How do atheists explain their inconsistency with their threshold of proof?

How do atheists explain their inconsistency with their threshold of proof for the existence of God, but not the existence of other things like the Oort cloud? Below are some excerpts from Wiki’s article on the subject (emphasis added) to make my point.

The Oort cloud ... is a spherical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals that is BELIEVED to surround the Sun at a distance up to 50,000 AU, nearly a light-year.

Although NO CONFIRMED DIRECT OBSERVATIONS of the Oort cloud have been made ...

The outer Oort cloud is THOUGHT to contain several trillion individual objects ...

Back to me. The Oort cloud is based on a belief without any direct observations, yet many if not most atheists believe it to exist. Yet if a theist asserts that God exists based on a belief without any direct observations, the question is asked, “Where is your proof?”

Does the inconsistency arise because an Oort cloud does not make an issue out of sin, whereas the God of the Bible does?

(Heb 11:1 Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, proof of things not seen. Sort of sounds like what is going on with the Oort cloud.)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud

Anonymous2014-05-04T03:12:00Z

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That's the thing, they don't.

Todd2014-05-04T08:36:09Z

Among the other answers, probably also because believers can say pretty much anything is proof of a god or gods, such as a storm, or a wave, or a butterfly, or a tree, or love, or intelligence, or reverence. Atheists can't explain everything, but they believe that it shouldn't be explained away by a phantom just because it makes you feel better.

This burden of proof argument is getting old, because it seems to me the people that have blinders on in the debate are mostly strict theists.

The Best Answer In The Universe2014-05-04T03:29:43Z

You're right that it doesn't have direct observational evidence for it's existence so could easily not exist (although it has a lot of indirect evidence), the difference is that the Oort cloud is a legitimate scientific hypothesis, so it comes from established theories about large scale astrophysics (general relativity, solar system formation, etc.) and most importantly, it CAN potentially be disproved by an experiment/observation.

I hope you see the fallacy in comparing the idea of the Oort cloud, which is a good scientific hypothesis that already has indirect evidence, to the idea of a God, which mostly comes from books written and edited by people in the bronze age who thought the Earth was flat.

Raatz2014-05-04T14:49:34Z

I would love to know the source for the creationist obsession with the Oort Cloud. It doesn't have anything to do with evolution & is simply weird. Did Answers in Genesis tell you this? An old Henry Morris textbook? Those A Beka Book home-schooling atrocities?

K. Plesner2014-05-04T03:21:04Z

We simply follow the available evidence. A lot more evidence exists for the existence of the Oort cloud than for the existence of any god you'd care to name. The evidence may be indirect, but in some cases that is all we have and it is surely a lot better than no evidence.

If indirect evidence was worthless, we'd hardly ever be able to convict a single criminal.

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