming true beliefs. Put that way, the commitment is not an anti-religious premise smuggled in at the start but the same standard applied to every claim a person might accept, and one that could not be maintained selectively. Since the existence of God (and religious beliefs in general) is predicated upon the practice of blind faith, it follows that belief in God is not a form of knowledge and should be rejected on the same grounds. Faith is understood here as belief held independently of supporting inference, which is precisely the feature the definition of knowledge excludes, so the conclusion follows from the definitions rather than from any prior claim about what does or does not exist. That holds regardless of whether the atheist can provide positive evidence of absence of gods. This is what philosophers and attorneys know as "the burden of proof": whoever asserts the claim is bound to demonstrate it, should he like others to believe alike. A demand that the atheist disprove the claim reverses that order, and an assertion left undemonstrated is not thereby established.

Context

An argument from lack of evidence is any display of mistrust towards faith-based beliefs. Bertrand Russell's China Teapot and Christopher Hitchen's Razor are popular allegories and aphorisms trying to explain why belief in God's existence in the absence of proof is unreasonable.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Theologian Alvin Plantinga building upon presuppositionalist apologetics contends that belief in God is "properly basic", that is, an axiom or premise necessary to make sense of the world and acquire further knowledge.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise sets a standard the conclusion cannot meet: on the account given, a belief lacking supporting inference fails to qualify as knowledge, which licenses withholding assent rather than asserting the negative — that is the sibling position in this debate, not this one. [Rejecting P2] The characterisation of religious belief as resting on blind faith also passes over the natural theology tradition, which offers arguments — cosmological, teleological, moral — that may be judged unsuccessful but are inferences rather than an absence of them; and the burden of proof allocates who must argue first, so appealing to it establishes a procedural point about the debate rather than a fact about what exists.