Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

[Esquilax]

It seems that you are arguing against the level of knowledge, not observation.   How did we determine that the earth was not flat?  Did it include further observation?

I'm arguing against observation in the sense of just taking one's observations as truthful reflections of reality. Observation is limited, and not recognizing that is the cause of a whole lot of fallacious reasoning.

I like how that in the first part of this reply, you are arguing against observation being sufficient.  Then in the second part here, you appeal to observation, to support an outlandish claim and as the answer.

The point is that observation alone was insufficient in all those cases. In the example of thunder and lightning, determining the real cause required additional knowledge of electricity and physics, derived from experimentation and not pure observation. The observation of the phenomena alone was not enough to determine the cause, and that ignorance was what had the cause pegged as supernatural for so long. That's kinda what I'm getting at: observation is a necessary component to determining causation, but it isn't a sufficient component on its own.

Also, we could make similar claims, that every time science has been shown to be incorrect, that it has a 100% tract record of being shown as unreliable.  (This is not an argument against science, but the reasoning behind your statement)

The two statements aren't remotely comparable, because while science may be wrong sometimes, it's right a lot more, and whenever it is wrong, it's wrong on the way to being right. Mistakes are always corrected.

This is not at all similar to a concept that has never been right, in any capacity, for reasons that should be obvious: a positive number is higher than zero, and hence presents a higher degree of reliability.

Again, I find that your argument and use of the word ordinary to be highly subjective.  It is based on understanding, and as understanding increases, what was extraordinary becomes ordinary.  Therefore the skeptic has the right to demand extraordinary evidence for whatever they choose.

I agree, our understanding does determine the bounds of what is extraordinary and what isn't. What else could? And why do you think this is the downfall of the argument? It's the defining characteristic of it. You need to separate the truth of a claim from whether it's rational to accept it as true, because those are two different questions. There were times in history where it was irrational to believe in claims that are absolutely true, due to a lack of evidence supporting those true claims. The claims were always true, but one could not be justified in holding them until such time as there was sufficient justification to do so. Likewise, I'm sure there are true claims right now that it is irrational to believe on the same basis, but that's not my problem; I know I'm not omniscient, and the only way I can become closer to being right is to follow the evidence, because that is the only reliable indicator for truth that we have.

When it comes to extraordinary claims, the fact that one needs extraordinary evidence is simply a result of how unheard of the claim actually is; it has more work to do because there are more individual elements of the claim that need to be vetted before that claim can be rationally accepted. Epistemology is a series of necessary conditions that need to be fulfilled, one by one: a thing must be possible before it's probable, it must be probable before it's parsimonious, and it must be demonstrated before it's rationally justified. For ordinary claims some of those conditions are already fulfilled: we can determine whether an ordinary claim is possible and, to some extent, probable with very little effort. But for an extraordinary claim, now we've got to first determine that it's possible, then probable, then demonstrate it. You can't just go about skipping steps because if you haven't determined that a thing is possible then you haven't yet determined the cause for the claim, and hence it would be impossible to demonstrate that the claim is true. Theists often want to skip steps, or introduce new criteria like consistency, rather than just going through motions that should be trivial, if they're truly in possession of a rationally justified belief.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," is simply a recognition that some claims will need to start at step one, whereas others have those steps pre-fulfilled.