But you’re the one who said that we can see the effects of God. Those are generally referred to as miracles. If you did not mean that, what effects were you talking about when you said we can see the effects of God and how would we distinguish those from what it would be like if there wasn’t a deity involved in them?
The universe exists, does it not? As for the second part, I don't see how you could... we only have the one universe to observe. Where's the control for this experiment?
Indeed, I don't see how a Newtonian miracle would prove that God had created the universe itself. Wouldn't it just prove that he's capable of breaking it? I can break a lot more machines I know how to make.
This is exactly what the OP was getting on about. Whenever someone tries to pin down a Christian on what it is that they’re talking about, the definition changes from person to person and its impossible to have a conversation because they’re all referring to different things.
Shocking. It is almost as though people might be different from one another, or have different opinions about things.
People do have different opinions. But in mainstream religions, that is not allowed; It's called 'heresy', and up until very recently could get you seriously set on fire.
Only in a secular society is such a thing NOT shocking. History tells us that such societies are a rarity. So from a broad perspective of humanity, yes, it is deeply shocking.
The explosion of different religious beliefs within Christianity is a strong indication that none is correct; And for centuries the various branches of Christianity have tried to resolve that glaring problem by violence, up to and including all out war.
The very idea of religious freedom is one which has been viewed with horror by most Christian (and Islamic) societies for almost all of history; Tolerating freedom of religion is an idea that has only become mainstream in the last couple of centuries, in a very small part of the world - and the result of freedom of religion is fragmentation of opinion.
A failure to move towards consensus is generally diagnostic of an erroneous hypothesis. If any of the religions or sects were based in fact, that sect would tend to dominate over time, if only because their expectations about the best course of action in any given circumstances would tend to be dashed less often than those of their heretical brethren.
Religions look exactly as we might predict them to look under the hypothesis that no gods exist outside fiction. They look nothing like we would predict under the hypothesis that there is a single god, or even a most powerful god amongst a pantheon.
Observed reality is consistent with atheism, or with a highly diverse polytheism of almost powerless small gods who are in constant competition for influence on reality. The latter is needlessly unparsimonious, and suffers from being almost universally disbelieved, which is a major blow against the likelihood of any religion's being non-fictional.
Quite true.
