The Sunday morning keynote address was presented by Joshua Fost, PhD. He talked about the myth of the soul and the implications that living without a soul has on life and death. One of the many very good points that he made was that those who claim that we have an immaterial soul are the ones who have the burden of proof. After all, the evidence all points to humans being nothing more than very complex bioloigcal machines. So for someone to make the claim that we have an immaterial soul and/or free will, they had better bring some evidence.

A lot of people, expecially if they hold the majority view, place the burden of proof on whoever disagrees with them. On the small scale this is justified, but in the big picture it is horribly wrong. Most people require no evidence to support what they already believe and often overwhelming evidence is insufficent to change their minds. Those of us who are former believers understand how gradual it can be to go from creating an impossible standard of evidence for the other view while requiring none for your own, to eventually weighing each position on the strength of its evidence. When someone is completely close minded, there is no burden of proof either way, but once they begin to become a little more open minded, you will have to present evidence for your view, even if their possition would technically have the burden of proof, that is, if you want to change their minds. If you don’t want to accept the burden of proof then you can always just walk away.

To be continued…