Arguments are not evidence; they are a means of interpreting evidence. In the First Cause argument (Which is crap - It doesn't even address how you go from needing a first cause to needing a first cause that is sentient, anthropomorphic, capable of forgiving sins and reading minds, or even still active in the universe. The first cause can be something completely different from any sort of meaningful god.) and Watchmaker argument (Which, again, is crap - Just because something "looks" designed, doesn't mean it is, and most organisms don't even look designed if you know anything about their physiology.) you take the whole universe (Or some properties of it) as "evidence" and make a convoluted point to pretend it demonstrates the existence of god.

Unfortunately, both arguments for the existence of god are so horribly flawed, it's not even worth addressing them in much detail.

Maybe in your post-modern world of ultra-subjectivity, bot not here in Realityville. People can give justifications other than evidence, but the only epistemologically valid justification for belief is evidence; furthermore, evidence that can be independently tested and verified.

The God of the Gaps is very much alive today; just because you can talk your way out of saying you believe in him doesn't mean you do, and furthermore, that's not the original point of the argument - the original point is that belief in both fairies and gods is epistemologically equivalent (That is, unjustified and most likely wrong).

Ah, I just love theists trying to pantheist their way out of believing in a miraculous god.

No, you're just trying to convince people that you're better than people who don't believe in YAHWEH.
I'm sorry, but the god of the gaps is very much alive. Look at creationism, for example; they love the gap so much, they want god to stay in there.

I'm not the one equating faries to any god of the gaps figure; I'm just equating all entities whose existence cannot be properly demonstrated. At any rate, the watchmaker and first cause argument apply to fairies as well. You can claim that fairies created the universe; you can claim that they "designed" all living things. It's easy. Perhaps a more understandable form of the same argument is: If you believe in Yahweh, then why don't you believe in Woden, or Zeus, or Ra?

Pure mystification. From an epistemological standpoint, belief without evidence is belief without evidence, your false analogies nonwithstanding. I know very well people have more reasons to believe in in god than in fairies, but they don't have more justifiable reasons to do so. If you believe in god, you can also easily believe in fairies.

That's not evidence, however. If I write in a piece of paper, "I have an invisible, intangible dragon in my bathtub" that doesn't make it true, and it certainly doesn't provide evidence for existence of the invisible bathtub dragon. The same goes for every religion. The fact that they have this book, and that people believe in it, is not evidence. Please show an empirical manifestation of god. Millions of people claiming something doesn't make it true; millions of people have believed in Santa Claus, for example, and the same goes for Ra, Odin, Zeus, Hera and many others.

Your "evidence" is nothing but hearsay, mystification, and bull. A lot of theists even agree with me on that; they claim that god requires faith and doesn't reveal himself deliberately (In my opinion, a more reasonable position than trying to hide the emperor's nudity with so-called "evidence").
Sure. Socrates could be a fictional character. I'm cool with that. But Plato did not purport that Socrates did things blatantly in conflict with the way we're used to see the universe work; Socrates did not turn water to wine, for example. If Socrates was just a figment of Plato's imagination, his role in modern philosophy would be unchanged - the ideas would be the same; only the author would change. Jesus, Yahweh and other mythological figures however, rely on being real. Otherwise, what's the point of their respective religions?

Socrates' existence however is not equivalent to the existence of fairies. If you read in a chronicle written by some guy in the fifth century AD say, "The sky turned purple today and blood fell from the sky," you don't believe it; it takes more evidence than that. If you read him write, "Bob, the king's baker, died today" however, you are inclined to believe him because nobody would make up something so trivial. Socrates could be a made-up character, and it would have no influence in our outlook of life here; maybe Plato just invented him to have someone to talk with! But god's existence, or the existence of fairies, is s much more important matter.

Additionally, everything written about Socrates is internally consistent; we can talk about what Socrates believed in and what his ideas were. No such luck with Yahweh or fairies, of course; both have hundred of contradicting myths surrounding them.
Uh, lots of people believed in fairies; do you think they're just made up by Victorian era authors? The term "fairy" is a generalisation for the mythology of many, many Eurasian peoples, all of which really believed in them at some point.

And eyewitness accounts are not evidence; they are, at best, a last resort which can be used in court because we assume people wouldn't lie or hallucinate about a mundane matter that doesn't directly affect them.


Only if you're one of those theists who still insist that they have evidence.
No, no, no but there is no such thing, yes but you can't prove god as religious people understand him with that, not really but it helps confirm things other people have shown evidence for, no but it refers to real evidence which has been independently verified.

No, it doesn't. I for example understand that if I drop something that is denser than air and has no means of sustaining flight by itself, it'll fall until it hits something. My personal experience - and not just one occasion, millions of occasions - demonstrates that this is true; furthermore, I have seen thousands of people drop thing, I have seen videos of things being dropped. I have plenty of evidence to believe that they drop. Gravity, on the other hand, is a mathematical abstraction; nobody has observed gravity, but we have observed things moving, and for everything we have observed, gravity works to predict their movements; thus we believe in gravity, because everything seems to indicate things really move according to some law or force of gravity.

Of course, you can believe that there is no gravity, and gravity elves move everything in accordance with some law, and that if we don't drop enough things, they'll get angry and leave.

But Occam's Razor forbids us from believing that. The evidence for an universal gravitational force is the same as the evidence for gravity elves; but gravity elves require more evidence to be believed in, thus we say there is no evidence for gravity elves - what we really mean, of course, is that there is no evidence for gravity elves beyond that evidence for them which can be better explained through more parsimonious means.

"Maybe in your post-modern world of ultra-subjectivity, bot not here in Realityville. People can give justifications other than evidence, but the only epistemologically valid justification for belief is evidence; furthermore, evidence that can be independently tested and verified." --- Verithrax, your arguments here are just arguments for another particular religious perspective. Your ideas built on faith as much as any creationist. What you state as fact is not, fact.

"Ah, I just love theists trying to pantheist their way out of believing in a miraculous god." - evidence 1. Did I pantheist my way out of believing in a miraculous god? No, I don't think I did. You are jumping to conclusions, and once again, proving your ignorance in the realm of theology.

"I'm not the one equating faries to any god of the gaps figure;" - This is false. You explicitly defined gods and fairies as being things which have the same definition as a "god of the gaps"

"No such luck with Yahweh or fairies, of course; both have hundred of contradicting myths surrounding them." - This is also false. This is like claiming that Science has hundreds of contradicting laws and theorems.


"Unfortunately, both arguments for the existence of god are so horribly flawed, it's not even worth addressing them in much detail" -- 200 years of philosophical arguments say otherwise.

"No, you're just trying to convince people that you're better than people who don't believe in YAHWEH." -- please, stop projecting your motives onto me. I am doing no such thing.

Because of these patronizing comments and arguments, I haven't read the rest of what you wrote. But since you wrote so much, I thought you deserved some response.

It would be nice if you would admit that you have beliefs just like every other human on the planet, and would stop pretending that you have pure fact while everybody else has beliefs.

If you somehow removed Creationism from humanity's conciousness, instead of debates over evolution vs creationism, you would have just as strong debates between group "Groupism" (David Sloan Wilson) and "Individualism"(Richard Dawkins), both sides claiming that the other side is not using science, but rather baseless irrational belief, to support their positions. I can say this with some certainty, because these are the attacks they throw at each other, within their book reviews today.

And that is why I don't have a problem with people being Atheists are supporting atheism, but I do have a problem with this dubbed "New Atheism movement." Who, according to their own theories, would like to go against thousands of years of evolution to remove certain behaviors and thoughts from our species, which they alone have decided is bad.

Perhaps you need to re-read what you wrote.

You claimed that a belief in fairies was the same as a belief in God because neither had evidence. I pointed out that this is not a valid basis for identification, a point which you have still failed to refute. May I conclude from your shifting of argument that we agree I'm right on that?

The fact is that you and I (and presumably every person reading this thread with even marginal abilities to follow arguments) know that your comparison is a gross oversimplifaction and overgeneralization in an attempt to equate something most people think is absurd with another thing that most people do not. It's just another way of comparing someone to Hitler, and it's equally illegitimate in this context. I demonstrated how; you've failed to demonstrate how it is not. I'm still waiting for the killer argument that shows that believing in God and believing in fairies are, in fact, the same thing.

Let's move on.

All right, now you've given away what I was suspecting was the case, but didn't know for sure, and that is that your belief that only things for which there are empirical evidence can qualify as a knowledge claim.

First of all, I would like to see the empirical evidence that only things for which there are empirical evidence can qualify as a knowledge claim. If you cannot produce empirical evidence that only empirical evidence counts as evidence, then your contention falls under its own weight.

Second, I am 99.99999% sure that not everything you think is true has been empirically verified. Am I right? If you're having trouble thinking of things, I can give you some examples.

Third, well, it's not my evidence. I was just illustrating that your definition of "evidence" is unrealistic and prejudicial, even by your own standards as we'll see, below.

Finally, by enforcing your own definition of evidence on this discussion, you make actual discussion impossible. Observe:

"The Bible is comprised of writings over thousands of years by multiple authors, all of which claim empirical bases for their statements."

"I don't accept that as evidence."

"Archaelogical findings correlate several sites mentioned in the Bible and the descriptions therein."

"I don't accept that as evidence, either."

"The writings of other cultures neighboring the Hebrews correlate Biblical accounts of events."

"I don't accept that as evidence, either."

"A belief in the divine is a common denominator in nearly every culture throughout history."

"I don't accept that as evidence, either."

"Many people claim God has acted in their lives, either internally or externally."

"I don't accept that as evidence, either."

"There are artifacts that continue to exist that have been historically explained as a product of God's actions."

"I don't accept that as evidence, either."

*God appears*

"Where's the projector? Am I hallucinating? I don't accept this experience as evidence, either."

So, basically, your only basis for saying that a belief in God has no evidence is because you, by definition, will rule out any evidence as non-evidence. That's very convenient for your argument, but the problem here is that there's nothing that can be done that will cause you to consider God's existence, because you can draw your evidential circles in whatever parameters will support your own framework, which is precisely what you did all through your response. It's very similar to shooting an arrow and painting a target around it.

If this is not the case - if you are not defining what does and does not constitute evidence on the basis on your own framework - then I'd like to know where your basis for defining what does and doesn't count as evidence comes from. What possible evidence could emerge for God's existence that you would accept as evidence?



This isn't good enough. To be consistent with your own statements, you have to actively reject the existence of Socrates, not merely allow for the possibility of his non-existence. There is no empirical evidence that Socrates existed. Or Plato, for that matter. Or Julius Caesar. Or Moses. Or Louis V. If you will not here and now decry the existence of these various historical figures as fictions invented for the various purposes of the people who invented them (assuming they also existed), then maybe you ought re-consider the integrity of your framework. Either you are correct, only empirical verifications count as evidence, and we should dismiss the vast majority of history as fiction in the name of logic and consistency, or you are not correct.

So, which is it? Are you correct, or should we reject all pre-photographic history as hogwash? Assuming, of course, those photographs are real. We can't empirically verify that, either.

Further, how does this change whether or not an eyewitness account is evidence? I think you're anticipating arguments that I'm not making. Are you saying that if Plato said, "Socrates flew to the market, today," that would not be evidence for Socrates existence, but if he said, "Socrates walked to the market, today," it would? How does that jive with your earlier statements? Is Plato's account of Socrates evidence for Socrates' existence or not?

This actually sounds a lot more like what -I- was saying - the evidence exists, but you find it unlikely and not compelling. It sounds a lot like your definition "evidence" is "whatever I believe when I hear it."

I'm not sure that non-existent people can still be as historically significant as their existing versions, but we can easily look at other figures that you might not be so willing to concede. Even so, what has "historical impact" got to do with what counts as evidence?

Further, you state that if a statement is trivial, then it counts as evidence, but if it's radical, it doesn't? Verithrax, I'm mystified, here. What ARE your criteria for evidence?

So far, from your response, I've gathered:

- must be empirical
- must comply with what we already think we know about the natural world (good luck, scientists)
- must be trivial
- does not matter if the object of said evidence exists, except for religious figures

I think a clarification is in order. Furthermore, I'm still keen on seeing what the empirical evidence is that proves that evidence must be empirical.



That first bit is a good point, and I'll concede that the existence of God versus the existence of Socrates is very different in terms of ramifications for people, today. Not sure if the existence of fairies is equally weighty or more important than Socrates or God, but I'll give it to you.

Still, though, how does that affect what counts as evidence?

The second bit, however, is not true. There are many debates over what Socrates (if he existed) said and whether or not he was consistent with himself, the same way we might debate over anyone's writings that occur over a span of time. Heck, most people can't write an entire book without contradicting themselves at some point, but that has yet to give rise to the speculation that they don't exist.

Just for clarification, Yahweh is the Hebrew God, so am I to assume we're talking about the God described in the Old Testament? And there are hundreds of contradicting myths surrounding him?

If instead, you actually meant to refer to a supreme being in general, then yes, there are several contradictory versions regarding him. All the versions seem to be united on the point of his existence, though, so if lack of contradiction is part of your list for evidence, the existence of God seems to qualify.

What does this have to do with what is and is not evidence? I already said that people giving accounts of interactions with fairies was evidence. And recall that, when listing potential evidence for God, I talked about people offering their accounts of interaction, not their personal belief. I nowhere said, "Lots of people believe in God, so there." I haven't even posited a belief in God, myself. I just thought your statement that there was no evidence for a belief in God was very... staggering.



Of course, "I saw that man shoot that woman" is hardly a mundane matter, and people are mistaken and lie as witnesses about crimes with some degree of consistency. I guess we should eliminate that from the legal system. And as you pointed out, numbers of people don't matter, so if five hundred people say they saw the same man shoot the same woman, that doesn't count as evidence, either.

Right?

If it's not right, then how does that work with your previous contentions?

Furthermore, if eyewitness accounts are not evidence, you've more or less doomed scientific progress. First, every scientist will need to replicate the research of every other scientist (because accounts are not evidence), and then, every -person- will all need to replicate this research, because the word of a scientist that their results are in fact what happened is, at best, a last resort, as you said. And the numbers don't matter, so even if 50 million scientists report the same results on given research, that doesn't count as evidence.

The thing is, Verithrax, you, I, everyone relies on the kind of "evidence" that you are de facto ruling out of consideration. Rather than believe that you actually reject as false anything that you cannot empirically demonstrate, yourself, I'm going to guess that you actually live inconsistently with the ideas you're articulating, here.

So, I say you should either start living consistently with them (good luck!), or examining them for plausibility.

This is not an argument.



What?



Well, this is starting to get a little weird, but I'll try my best.

If I drop something, and it falls to the ground 999,999 times, how do I know that it will fall to the ground the millionth time?

One choice is to say that I don't know that. All I've done is establish a probability, and no matter how many other people tell me that they, too, have dropped this object and watched it fall to the ground, I can stubbornly hold out and say that doesn't prove anything, even if I believed them. In fact, I feel like this choice is the one that comports the most happily with the arguments you've laid out. I don't take into account numbers of people. I don't take into account their relayed accounts. I don't take into account history. I don't take into account anything about the continuity of my own experience. I don't take into account anything that textbooks have said about gravity or density. The ONLY thing I take into account is what I can empirically verify, and the only way to empirically verify that it will drop the millionth time is to drop it. Prior to that, I can make no knowledge claims about what will happen with the object. Right?

If it's not right, then on what possible basis can I claim that the object will fall that you have not already ruled out? Where's the evidence?

In your final paragraph, you introduce yet another problem for your stance. You posit two phenomena (gravity and elves pulling objects down), and you state the body of evidence for them is exactly the same, which is indeed consistent with what you've said before. In terms of sheer empirical verification, gravity and elves are equally "evidenced" phenomena.

However, you then throw in Occam's Razor and claim that the only basis for adjudicating between these claims - since the empirical evidence is the same - is the Razor.

Well, in either case, you're positing an entity - just one is a naturalistic force and the other is a being - so the Razor doesn't divide these theories.

What does, Verithrax? If the evidence, as you've stated yourself, is exactly the same for these propositions, how do you decide between them? Why is a force that you can't see a better explanation than a being you can't see?

I will offer, once again, that it's your -disposition- toward the evidence that makes the difference. Clearly, it can't be the evidence itself.

Right?

Atheism could arguably be called a belief system, but at the same time it could not. It depends on how the atheist phrases his definition of atheism: "I believe that gods do not exist" is a belief. This is a statement that the atheist is convinced that there is no such thing as a divine entity, and that there is no way that they could possibly fit into this universe. However, the statement "I do not believe in gods" is not part of a belief system, as it is inherently a lack of belief. This is a weaker form of atheism, and is most likely the form of atheism that most atheists hold.

I personally do not believe in gods because of the lack of credible evidence. As Verithrax mentioned, the majority of the evidence that is used to uphold the validity of a religion is not credible: religious texts are contradictory and eyewitnesses lie. If evidence that I deem to be credible surfaces, I am open to changing my opinion. However, there is currently no such evidence out there, so I remain an atheist.

Here, I'll offer a standard of proof.

One, you must demonstrate the workings of a deity without recourse to philosophy.
(Subpoint one: You may do this by pointing to a natural event that is caused by immaterial actors.)
(Subpoint two: You may do this by pointing to an artifact that is beyond forgery.)

Two, your demonstration must pass muster by Occam's Razor. In essence, this means that your demonstration must show that a deity must have been involved in some sort of intermediary sense. It rules out all argument on first causes. (The Big Bang being the start of all physicality is essentially the same as saying that God caused the Big Bang, except the latter has an extraneous argument that can be cut out with no change in the final result.)

Three, if you're going to make any sort of claim on the nature, identity, disposition, or workings of the demonstrated deity, you must be prepared to demonstrate how you know anything about the deity and how your evidence is better than all contradictory evidence.

Have fun.

Why must anyone do that?



Why?

And I'll refute this one while I'm at it. You're not just presupposing elves, you're presupposing mechanically perfect elves who can be deduced through mathematics. If there is no evidence of decision making or independent existence, you assume there isn't any. On the other hand, if you care to define elves as small particles whose only known activity is motion towards elven cities, I'm going to get a little chuckle and agree.

Because they're reasonable standards that nearly every bit of controversial human knowledge either has met or is hypothesized and hold up relatively well to scrutiny by those standards, even if not perfectly. If you can't even start to break ground by those three standards, you're not in good intellectual standing.

No knowledge claims rely on philosophy, nor is their reality more complex than an explanation that would pass Occam's Razor?

That's quite a claim.

EDIT:



Why is mechanical perfection or mathematical deduction necessary for the elf theory?

Controversial knowledge. I think there's a lot of common sense baggage that's gone untested. But yes, yes it is! Feel free to test it. I'm here for another couple hours.

I could point to history, but the fact is, there is nothing on earth which is beyond forgery.

Whenever something unique is pointed to, those who choose to believe in materialism say "so what, unique and strange things happen, but there is an explanation for it, somewhere, we just don't know what the explanation is yet."

Again, you are restricted by what you accept as evidence.

So, for instance, the validity of empiricism as a mechanism for knowing truth does not rely on philosophy?

Or, for instance, the fact that the spin of an electron from a disrupted atom will change the spin of every other electron passes Occam's Razor? Because I can imagine an electron whose spin would -not- change the spins of other electrons.

Consciousness, the self, and free will.

None of these concepts have been proven.

edit: Love, commitment, responsibility, morality, ethics. Dark Matter, Black hole horizons, multiple dimensions, law and government, civil rights, human rights. Land rights. Ownership., I could probably list more if I pulled out some philosophy books.

Perhaps "beyond forgery" was too harsh. I'll concede this. I'm having trouble formulating something less rigorous. Saying that God wrote on stone tablets while no one was looking except that one guy who brought down the tablets is iffy. It's worse when you can't find the tablets anymore. That's not to say that there isn't evidence of several of the wars that are documented in the Torah, though.

I have one article of faith I believe in. I believe it is more likely than not that we live in an universe where the behaviour of fundamental, minimal entities herein remains constant.

However, theists believe the very same thing (Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to get through life). I just cut god out of the equation; theists believe the constant feature of the universe is god; I believe there is a core set of fundamental forces which governs the interaction between entities in the universe. Theists purport to know and often even talk to god; I'm not quite so arrogant.

Despite your constant accusations of ignorance, I find it quite humorous that you even expect me to need to know theology to demonstrate the unlikelihood of god's existence; as PZ Meyers expertly points out, it's akin to saying just because I haven't visited the best tailors of Paris and Milan, I am not qualified to point out that the emperor is naked.


Fairies can be a "god in the gaps" figure, but they don't have to be and my original argument does not rely on it.

200 years of "philosophical" arguments are wrong, then. Argumentum ad people in powdered wigs?


Do I even need to link the posts in which you do so? Let alone your total inability to go one post without calling your adversaries "ignorant" because they disagree with you; it's rather unbecoming.
Of course I have beliefs. Only a total idiot with no knowledge of epistemology would say he has no beliefs; such a condition is unattainable. I have some beliefs for example which are ill-justified and subject to rapid change (Most of my political beliefs, for example, are only crudely supported and I would easily change my mind between social democracy and libertarianism, simply because I don't understand politics as an exact science or one in which there exists a concrete, useful, unified body of knowledge). Some of my beliefs are larval; I'm just happy with some hypothesis and would rather they were true than not, but I don't rely on them (I expect the Democrats to win the next US presidential election; I expect that the Gaia hypothesis is true). And some of my beliefs are strongly supported by evidence and thus are essentially the same as knowledge (I believe in the current body of knowledge taken as true by biologists, for example).

So? People have different opinions. Some of them are wrong. Some of them are blatantly wrong. Cope.


What was useful thousands of years ago is now an unnecessary remnant of our evolutionary history. Religious behaviour, like the appendix, needs to be extirpated if it starts hurting; and right now, it's about as painful as can be. We would not be waging a rhetorical war on irrationality if irrationality hadn't launched its Pearl Harbour in 9/11, the London bombings, the Gaza strip, Ireland, and who knows how many other places.

Isn't it pretty much a given in modern philosophy that none of those things really exist in the same sense as a rock exists? The things that produce those illusions are all perfectly scientific and studiable to some extent via neurology, but most people accept that it's hard to have a discussion without it since we're all bound by those illusions and whatever's behind them has some effect.

I am sure you are aware of this, but the basic idea in Judaism is that there was a MASS revelation, not a single revelation.

That is, 600,000 people heard G-d speak to them. Moses's leadership position was disagreed with after that revelation. "We are all holy people (we all are/were prophets), why are you more holy than us?" was the argument. Further more, this argument is only a binding argument for people who were born into the families that experienced that event, and there is no assumption or request from people outside this group to believe them. (i.e. that they have the one true book of instructions.)

My point being, there are plenty of people born into Judaism who do not beleive in it do to what they call lack of evidence. And one has to wonder what exactly they are looking for.

@verithrax: The emporer wearing clothes, is an example of a physical entity within spacetime. Spiritual beings however, are by defintion not in spacetime, and so for one to know what they are saying is not there, one has to know what it is they are looking for. Which would require a good deal of theology.

Holy crap, I don't want to reply to this post because it's incredibly long, but do because it's got actual material in it, unlike the exchanges between a couple previous posters.



I do not believe that his point was that they are the same: if that is what he truly meant, his statement would be merely inflammatory and would serve no real point, and we all know that he doesn't do that. For the atheist, a belief in fairies is equivalent to a belief in God, but not identical. While there are many differences between the two, at the lowest level, they are both beliefs in fictional entities.



An actual definition of evidence would be appreciated, then. It would appear that we are operating under different assumptions. I share a weaker version of Verithrax's view: the strongest evidence is that which is experimentally and empirically reproducible. Observations of one-time events are less credible as evidence, as they are more easily disputable. The Bible and other religious texts, unsurprisingly, is way down on my list: it was not only written by people I do not implicitly trust, but it has been revised and rewritten many times over the thousands of years it has existed.

"The Bible is comprised of writings over thousands of years by multiple authors, all of which claim empirical bases for their statements."

As above, I do not hold that a claim for empirical evidence is true evidence.

"Archaelogical findings correlate several sites mentioned in the Bible and the descriptions therein."

The Bible is not entirely fictional. It is entirely reasonable that a religious text that depicts places that existed in order to add credibility to the tale. Who would believe a God whose exploits were all centered on a planet in a far off galaxy?

"The writings of other cultures neighboring the Hebrews correlate Biblical accounts of events."

It is entirely possible that the writings were based off of widespread legends and fables. Again, this is good for a religion: by explaining established stories in a new light, you can easily build credibility for your religion.

"A belief in the divine is a common denominator in nearly every culture throughout history."

This is a combination of many facets of the mind and psyche, most notably our curiosity, our powerful sense of pattern recognition, and our self-centeredness as a species. We see a phenomenon and wonder about its cause. Until recently (in a historical sense), we did not have the tools to adequately explain these phenomena, so we observed them as the actions of a being like ourselves, but much more powerful.

"Many people claim God has acted in their lives, either internally or externally."

Again, a claim is insubstantial. I can claim that I can turn invisible when unobserved by anything, and get many of my friends to do so as well. This is entirely unprovable.

"There are artifacts that continue to exist that have been historically explained as a product of God's actions."

I am not sure as to what you are referring. Could you provide examples of these?

*God appears*

"Where's the projector? Am I hallucinating? I don't accept this experience as evidence, either."

I would have a similar reaction, though I would not be so quick to discount it. If whatever appeared was persistent and willing (a benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God would surely be able to spare an instant of His eternal time), I would gladly devise and run tests to determine that it was, in fact, a manifestation of some being much greater than me. I would not, however, then admit that he was God, as there are countless other potential ways that a being could manifest tremendous power.



Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot. Can we continue?



I am personally a fallibilist. I accept that what I know could be wrong, and base my knowledge of what is likely true on degrees of certainty. For historical evidence, I must accept that what is taught to me is likely true. I did not experience World War I, but the descriptions that have been given to me are realistic and difficult to dispute. Until a strong disproof is made against the existence of WWI, I will continue to accept that WWI actually occurred.



Eyewitness accounts of the supernatural are almost immediately discredited in my book. A human being is capable of walking to a market. This matches my observations. However, a human being is not capable of flying to a market under his own power. Without sufficient explanation and, dare I say it, proof, I will not accept the possibility of a flying man. This may not affect my belief that Socrates existed, but I would certainly disbelieve the story of his unpowered flight.



Evidence must be empirical, realistic when compared with the known body of knowledge, and ideally experimentally provable. Verithrax's statement about the irrelevance of Socrates potentially not existing is entirely true. It matters not to the field of philosophy if Socrates existed or not. It is the ideas that are attributed as being set forth by him that are what matters in philosophy. Similarly, Christianity would be entirely unaffected if God did or did not exist.



As I pointed out earlier, it is seemingly natural for humans to attribute the unknown to the actions of some intelligence out of our control. If you were locked in a windowless room, and a single light were to turn on and off at random intervals, it is likely that you would assume that it was the action of some human that was causing the light to turn on and off, regardless of the true source of the disturbance.

Additionally, lack of contradiction is only one qualification.



There have been studies that have shown that eyewitnesses are incredibly fallible, but they are often one of the only forms of evidence. Their testimony is also frequently disregarded when it is contradictory.



Ah, but it is this kind of distrust that makes science work in the first place. Science relies on repeatability: if one person can produce experimental results that state one thing, another person should be able to produce similar, if not identical, results to state another. This is done constantly until everyone who doubts the conclusion that was drawn has been satisfied that the conclusion is true.



Flaws in Verithrax's arguments aside, you have basically pointed out the view of every reasonable thinker. The difference between gravity and magical down-pulling elves is not in their effect. The difference lies in which one is provable. As of now, neither is, though we have theories about how gravity works. However, when the undisputed, experimental proof of the source of gravitational pull is found, the down-pulling elf worshippers are going to feel a tad silly.

There, you see, is an event which requires extraordinary amounts of evidence (As opposed to Bob the Baker dying.)

First you have to demonstrate that something can exist outside time and space.