Something regarding atheism vs religion - not sure yet

What is this debate about? Is this a debate? I am defending my beliefs, my methods, and my positions. I expect you to do the same. What do you believe? And why do you believe it? Through the course of this debate, and in a long exchange of private emails beforehand, you have been completely unwilling to answer these basic questions. Please answer them now. Again, I have been forthright and honest enough to answer those same questions, and I am very willing to provide additional details on my beliefs and methods. Do you believe that the Christian god exists? Do you believe that the Christian god exists in some part because of private - or public - communication from the Christian god? Please describe the nature of this communication. What evidence do you have for this communication? Just your own personal testimony and the testimony of other Christians? (Which is still just hearsay, albeit on a massive scale, which does make it slightly more compelling - barring certain objections that I can go into.) Do you have anything other than hearsay evidence for this presumably large-scale telepathic communication? ...The default position for every question of objective factual questions of our shared reality is "I don't know / I am undecided". Does a god exist? Without examining any evidence, the proper position is "I don't know / I am undecided". Does the universe have a beginning moment of time? Without examining any evidence, the proper position is "I don't know / I am undecided". If the universe had a beginning moment of time, what was the cause or explanation for the first moment of time? Without examining any evidence, the proper position is "I don't know / I am undecided". When you gather relevant information, aka evidence, only then can you move towards some concrete claim, and only insofar as the evidence supports the claim. ...Currently, I am firmly of the position that the words "natural" and "supernatural" as a dichotomy are not useful. They don't name concepts that are useful in discussions like this. The word "supernatural" seems to serve no purpose or function except to be used as a "get out of justification free card". You said that the way to show something is supernatural is to discount every natural explanation. That's wrong. That is simply wrong. That can never work. For example, various flavors of "brain in a vat" are natural by standard conventions. Use the first "The Matrix" movie as an example. You can never discount that explanation because it's designed to be untestable, exactly like most god claims. In the Matrix hypothesis, we simple humans in The Matrix should expect that we will never get evidence that we're in The Matrix. First, because the Agents are really good at not producing that much evidence. Second, because the Agents regularly wipe the memory of humans in The Matrix who uncover the truth. The Matrix claim is a natural claim that you will never be able to disprove. Supernatural claims do not have a monopoly on the untestable. There are plenty of untestable natural claims too. The way to show something is supernatural is the same process to show that anything has any property. First, get a specific workable testabe definition for the property. Second, gather evidence which is more likely to exist if the proposition is true than if the proposition is false. For claims like those under discussion here, because of the massive number of competing claims, the only practical way that you can actually make inroads is to gather positive affirming evidence for your claim rather than evidence against some truly meager subset of competing claims. Even then, suppose you do show that some thing is supernatural. You complain about the vast size of the set of natural hypotheses. Have you taken a moment to stop and consider the size of the set of supernatural hypotheses? What do you gain by showing that something is supernatural? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just to drive this point home, and to share it with others. I can take the Christian bible and the Christian tradition where humanity is special, and I can replace "Earth" with "planet around some star", and replace "human" with "humanoid aliens of that planet". There's roughly a trillion trillion stars in the observable universe. With this process I can create a trillion trillion mutually incompatible god hypotheses that are all equally plausible. What good does it even do to show that a supernatural god exists in light of this? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The idea of a god in a general sense is not interesting. It captures far too many mutually incompatible and the range of gods is far too broad for us to derive anything useful. And remember that this trillion trillion hypotheses of Christian god variants is but a very small drop in the bucket of god hypotheses, and remember that god hypotheses is but a very small drop in the bucket of all supernatural hypotheses. Even first-cause god claims have plenty of alternatives. Maybe the universe is eternal in the past. Maybe the universe has a closed time-loop. Maybe some more exotic possibility - quantum theory and relativity should teach you that the world is weirder than you might first guess. If the universe had a beginning, maybe some non-intelligent thing is the cause, or maybe there is no cause. Further, I do not understand what the word "cause" means when applied to things outside of time. ...If you want to convince me that a god exists, you're going to need to present the same kind of evidence that is needed to convince me that you have a friend named Bob. Your mere personal testimony that you have a friend named Bob is a good start, but it's mere hearsay, and it's not all that compelling. In most circumstances, I might accept your claim because claims like this tend to be truthful rather than false or mistaken. However, if I had the slightest reason to suspect that you had a reason to be untruthful, then that would change. I have lots of knowledge that people lie about having friends all the time for reasons like vanity. In this particular case, I have lots of testimony from other people of other religions that you don't have a friend named Bob / your Christian god does not exist, which lowers the significance of your hearsay even further. Those same people give testimony that they have a friend named Charlie, and Charlie adamantly swears that Bob does not existence, which reduces the value of your hearsay testimony to basically zero. If you had a letter from Bob with Bob's signature, that would be a good start. However, if we also have lots of evidence that shows that this letter is heavily doctored and contains a massive treasure-trove of lies and falsehoods - just like your bible by the way - then your letter has near-zero evidentiary value. You could present Bob to me in person. That would be a good start. I suppose that it could just be a paid actor, but I wouldn't have a particularly strong reason to doubt your word nor the word of Bob at that point. If I were able to observe you interacting for an extended period of time, such as hanging out with you for several months at parties and get-togethers, then that would constitute really strong evidence. Unfortunately, your friend Bob, e.g. your god, has been hiding for several thousand years. He used to come to parties and do cool stuff like block out the sun and raise zombie armies, but he hasn't shown up in person since then. Now, imagine how I'd react if you said you never actually met Bob in person, and it was all based on a voice in your head. Let me stress that the kind of evidence I want for your friend Bob does not change if your friend Bob is a natural person, or a supernatural person. The question of natural-supernatural is simply irrelevant to the kind of evidence that I want. Now, if you further claim that Bob is 10 ft tall, or if you claim that Bob can do magic, of course I want additional evidence for that, but again please note that this is true for outrageous natural claims as well as outrageous supernatural claims. I will use the same methods and standards for natural claims and supernatural claims. I have background knowledge that supernatural claims are at best extremely rare, and so I will properly demand additional evidence for any purported supernatural claim. That's assuming of course that anyone presents me a sufficiently rigorous definition of "supernatural" that I can even work with. This is a difference in quantity, not in kind. I'll still accept all of the same kinds of evidence in both cases, but in one case, some amounts of evidence won't be good enough because of my background knowledge against claims of one of the two kinds. ..."Let me also mention in closing that another way people dismiss the supernatural is by pointing out that science has already resolved numerous puzzles that used to be considered supernatural: rain, earthquakes etc. There's no reason, they say, to think that given enough time, science will not also resolve every other remaining puzzle via a natural explanation. To me this basically equates to 'faith' in naturalism."But there's an important difference. That conclusion is based on actual real evidence that we can all see, plus the one of the best imaginable track records. Every time there has been a conflict which has had a clear winner, materialism has won, and religion has lost. Materialism has won an uncountable number of battles over an amazingly wide range of battles. Doing a simple induction and extrapolation is not "taking it on faith". It's not being a fool. A fool: Doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same result each time, and expecting a different result the next time. Science: Doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same result each time, and expecting the same result the next time. ...PS: Are you able and willing to name specific hypothetical evidence which, if found, would convince you that your Christian god does not exist?