"God doesn't Exist"- Claim or Conclusion

[SteveII]

I see why some atheists don't like the term supernatural--because discussion of it is insulated from the myopic view that only science can provide us knowledge.

It serves as a catch-all phrase for any claims about beings and events that cannot, by definition, be verified.  The problem with this should be obvious-- there is no consensus on such claims and believers will dismiss claims that do not fall within their accepted beliefs even though they cannot establish the veracity or falsity of those claims.  You have the events of your sacred book as evidence, but someone who follows a different denomination can claim that they mean something different and we don't have a way to determine who is right.  Or someone who follows a different religion can claim that you are wrong and it is the events in his sacred texts that are evidence of his god(s) and we have the same problem in figuring out who is right.

It's the same with the personal experiences of billions of people.  What does that evidence point to?  It depends on your belief system.  It may be evidence that your god performed a certain act, or it may be an evil spirit masquerading as an angel of light to mislead the innocent.  We can't prove which of you is correct.  If we ignore the likelihood that an investigation will lead us towards a natural explanation for nearly all of those billions of experiences, we are left with a bunch of explanations that are contradictory and no way of determining which one is true.  Even if we accept that the forces of good are allowing us to stumble about in search of the truth and the forces of evil are doing a very good job of tricking more than two-thirds of the world, we don't get any closer to a consensus.  On questions of universal and eternal import, no one is able to point to a clear explanation that everyone can agree on.

The best we can get regarding the existence of God is that we cannot prove there isn't one.  The one claim that nearly every theist can agree on is that at least one god exists because it's not possible for that not to be the case.  Any step taken beyond that is little different from speculation, seeing as it relies on evidence that is dubious at best and impossible to verify otherwise.  [1] Under those circumstances, it is reasonable to hold the belief that only through the scientific method can we learn anything.

Because there are multiple and conflicting truth claims does not mean that one of them is true to the exclusion of the others. You say there is no way to determine which claims are correct--perhaps, but we can examine the overall theological framework of each religion and see which one is internally consistent, which one best matches claims against reality, which one makes more sense of more observations, and which one has the best predictive value when examining issues of xyz. 

[1] Did you mean that is is reasonable to employ the scientific method to the truth claims of religions because of the reasons listed or do you mean that in general, only through the scientific method can we learn anything?

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“universe” in British English

universenoun
uk /ˈjuː.nɪ.vɜːs/ us /ˈjuː.nə.vɝːs/  
       
B1 [ S ] everything that exists, especially all physical matter, including all the stars, planets, galaxies, etc. in space:

So when cosmologists say that the 'universe' is 13 billions of years old, they mean to include the universe generator, or the quantum field, or whatever you think was before the big bang? Do you really think people confuse the word 'universe' to include the supernatural (especially since like 80% of the world believes in a god(s) that created the universe)?