Evidence for Believing

[Inqwizitor]

I never said it could.

But then, if a god exists, that is outside of our natural epistemology, then I aren't I still justified in disbelieving it exists?

If said god exists, but cannot be demonstrated to exist, how is such a god distinguishable from a god that does not exist?

The possibility of supernatural causes. Miracles. This might be essentially what divides the theist from the atheist: belief that nature is absolutely uniform or relatively uniform.

Please explain, why the possibility that something may exist without reason or explanation, is arbitrary and irrational. Besides your discomfort with that possibility, of course. Or the necessity for a god.

And just to clarify, I am not claiming, that it is a brute fact that anything exists without reason or explanation. I am just trying to figure out how you eliminated the possibility? Besides your discomfort with that possibility, of course.

Sometimes I see the critique of cosmological arguments as a fallacy of special pleading: God just is, but everything else can be explained. I agree with the critique. The existence of something that "just is" is an exception that must be justified. I don't accept that God is an "ultimate brute fact" either, although some philosophers do (Richard Swinburne). There must be something that is not logically reducible to anything simpler. If we say that the universe "just is" then we're also committing the fallacy of special pleading. We're saying that rational explanations stop at some point, because... just because.