It is logical to believe no deities exist.

I have no issues with Con's first two contentions. I do however have an issue with Con's third claim. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence in the sense that you said before: if no evidence is show that leads one to believe something exists, there is no reason to believe it exists. The difference between God and the shoebox is that the deck of cards in the shoebox is a completely plausible claim. It is completely possible for the deck of cards to be in the shoebox. That claim does not go against known theories and scientific law. It is not a miraculous claim. The existence of God however, is. It is not a good comparison. God's existence is highly unlikely knowing what we know about how the universe works, especially if you believe in Biblical literalism. God's hand in our lives does not fit with modern science. How is he controlling our world? How is he controlling our behavior? We know how plants grow and how our behavior works, and there really is not room for God. We know that everything that occurs in our world occurs through natural, not supernatural, processes. So where is God? "A deity, by definition, is supernatural and therefore transcends our physical universe"- What does "transcends our physical universe" mean? Can we not only sense the physical? If so, how would we have any way of sensing that which transcends the physical? Metaphysical is just another word for supernatural. There is no reason to believe in the supernatural. The more progress we make, the more we find out that everything occurs because of natural processes. The only supernatural explanations people believe are the ones that haven't been completely disproved. We can rightly say that most supernatural explanations were created by people when they did not understand something. Is it logical to believe or even seriously consider the possibility of supernatural explanations knowing this? You can never completely rule them out, but rationally, one would not take them seriously without lots of evidence to suggest that they are correct. "if I had told you instead that there was an Orca whale in the shoebox, you would be justified in believing that claim to be false (since everything we know about Orca whales contradicts the notion that one can fit in a shoebox)."- God is an Orca in a shoebox. Like I said, God does not fit into what we know about the universe. Con is under the assumption that there is no evidence for God's nonexistence. I disagree. Now all my evidence is circumstantial and one cannot make a conclusive claim from it, but it is enough to make it logical for one not to believe in a deity. We have had countless religions over the course of human history. Most of them we now do not take seriously and call them "myths." Those religions had no more evidence than that of the modern ones. Why should we take the modern ones any more seriously? All religions claim that all other religions are at least partially wrong. Is it really very likely that one of them happens to be right? Is it not more likely that they are all wrong and that no deity exists? There are also natural, much more plausible, explanations for most "supernatural" claims. For example, people can see "ghosts" if the contingencies around them were similar enough to known stimuli where they normally would have seen the dead person. There are also natural explanations for the creation of religion and mysticism. Simply put, when humans could not explain something, they made up stories which over time developed into religions. My comparison will be the classic "invisible unicorn." The existence of an invisible unicorn is a fantastical claim since there is no evidence for its existence, yet its nonexistence is not provable. The circumstantial evidence against this claim is that a unicorn has never been documented to have existed, neither has a truly invisible creature. Is it really logical to reserve judgement completely for something that has no evidence for its existence, has circumstantial evidence against its existence, but that cannot be proved to not exist? No! If a claim is fantastical and has no evidence for its existence, one can logically believe it does not exist since the probability of its existence is very low. One cannot logically make an affirmative claim, but one can logically believe.