Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?

[Angrboda]

I once had someone in a discussion propose to me that the mere ability to conceive of something increases the probability that it is true or that it exists. He gave as reference someone named Sobel, but I've since forgotten to which Sobel he had referred. I chose to accept his proposition for the sake of argument. There seems to be a similar question afoot here, as well. While one may judge the relative probabilities of the various elements of Steve's inductive argument, by accepting that they have a probability, you are implicitly granting that the probability is non-zero, i.e. that the events in question are not impossible. Any such thing which has a non-zero probability thus becomes valid evidence in an inductive argument, no matter how weak it is. If that is all that one means when one says that there is a valid inductive case for the existence of God, then, perhaps, but that seems little more than accepting the idea that God existing is a coherent proposition. It seems that this acceptance is doing most of the work here (though I have no doubt that Steve thinks other facts are doing more work here than that). So I guess I'm nonplussed about any such inductive arguments unless they can be shown to be doing more work than that. That is where I suspect the crux of the matter lies. I'm not going to argue the matter, but I think that Hume's objection that any explanation is more likely than a miracle cuts some ice here. If that is true, then accepting arguments such as Steve's as inductive arguments for the proposition of God amounts to accepting that certain things that are less probable than other things are actually more probable than the things they are less probable than, and that would simply be irrational. So, to Steve's argument, I would suggest that for the inductive case to have any merit, we must first assume that the concept of God is coherent, which not all of us do (and if it isn't coherent, believing it is necessarily irrational), and that Hume was wrong. I don't think it's up to the atheist to prove that Hume was right by providing the explicit alternative explanation to the satisfaction of the theist, that is just a sucker bet. Given that the argument, even if inductive, is a positive claim, it must refute all defeaters, not simply assert an argument of ignorance with respect to those defeaters, as it seems to be here.