Zoom-boing
Platinum Member
Since you have not proved the non existence of God, I'll stick with the God given rights. Thank you very much but fickle man can all too easily take them back.
This is a logical fallacy known as the argumentum ad ignorantiam, or the "appeal to ignorance," the specific form in which you use it being a claim that a premise is true simply because it has not been proven false. More than that, I would posit that the burden of proof lies upon those who wish to assert the existence of an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent entity rather than those who wish to deny it. Reference to Bertrand Russell's teapot analogy is appropriate here.
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there 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, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
Such a failure on the part of theists to accept a burden of proof was the origin of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, of course.
Likewise, using a claim that a premise is false simply because it has not been proven true is also an appeal to the ignorance.