Something regarding atheism vs religion - not sure yet

"Premise 1 - Because the theist is the one making the positive claim, the burden of proof is entirely on him."I agree with your apparent position, and I disagree with a majority of atheists on this matter. A reasonable person has the onus to use all of the available information when informing their beliefs. If a person who makes a claim presents additional information, then the listener has an onus to also incorporate this additional information. (Of course, the listener may decide that the new information is mere hearsay, and may place an appropriately small weight on hearsay.) The burden of proof is simply irrelevant to this process. The burden of proof is a cultural convention, a cultural rule, a cultural more, which says that the claimer should not try to place a requirement on the listener to do further research. It's a rule for fairness and to prevent someone from wasting someone else's time. "Premise 3 - Each of these propositions must be supported by evidence and the determination is made by contrasting the various options rather than by placing the entire burden of proof on just one of the options."I completely agree. The idea of a null hypothesis is often misused. The theist does not have the default position, and the strong atheist does not have the default position. The default position is "I do not know / I am undecided". If a reasonable person comes across sufficient and compelling evidence one way or the other, only then is the person warranted in being a theist or strong atheist. (Note: The "I do not know" position, the default position, is encompassed in the label "atheist".) "Premise 3 - The only acceptable form of evidence is Scientific Evidence."A theist once offered me the possibility as a defeater argument. Imagine a world where materialistic and naturalistic approaches always failed, and where prayer was effective, and amazingly so. In this world, the only reasonable position is to forgo naturalistic and materialistic science, and to use prayer. However, that conclusion is itself a scientific conclusion. In this world, we have premised that prayer works, and it survives many many tests that it works. That's science. It fits the cliche "scientific method" to a T. Science does not depend on "methodological naturalism". Science does not assume the natural. Science does not work only on the natural. This is a very common notion, and it's simply wrong. I completely agree with the contents of the Boudry paper linked above, "How not to attack Intelligent Design Creationism: Philosophical misconceptions about Methodological Naturalism". I also endorse Scott Clifton's Skepticon 7 talk which has additional insights on the flaws of the "methodological naturalism" position. When someone argues with this claim, I first ask "What other sort of evidence is acceptable?". Mike has preemptively given an answer: divine revelation. Thanks for moving that along. However, divine revelation is just another form of scientific evidence - a point I cover below. "Premise 2 - Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."I had hoped to avoid invoking the name "Bayesian", but that seems unavoidable at this point. We all start grossly ignorant about the world. For any particular specific claim, like "The sky is blue", "A god exists", "Ice is slippery", etc., we all start with zero relevant knowledge, and the only appropriate starting place is "I do not know / I am undecided". As we live our life, we collect knowledge. We look up at the sky and we see that a (cloudless) sky (on Earth) is blue. We stand on ice and often slip, and we learn that ice is slippery. Our knowledge about how reality is comes from prior experience. When I am presented with a claim, I first look to see if I have any relevant prior experience, prior knowledge. I use my prior knowledge and reason to then determine what is the reasonable likely truth of the matter. When new information comes in, then the ideal that I strive towards is to adjust my estimations of the likely truth of my beliefs based on this new information, and taking into account all of my previous information. I have plenty of past experience that when someone releases a hammer from a height in normal household conditions, it falls to the ground. I have a lot of past experience that supports this truth. Suppose someone did a demonstration to the contrary. As a reasonable person, the onus is then on me to take this new information into account and modify my beliefs accordingly. I have to create a list of possible explanations, and keep in mind that perhaps I haven't stumbled across the correct explanation yet. In this particular case, a demonstration that hammers float in mid-air when released at a height in normal household conditions will cause me to use my prior information which will lead me to the conclusion that you are playing a trick on me, and that there are wires or magnets involved or something. In other words, my background knowledge is such that the claim "hammers float in mid-air when released at a height in normal household conditions" is highly unusual. It is highly unlikely to be true. It is extraordinary in that sense. To convince me of the truth of that proposition, I would need access to an amount of new information that is comparable to the wealth of prior information I have on the topic. This required additional new information would be quite massive in scale. It is extraordinary in that sense. "Bayesian reasoning" is the name for the reasoning that I have been advocating above. All proper reasoning about testable claims of the world around us are Bayesian. For a proof of this, and for further explanation of what this means, I suggest the book "Proving History" by Dr. Richard Carrier. "In a reality where God DOES exist however, we would still have reason and science but we could potentially have an additional source of information: divine revelation. In other words, if a God does exist, it wouldn't be entirely up to us to look for Him."I never had an experience that I would describe as divine revelation, so please forgive me for covering my bases. Is divine revelation like someone whispering in your ear? Talking directly into your head? Is divine revelation like god rewriting your memories, beliefs, and behaviors? (The scifi term for that is mind-rape.) First problem: There are plenty of alternative explanations for all of this experience. There are medical conditions, brain defects, that can do it. Perhaps there's a hidden electronic speaker which is the source of the sound. Perhaps the devil is speaking to you. We know that false memory syndrome is a common result from recovered memory therapy, and we know that false memories are all too easy to create. Mike, as a reasonable person, you need to examine all of these scenarios and see how well your evidence, your experience, fits each scenario. Bayesian reasoning 101. That is using reason and science to analyze divine revelation. To put it another way, divine revelation is just like god passing you a note, which is just like me passing you a note. If I were to pass you a note, you would use science and reason to verify that the note actually came from me and not someone else. Further, this phrasing also shows another possibility - perhaps your god is just lying to you. Any use of divine revelation is governed by the same epistemological rules that govern any other use of evidence, and those rules are reason and science. You seem to have a massive intellectual blind-spot w.r.t. divine revelation and the proper use of reason and science. PS:I hope you're not using the words "divine revelation" in this context to refer to the contents of a particular book. If so, it should be amazingly obvious that you need to use reason and science to determine which book of which tradition (if any) is the genuine article. Perhaps you use another divine revelation to determine which book is the genuine article, but that additional divine revelation itself still needs to be verified with reason and science! PPS:"In my opinion, if we restrict ourselves to only logic and science, we don't have sufficient information to determine that the possibility of God's existence is significantly lower than 50%."For a nebulous and ill-defined first cause god, I completely agree. If you do not posit any additional characteristics, then its existence is indistinguishable from its non-existence, and a 50% estimation for its existence is an appropriate starting point. However, if you start to posit additional details, then this changes drastically. For example, if you posit that the god largely matches the description of god in the Christian bible and the Christian tradition, then you can use logic and science to show that this god does not exist. It's commonly accepted that Genesis as history is fabrication and fiction. It's mainstream scholarship that Moses did not exist and Jewish slave exodus from Egypt is fiction. There are plenty of miracles attributed to Jesus that are demonstrably false, such as the 3 hours of darkness, and the zombie army that purportedly marched on Jerusalem (Matthew 27:51-53). The Christian tradition is obviously an invention of humans and not the result of a god. Even if there is a kernel of truth in there somewhere regarding a god, the god as described in the Christian tradition does not exist. Maybe some drastically different alternative god does exist. Ex: The lying hiding trickster god Loki exists and is the primary cause behind Christianity. Loki may exist, but it would be incorrect to say that Christian god exists because Loki exists.