burden of proof

excuse for debate club fags and defendents in court, amirite?

"Absurdity (which I proved above is eminently classifiable)"

"(BTW, absurdity is not "ill-defined".  Find me a fucking Unicorn or Jewgod and then we'll talk about how easy it is to get around absurdity.)"

A proof to rival the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra in its sheer rigor and elegance.

"The absence of proof for what should be a very provable assertion is more than enough rational evidence itself for the reasonable man to reject the assertion OUTRIGHT."

Fermat's Last Theorem - Conjectured in 1637, proven in 1994.  NEVAR FORGET

Since your particular ax to grind seems to be religion, though the topic was about logic, let's talk about that.  Deducing physical principles from evidence is a small portion of the logic that the human brain performs.  Even a field as closely related to scientific thought as mathematics deals with rigorous definitions of concepts which can't be said, in any strict scientific sense, to "exist," and what follows from those concepts.  The question of evidence already becomes moot when one strays as far from science as mathematics.

Even logic becomes severely limited as an intellectual tool when one enters the realm of value judgments.  A statement as fundamental as "it is good for a person to be alive" cannot be supported logically or by any kind of evidence, unless one passes the buck by defining "good" elsewhere.  So, the entire construct of value judgments (a given condition is desirable) relies, at its core, on axiom, though anon confesses a preference for systems with as few axioms as possible, and most of the main tenets following from the axioms by logic.  A system of value judgments is pointless if not applied to the practical question "given a set of conditions S, (restricted to those physically possible or even to those above a certain threshold of probability), what action should I take in order to achieve the 'best' set of conditions S'?"  That additional layer of logical complexity makes our system of value judgments into a "morality."

A popular method of constructing morality among Western and Middle Eastern cultures seems to be first defining "good."  As an example:  "it is good to be able to do things (potency)," "it is good to know things," "it is good to desire good for all of one's society, not just oneself (benevolence)."  After defining all of these attributes and assuming them to have an order relation, said culture than hypothesizes the existence of a being maximizing all of them.  From that hypothesis, morality is left as attempting to determine, through logic, what such a being would have Person A do when confronted with S.

Since most people familiar with formal logic realize that morality and mathematics are only two of many intellectual disciplines requiring the practitioner to make "baseless assumptions (PROTIP:  it's called "choosing axioms)," they don't have problems with what certain people choose as their axioms for everyday living.  In fact, they find bluster about evidence and logic in topics to which neither applies irrelevant and ultimately annoying.