If you believe that the central hypothesis of atheism can be supported by empirical evidence, I'm interested.
The "central hypothesis of atheism"? What would that be?
If you're referring to
not holding a belief in a god or gods, that's not a hypothesis. But even if it were, it is easily supported by empirical evidence. We know from extensive experience that fictional characters in books don't exist and that anecdotal claims only evidence that someone thought they saw or experienced something that they couldn't otherwise explain,
not that they evidence the subject of that claim being actual.
Regardless, the implication in your fallacy is that there is a "central hypothesis of
theism" that is "supported by empirical evidence" and that's false. Again, there is a fundamental difference between an experience and correctly assessing--i.e., objectively establishing, to the best of our abilities--what that experience actually consisted of.
We know, for example, that human brains are extremely easy to manipulate and human perception is disturbingly susceptible to all manner of malfunction/damage/mistakes/confirmation bias, etc.
There are countless examples of eye-witnesses literally swearing on a bible that the person that
raped them--something so intimate and extended as to seemingly be impossible for a victim to get wrong--and yet,
it occurs.
Likewise, we know the alarming fact that many confessions of serious, heinous crimes--murder, no less--have likewise been false, something that seems so counter intuitive to the majority of us that many today still don't believe it can actually happen.
We know about Stockholm syndrome and
shared psychotic disorders and
mass hysteria and, of course, the well known "religious vision" component to certain forms of
epilepsy.
Hell, we ALL know that we dream at night and are therefore fully capable of generating entire worlds that, at the time, seem so real and legitimate that they often have "real world" effects (such as wet dreams and sleepwalking and the like).
Iow, it has been abundantly and conclusively established that human perception should always be distrusted and tested and retested, which is precisely why the so-called "scientific method" was created in the first place and why rules of logic were formed; because we cannot trust our senses and need exhaustive measures to quintuple check our results and observations.
It is also (likewise) the basis of your own alleged agnosticism. I say "alleged" because of your posting history, but also because agnosticism in general is actually the more unsupportable position, for precisely these reasons. In professing to hold no position on either the existence or the non-existence of a god or gods, you are merely tacitly holding a positive position. I.e., you are simply a theist. Claiming to be "agnostic" is really just a disingenuous
get out of the argument free card for precisely the above reasons.
We know anecdote is not evidence of the
content/subject of the claim; merely that someone experienced something not readily explicable. But in so many
quadrillions of such instances throughout history, the answer has
always turned out to be something explicable.
When you have so many billions of like claims ALL proven false, it goes beyond a preponderance of evidence, so to nevertheless assert agnosticism in regard to such a mountain of supporting evidence actually contradicts the whole reasoning behind agnosticism axiomatically.
Iow, we have ALL evidence disproving and zero evidence proving what is actually a
single, never proved positive claim that is thousands of years old, regardless of how many times it has been regurgitated since that first time one of our ancestors made up the notion of a god.
To assert agnosticism in light of that overwhelming mountain of evidence disproving a millenias old claim--itself the rather obvious result of an honest, but simple ignorance--is, again, just a disingenuous way of saying, "I'm a theist, but I don't want to be held accountable for my beliefs."
