There is no evidence, and no tenable arguements, for the existence of any gods.

Dax... my point about never having witnessed any supernatural events is not begging the question, because it is not me who is making the claim. If someone approaches me and tells me they had a personal experience of a god, I would count that as miraculous. And upon my mentioning to him that we have no evidence of any miracles ever occurring, his reply of "Well, you're just begging the question. I know it exists, because I experienced it," would not be tenable. On the contrary, a lone personal experience of a miracle IS circular . "I know a god exists, because I experienced it." Well how do you know that what you experienced was real? "Because gods exist!" But how do you know that? "Because I experienced one." It hasn't yet been established that gods exist at all, and a claim that one has experienced one is miraculous and demands far greater preponderance of evidence (and from far greater sources) than casual, everyday items. You don't need to refute someone's beliefs in purple unicorns to accept that they don't exist, do you? If you claim that you ate a snickers bar yesterday, and no one saw you eat it, but you experienced it so it must be true, I have no problem accepting that. Even if you are lying, the fact remains that the you, your mouth, and a snickers bar are all objects that have been verified to exist. The event of a person eating a snickers bar is an event that has occurred with relative frequency countless times and can be documented. And if that weren't enough, we can repeat the test and FALSIFY it. We can etablish that you will eat another snickers bar within two hours, and then sit with you or follow you wherever you go, and witness you either eating another one or not eating one. In other words, we have good REASON to believe you can eat a snickers bar. But what reason do we have for believing that your miraculous experience of something that has never been documented is true? And how could we falsify it, if it's true that we can't jump into someone else's brain and experiene their experience? The personal experience of a god has the unfortunate characteristic of a) being an event so miraculous that it demands far greater and more compelling evidence than the event of eating a snickers bar, and b) being an event that we cannot document, test, or falsify, thus we can't even establish that it ever occurs. This is why the personal testimony of miracles is insufficient, and this is why it's unreasonable to accept it as evidence, EVEN if you're the person who experienced it. It does not take a great intellect to understand that, even with your experience, you lack satisfactory proof. If you have a personal experience of a god, it IS reasonable to accept that you HAD the experience. But you do not have EVIDENCE of the experience. >>>>>>If you could somehow show that god is incompatible with something we do know, then you might be on to something. Herein lies a great flaw. Because the standard definition of a god is an all-powerful, omniscient being, such a being could do anything. Thus, there could be NO possible incompatibilities with this god and anything, at all, inside or outside the known universe. I.E. This god cannot be falsified, thus it cannot ever be proven. You could present this god's will to do whatever it wished as evidence for ANY experience you had, period. You could present God's will as evidence for anything, at all, ever. There is no limitation, and there is no boundary by which we can decide whether it is verifiable or not. Does any of this remove the personal experience that one may have of a god? No. But it completely dismantles it as any evidence that the person can use to establish that god's existence. It can only be a personal experience. It can never be evidence by itself. Consider: You come to me and say "I had a personal experience of the god "Frith". He showed himself to me and told me that I am destined for eternal happiness." To which I reply: "Well, I have news for you. The god "Colmdof" spoke to me last week, and told me that He would implant a fake experience in your head involving a nonexisting god, named "Frith". He said he wanted to trick you and make you believe something that wasn't true. Looks like it worked." What on EARTH would make you think that my believing what happened to me was a "reasonable" belief? How on earth could you prove me wrong? How could you say that my experience was false and yours was true? What criteria would you use to decide whether my belief in my experience is reasonable? Because in light of our opposing accounts, neither of us could reasonably accept the other, and neither of us could reasonably discount the other. This is only to illuminate my prior point: that ANYTHING can be explained away by omnipotent beings. This does not translate to reasonable acceptance of any experience. It is merely a philosophical cop-out. Incidentally, I have never claimed that gods don't exist. I claim, correctly, that no evidence has ever been presented for the existence of gods. I have no circular arguments. I am not arguing for the existence of any experience, for any supernatural beings, or for any reasons for belief in supernatural beings. So contrary to your example, I would never say "Because god doesn't exist." I am agnostic with respect to the existence of gods. I would say that it hasn't yet been established that gods exists at all, so we cannot operate from an a priori assumption that they do exist, and the judge our experiences based on that. The burden of proof lies on the claimant. Re: your last ice example: You are incorrect. I would NOT be justified in not believing in ice, because you have demonstrated that there is an avenue towards greater knowledge and direct experience of ice: i.e. traveling to see it, which in your example many people from our village have done. As long as I know that that option is available, and I do not take it, I am not justified in simply saying that ice doesn't exist. (which, as you can see, I am not doing with gods, for I have never claimed that gods don't exist.) If I understand that there is more knowledge to be had about ice, but i, for whatever reason, cannot travel to see it, then I can resign to a very rational stance regarding the existence of ice: "I don't know." That's exactly the stance that science has with respect to everything we have yet to explain. It's a good stance; a healthy one. It leads to a greater effort to learn more about the unknown. But again, saying "I don't know" about ice does not make it "reasonable" for me to go ahead and believe in it. You did not really answer my question about supplanting a supernatural explanation for something that has no explanation. Your quote from William F. Buckley illustrates this well. What explanation would he give, then, for how this omnipotent being came into existence? And how would it be any more satisfactory than the explanation of gods was over the "molecular structure of a mutton chop" at that time? Buckley knew that an omnipotent being could not be explained nor could it be falsified. Thus, it was a good cop-out, because it stagnates all discussion on the matter. Any rational person can see that that does not translate to good 'reasons' for believing in the existence of gods. My point about the appeal to majority was not to discount religion in general, so your reply is misdirected. I was responding to your statement: "Wouldn't all of our similar testimonies be at least some type of minimal evidence…" No, they would not. I side with David Hume's sentiment: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish." Do you have answers to the questions I presented at the end of the last round?