Testing a Hypothesis about the Supernatural

[SteveII]

The evidence that I believe that supports my belief (another opinion) is below:

[snip]
4. The natural theology arguments:
a. God is the best explanation why anything at all exists.
b. God is the best explanation of the origin of the universe.
c. God is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.
d. God is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness.
e. God is the best explanation of objective moral values and duties.

Since you cannot 'prove' that any of these are falsely held beliefs, my conclusion (opinion) that God exists is by definition rationale (from my reasoning listed above). The amount of evidence meets my personal threshold for proof that God exists.

Yet another example of a list of explanatory criterion and how Steve's natural theology arguments fail them, with an important final thought:

Jim then says that Christianity offers a better explanation for things than naturalism does [and offers a list of explanatory virtues].....

To give you an idea of what a list of “explanatory virtues” or “explanatory desiderata” usually looks like when philosophers attempt this form of inference to the best explanation, here’s a list of explanatory virtues I’ve compiled from some of the leading thinkers on the subject from the past half-century: Peter Lipton, Gilbert Harmann, Wesley Salmon, William Lycan, Paul Thagard, and others.

1. Testability: better explanations render specific predictions that can be falsified or corroborated.
   
2. Scope (aka “comprehensiveness” or “consilience”): better explanations explain more types of phenomena.
   
3. Precision: better explanations explain phenomena with greater precision.
   
4. Simplicity: better explanations make use of fewer claims, especially fewer as yet unsupported claims (“lack of ad-hoc-ness”).
   
5. Mechanism: better explanations provide more information about underlying mechanisms.
   
6. Unification: better explanations unify apparently disparate phenomena (also sometimes called “consilience”).
   
7. Predictive novelty: better explanations don’t just “retrodict” what we already know, but predict things we observe only after they are predicted.
   
8. Analogy (aka “fit with background knowledge”): better explanations generally fit with what we already know with some certainty.
   
9. Past explanatory success: better explanations fit within a tradition or trend with past explanatory success (e.g. astronomy, not astrology).
   

Even more surprising than Jim’s odd account of explanationism is the fact that he doesn’t give a single argument as to why Christianity is a better explanation for things, given his criteria, than naturalism!

In the second half of my lecture Why the New Atheists Failed and How to Defeat All Religious Arguments in One Easy Step, I considered a more standard list of explanatory virtues and explained why theism scores so poorly on all of them.

Indeed, theism as an explanation has much in common with what we know to be really bad explanations from pseudoscience and superstition, and almost nothing in common with what we know to be really good explanations from the physical sciences. So why should we think theism is a good explanation like those from science, rather than a really terrible explanation like those from pseudoscience and superstition?

Common Sense Atheism || ‘God Did It’ is a Terrible Explanation

This last sounds like a good rhetorical point, that natural theology arguments are explanations with much more in common with pseudoscience than science, but I don't offhand know whether that is necessarily true.  What do you think?  Does 'Goddidit' resemble the type of pseudo-scientific arguments we hear for astrology, ESP, vibrational healing, and so on, and if so, what specific features does it share in common with them?

What are the differences between natural theology arguments and pseudoscience? The arguments are just that: inductive premises usually set in a deductive syllogism. Some of the premises are backed by science, some are backed by reasoning, and some are backed by experiences. Pseudoscience are claims that have actual scientific reasons not to believe them. So it would seem that your "similarities" are that neither natural theology nor pseudoscience are purely scientific--which is correct but of little consequence because as we know, verificationism is all but dead.

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Regardless, I have hundreds of reasons to believe the NT is true. You have no evidence that my beliefs are not true.

If you believed in leprechauns we still couldn't provide evidence that your beliefs are not true. You can believe in all sorts of imaginary things if your bar is other people not being able to provide evidence that they're not real.

Your analogy is severely lacking. People who believe in leprechauns do not have hundreds of independent reasons for their belief--all of which are available for scrutiny at any time.