Something regarding atheism vs religion - not sure yet

First, I need to clarify what I meant by Devine Revelation since it wasn't the best use of words. A better phrase would have been God Initiated Contact (GIC). In other words, in a world where God doesn't exist people have no choice but to figure things out on their own. In a world where God does exist, this God could choose to reach out in some way. So depending on whether God exists or not, we can logically deduce that we either have two sources of information to work with, Reason and Science (R&S), or three sources, R&S and GIC. And you are right that any such divine contact would be subject to R&S.However, I am not mentioning this to introduce an additional source of knowledge into the conversation but to point out that since theists and atheists agree on at least two of the three, the logical place to start the conversation is with the two we agree on. Moreover, what we conclude using reason and science will affect how we approach GIC so it makes sense to focus on R&S first. Basically, it is premature to get into a discussion on CIG at this point in time.Beyond that, there are several points that, based on what you've said here or in the side comments, might or might not need further clarification. I will list them but I don't think we'll have time to address all of them in detail so I am going to focus on just one. I think a discussion of Methodological Naturalism will prove most useful so I will focus on that unless you think we need to address something else first. 1) I like what you said about the null hypothesis but I'm not completely sure how you meant it. Are you saying:a) between the options 'God exists' and 'God doesn't' exist the default is 'we don't know.' Or,b) between the hypotheses 'creation,' 'naturalism,' or 'whatever else' the default position is 'we don't know?'I use the second because, like I mentioned previously, the starting question is, 'how did we get here', and, to come to a conclusion, we have to compare the different hypotheses to see which is more likely if any.2) I'm assuming you mentioned the Bayesian to explain why extraordinary evidence is required and I agree with what you said but here is why extraordinary evidence is also required for the alternative/competing hypothesis. For naturalism to be true a series of dilemmas have to be resolved explaining how the universe got from its original state to what it is today.The simplest way to explain this is to think back to what it would have been like for an eighteenth century biologist starting to recognize the complexities of living organisms and having no mechanism to explain how this could emerge naturally. To such a person a naturalistic hypothesis would have seemed ludicrous.3) I don't know for sure but we might need to spend some time defining the supernatural. Many definitions make it so that the supernatural cannot exist by definition, which is a waste of everyone's time. One of the things that I appreciated about Boudry's paper was that he gave several examples of bad definitions and then provided what I think is a much better one.I also watched Scott Clifton's talk, (which incidentally I was looking for just a few days ago) and I had a similar issue with it. Towards the end he was talking about how God's reality would also be 'natural.' And, in principle, I agree. But God's 'natural' would be so different than ours that it doesn't help the conversation not to make a distinction between the two realities. And natural/supernatural is just as good a distinction as any but we can always pick different terms if needed.4) You mentioned that for some concepts of God like the first cause God and the deist God there isn't sufficient evidence to dismiss. But I do think it's important to work through each of these concepts in order of complexity. This allows us to eliminate variables and to determine where the fork in the road is in our understanding since that's where the debate should take place.5) Methodological Naturalism (As mentioned, I will spend the remaining time here).It isn't exactly that I disagree with you but I do need to make a distinction:a) Present day supernatural interventionYou are right that any interaction of the supernatural with our reality WOULD be subject to science. If intercessory prayer worked consistently science would be able to detect that it worked even if unable to explain it. But there would need to be some consistency and repeatability or else other explanations would be more likely. This applies to any other kind of supernatural event that breaks into our reality.b) Historical supernatural intervention (creation)As an example, let's say that it was God that created the first living cells and evolution took over from there. Methodological naturalism (MN) means that scientists looking back and trying to understand angiogenesis will develop naturalistic hypotheses to try to explain how life emerged from non-life. This doesn't mean that this supernatural event is no longer subject to science but rather that it is addressed through a process of elimination rather than directly. We don't just come up with supernatural hypotheses in order to try to explain it because we wouldn't know what predictions to make based on such a hypothesis. Moreover, if we go straight to a supernatural hypothesis we might miss out on a naturalistic explanation that we could have discovered had we stuck with it a little longer. So we approach the problem by looking for a natural explanation but the likelihood that the event was supernatural increases as the naturalistic hypotheses we do come up with fail to resolve the problem. In theory, given enough time, science could advance far enough to know for a fact that all the possible naturalistic explanations have been tried and have failed. And, in that sense, the historical supernatural would still be subject to science. In practice however, it's hard to ever really know that we have exhausted all the possible naturalistic explanations. Another thing that should be mentioned here is the tentative nature of every scientific hypothesis and how certainty increases over time. Predictions are made, experiments are conducted and data is collected and, as this data is accumulated and consistently lines up with expectation the certainty increases. Depending on the problem being studied, this process could take months, years, decades or even centuries. There could be initial confirmation of a hypothesis based on limited data and, a long time might pass before we collect sufficient data to determine that the hypothesis was actually wrong. So it's important to have a sense of how far along we are in the process with any given question. We might for the time being feel that we are well on our way to resolving a problem when, in another century or two, scientists will know that we were way off. So when someone says that the only acceptable evidence for God is scientific evidence (in the context of the 3-premise argument against God in my previous comment,) they are asking for something NOW which realistically science would not be able to produce for centuries or even millennia, if at all. 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.I personally don't find this argument compelling since, if I were the creator I would consider it poor engineering to create something that would require my constant attention to work properly. If I had to constantly intervene supernaturally to cause rain in order to keep things alive, I didn't do a very good job building the system.It's probably best not to go much further without first getting some feedback so I'll let you respond to what I have so far.