Arguing the Negative

I am going to do a quick, short post about arguing from the negative. It's not hard, it's not easy, but if you know what you're doing, you'll do just fine. There are 4 things you need to hit upon (unless you're doing a different debating style to the norm, which isn't bad, just unorthodox, and not done by myself), and if you do any of them well enough, then you'll win the debate.

Who has the burden?

Here's something that happened again to me today; I was told that I have the burden of proof to say how UFOs aren't real. I tried to explain in the Q&A session how I did not have a burden of proof, yet the opposition kept trying to make the point. Of course, the judges picked up on this, and gave me the round. Huzzah. But these kinds of things are becoming all too common. So, I will try and explain how the burden of proof and the burden of rejoinder works.

Absence of evidence, god, and burden of proof

[written by chronomax who writes here]