Stump the Christian?

[Randy Carson]

Well, so much for that proof. You've already inserted all the wiggle room you would need to avoid admission of God's existence.

Here's the thing, and I know this tramples on your little "aha! You won't ever believe!" moment, but I don't care, because that's the same self-reinforcing delusional horseshit that a lot of theists use to make themselves feel better about their failure to convince anyone: accepting that there may be multiple answers to a question, in the absence of conclusive evidence, does not mean that any one answer gets short shrift from us when we consider them. We get shown an event that seems supernatural, and without some form of evidence regarding its nature, it would be idiotic of us not to consider multiple possible solutions, and in the case of a supernatural seeming event, yeah, aliens would come up, because sans additional evidence they are equally likely as the god conclusion, and in fact may be more so, since we know that life existing somewhere in the universe is at least possible where we don't have that same knowledge regarding spirit beings of any stripe. You're sitting there getting all smug at us because we won't favor your god with more credibility in a scenario without conclusive evidence, simply because you like him the best. You're asserting that we're being irrational because we're rationally eliminating assumptions and awaiting the evidence before we draw a conclusion, it's ridiculous.

It's not like we're considering these hypotheticals in a vacuum either, Randy. We have a rich history of phenomena and their later-discovered causes to look back on, and doing so produces a trend of overly eager theologians and idealogues attributing every unknown phenomena to a supernatural or divine cause of some description (diseases are demons, rainbows are god signs, lightning is Zeus, etc etc) and a similar trend of those answers being discovered, only for those same supernatural causes to be dead wrong, one hundred percent of the time. No matter how new and shiny and impressive you want to portray some new unknown phenomena, it must be considered within that context, that's simply an inescapable consequence of epistemology being built out of experience.

The really frustrating part of all this is that a god could easily just sort of appear and work his supernatural phenomena in plain sight, explicitly, and allow us to investigate it in sufficient detail to confirm that it is, in fact, the work of a god. [emphasis added] That's not an impossible thing, and yet here you are, immediately assuming that such a thing could never happen, that any such supernatural phenomena would necessarily be mysterious and ambiguous, but somehow it still should be enough to automatically assume not just any god, but your god specifically.

He did. First for the Jews, and then for the earliest followers of Jesus - both before and after the ascension. And yet, there are still those who refuse to believe.

Suppose God did another miracle for everyone in this forum, and you all believed. In a hundred years, skeptics like you would deny it.