The atheist debate strategy of not taking on the burden of proof is lazy and shows there’s no good reasons to believe atheism (or naturalism) is true. In fact, naturalism is self defeating.

This is just a rant, but hearing atheists constantly talk to theists about burden of proof is exhausting, lazy and just plain false. The claim that the only thing that exists is the natural world itself requires proof, yet atheists assume this is the “default position” and so don’t need to provide any reasoning for their beliefs. Contrast that with the slogan, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and atheists are just taking the intellectually lazy position of extreme skepticism and not actually believing or saying anything of value.

Atheism or naturalism (naturalism being the belief that the only thing that exists is the natural world) makes no positive claims that seem to hold or make sense. Let’s just take the naturalist explanation of supernatural claims, namely that there’s a natural explanation behind all supernatural claims whether that be hallucinations, delusions or misinterpretation of events. Accepting that leads one to the conclusion that human beings senses are unreliable, they do not accurately represent the world as it is. People are constantly seeing supernatural phenomena that don’t exist empirically and so on naturalism one cannot trust their own senses.

So if our senses are unreliable it’s not a far stretch to say our cognitive faculties are unreliable. Therefore there is no reason to assume on naturalism that human beings even have the capability to understand truth and what is true. So a naturalist perspective is self defeating, they must admit that there is no reason to believe what they believe, namely that all that exists is the natural world.

As a piece of evidence that the natural world isn’t all that exists consider numbers. Our natural world is governed (or has the appearance of being governed) by natural laws, these laws to our best observations are dependent on a pretty surprising relationship with mathematics and numbers. These “numbers” are abstract objects that are timeless, spaceless, immaterial and causally not connected with our world (save for their relationship with natural law). In order for these mathematical laws to govern the universe, particularly the early universe as in during the first moment of time in the Big Bang, these mathematical laws and objects can be extrapolated to existing beyond the natural world such that they govern the natural world.

Timeless, immaterial and spaceless objects such as numbers existing is evidence against naturalism.