Wow, the article News found contains one of the most cogent and succinct arguments I’ve read. Here’s more:
First Averick quotes Bertrand Russell
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that since my assertion cannot be disproved [no one can doubt its truth], I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
Just so. The burden of proof is on the one proposing the proposition, not the one attempting to disprove it. That’s why we have a presumption of innocence in our courts, not a presumption of guilt. The burden is on the prosecutor to prove his case, not on the defendant to disprove it. Averick goes on:
Atheistic scientists are acutely aware of the difficulties involved in proposing that some type of unguided process would be able to bridge the gaping chasm between non-life and life. However, they seem totally oblivious to the fact that – in keeping with the thrust of Russell’s argument – it is their burden to prove it true rather than being the burden of the theist to disprove the possibility.
He then quotes numerous materialist luminaries talking about how materialist OOL scenarios, while not proven, are “not impossible.” And he goes on:
I don’t know how to prove that it’s impossible for life to come from non-life, anymore than Richard Dawkins knows how to prove that it’s impossible for a china teapot to be revolving around the sun in an elliptical orbit between the Earth and Mars; but no rational person is going to believe either of those proposals without rock-solid evidence. And by the way, if we are accepting “it’s not impossible” as an argument, how about the following: “It’s not impossible that God created the world in six days and made it look like it’s 14 billion years old”?
When the atheist says “it’s possible that it happened” or “it’s not impossible that it happened” he is appealing to the notion of Infinite Possibilities. As we know from the courtroom, we don’t live in a world where we are required to consider infinite possibilities; we live in a world where we are only required to consider reasonable possibilities. The only reasonable possibility is that life was the result of Intelligent Creation/Design.
In the infinite space – or if you will – the infinite gap created by an infinite number of possibilities there is plenty of room for the atheist to believe that life can come from non-life through some mysterious unguided process. It is there, in that infinite gap, that he finds a comfortable place to pitch his tent and call it home. Hence, The Argument from Infinite Possibilities or most appropriately of all: Atheism of the GAP.