God on Trial, Part 1

Old gavel and court minutes, Author Jonathunder (CC BY-SA 4.0 International, 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic, 1.0 Generic and GNU Free Documentation License)

The posts in this series are excerpted from an article titled “God on Trial:  Applying Modern Legal Standards to Assess Arguments For and Against the Existence of God” by Michael Conklin in the Journal of Christian Legal Thought, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2025.

“…This Article applies cross-examination, the rules of evidence, and the rules of civil procedure to the question of whether God exists…

Proper Burden of Proof

…In the US criminal justice system, the prosecutor is required to prove guilt ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’…This imposes a high burden…Many atheists attempt to likewise apply a disproportionate burden of proof on the theist, therefore allowing the atheist to simply sit back and say ‘not good enough’ to all the evidence presented for God’s existence…

The reason the burden of proof is so high in criminal cases is that society has established that we should err on the side of acquittal rather than conviction given the deprivation of liberty, and sometimes even life, that are at stake…But these considerations…are not present in the debate of God’s existence…

One method employed by atheists in an effort to impose an unjustifiably high burden of proof on the theist is to claim that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’  This is followed by the assertion that the existence of God is an extraordinary claim…Throughout history and still to this day, [however,] belief in God is the norm…

Another misguided attempt by the atheist to stack the debate…is to claim that atheism is the default position and, therefore, it is the theist who bears the burden of proof…[O]ne of the most common [ways] is to allege that, because one cannot prove a negative, the burden lies with the theist to prove God’s existence, and an inability to perform this task to the atheist’s satisfaction results in the atheist prevailing…

[But i]n court proceedings, parties routinely present evidence in an effort to prove a negative.  A criminal defendant may present credit card statements, video surveillance footage, and eyewitness testimony to prove that he was not within 300 miles of where the murder occurred…

Some atheists attempt to circumvent the burden of proof altogether by…claiming that atheism does not posit that God does not exist; rather, atheism is merely a lack of belief in God.  This is then used as a tactic to claim…that no evidence is required of them.  This is a highly peculiar framing of atheism by the very atheists who write books and engage in passionate debate promoting the idea that God does not exist…

Relevance

…The Federal Rules of Evidence require the evidence must be ‘relevant’ to be admissible…A piece of evidence meets the relevant standard if it merely ‘has a tendency to make a fact more or less probable’…

It is interesting to note that the very existence of a legal system implies the existence of God.  Under atheism, our minds are merely a random assortment of atoms, and our actions merely the products of random chemical interactions.  Under such a worldview, there would be no more basis for imposing liability on humans than there would be for imposing liability on some molecules in the atmosphere that caused a chemical reaction harming some other molecules…”

This series continues next week

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