Gods forgiveness is worthless.

[Ryantology]

It keeps coming back to what evidence you would accept. Probably none. I found a blog post that says why better than I could say it.

It keeps coming back to 'evidence an individual would accept'. No. I want evidence strong and clear enough that anyone would accept it, strong enough that belief was irrelevant.

That, conveniently, is the goal line beyond which theists have planted the posts. God will only reveal himself to those who have conditioned their minds to interpret natural mental glitches as the work of God.

'even if it were conceded that the parting of the Red Sea occurred, it is not clear that the parting of the Red Sea demands a supernatural explanation; and, more important, even if the parting of the Red Sea does demand a supernatural explanation, it is not clear that the best supernatural explanation is to suppose that it is the result of the actions of an orthodoxly conceived monotheistic god (p.377)'

The "it is not clear" that the parting of Red Sea demands a supernatural explanation could be available to the atheist as an excuse even if hard evidence for the parting of the Red Sea were available. Hence, based on such an excuse, the atheist would have a reason to avoid accepting the existence of God.

And...

[quote]"Someone who has naturalistic preconceptions will always in fact find some naturalistic explanation more plausible than a supernatural one... Suppose that I woke up in the night and saw the stars arranged in shapes that spelt out the Apostle's Creed. I would know that astronomically it is impossible that stars should have changed their position. I don't know what I would think. Perhaps I would think that I was dreaming or that I had gone mad. What if everyone else seemed to me to be telling me that the same had happened? Then I might not only think that I had gone mad-- I would probably go mad" (J.J.C. Smart in his contribution to the book Atheism and Theism, pp.50-51. Emphasis in blue added)

So, the naturalist has a unfalsifiable assumption in favor of naturalism which precludes the efficacy of any evidence for the contrary. The naturalist position is being treated like an unfalsifiable hypothesis (and hence, like an unscientific one).

I find it very telling that both of these examples presuppose events that have never been observed to have happened. Furthermore, both examples make the extra presupposition that if no naturalistic explanation can be provided, it must therefore be the specific handiwork of Yahweh.

The brilliant thing about the tenor of this debate is that the theist could disprove every single naturalist explanation our current understanding affords and still come away with zero evidence supporting any supernatural explanation. We're simply supposed to cram God into those gaps (and, of course, it's the Christian god, even though we lack any evidence that it is the work of any god.)

The reason that naturalist assumptions are of greater value than supernatural is extremely simple: no supernatural explanation, for anything, at any time, has ever been independently and critically observed, verified, and documented. This is not the case for naturalistic assertions. You can demonstrate the effects of buoyancy to explain why a ship floats on the sea, you can't ever demonstrate the presence of water spirits creating magical floatation shields to explain why a ship doesn't sink.