1. [Appearance of design] does not necessarily equal [actually designed]--you'd have to justify making that leap. 2. Even granting that the universe has an external cause doesn't tell us anything about what that cause could be; you'd have to demonstrate the cause has the attributes you're giving it. 4. The veracity of a claim is not impacted whatsoever by the number of people who believe it (6.) nor the strength of their belief.

The appropriate philosophical stance should be to present canonical facts which is that there are three positions: theism, agnosticism, and atheism, rather than argue your personal values, at least according to long standing cultural norms here: philosophy.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/474/…

I'm not going to downvote, but PhilSE has historically resisted the goal of becoming a crappy debating site on the Internet, and sticks to the goal of providing editoralized summation of published materials on views. Your metaphilosophical presumptions here are comfortable at Christianity StackExchange, but they are not the norm here.

If philosophy itself should not be identified with any ideology, or even any specific claim to know something or whatever reason to believe in something, then the "reasons" listed here are, imo, perfectly fine, at first sight, as reasons... Whether they are sound, rational, coherent reasons, or sth that deserves any attention, is still a question. (In my eyes they are not coherent or sound, but I still upvoted this answer :) )

@JD But if the question is, "Is there more evidence for God than Russell's teapot", and the answer gives some specific examples, wouldn't that mean the question is off limits if such an answer is? It seems like other answers on this site often give specific examples to questions, rather than always being canonical or even referencing literature at all, whereas here I do at least cite some relevant books?

1. I'm suggesting best practices, not overwhelming current practices. Certainly, it's arguable most people here "do" philosophy instead of "report" on it. I only took an interest because you have an interest in moderation. 2. If you had phrased it as "According to modern theologians..." instead of "Overwhelmingly yes" then the response becomes much more neutral, because you acknowledge that your answer is coming from specific metaphysical positions. Evangelical Christians tend to come to the site and evangelize by proselytizing the Bible rather citing philosophical literature...

citing pseudoscientific discourse like intelligent design as science rather than philosophy of science which overwhelmingly rejects ID. And again, your answer presumes that anything you listed counts as professional philosophy rather than primitive attempts at theology. A lot of what you say, for instance, wouldn't pass muster with the Catholic church, and as the dominant Christian church, it's even arguably heresy. So, again, I'm not downvoting; I'm simply pointing out your answer lives in the rather limited and primitive space of US evangelical theology and comes off as preaching. $0.02.

And for the record, each of your instances of "evidence" fall apart with a naturalized epistemology (SEP). Epistemology certainly requires that appearance of truth and existence of belief do not justify the claim something is true or exists. Each of your claims to support your argument is at glance specious reasoning and broadcasts that you have no epistemological training.

If you want, I can walk you through them in a chat room.

I don't think this should be downvoted. Making a good case for "yes there is more evidence" should be upvoted, even if it won't convince you (or me), the reader. Particularly since this is the only answer that stakes the unequivocal-yes position, and it provides an overview of a number of common arguments for the position.

(If you want to improve the answer, Peter, I think you could cite somebody for #2, since "first mover" is one of the absolute classic arguments for why God is more necessary than a teapot.

Good idea @Kaia, I've included a reference to Aquinas and Craig.

@microondas "...does not necessarily equal..." - But something doesn't have to be absolute proof to be good evidence. I suppose that in most disputes, most pieces of great evidence are not absolute and unqualified proof when taken in isolation.

@JD Thanks for the link, I'll try to look at it. But if an epistemology can't distinguish between the teapot which has no claimed evidence, and the evidences presented here at least in theory, it seems like a defective epistemology. I'd argue that both evolution (UCD) and creation are a kind of forensic science, and in that sense, both equally a philosophy of science, rather than the observable-testable-repeatable kind.

@PeterRankin sure, but you haven't even made ANY case that appearance of design indicates that it IS in fact designed, in this case.

@PeterRankin Russell's teapot is what Dennett would call an intuition pump. It's not meant to be treated as an epistemological theory. It's meant to draw attention to the fact that a lack of physical evidence according to modern science is a powerful blow against ontological commitment. And things without physical existence are best understood in a contemporary knowledge lens in terms of operationalization. And said operational definitions for God or gods usually revolves around...

supernaturalism. Now, the alternative approach is to use rational, rather than empirical methods. Descartes in his Meditations has pioneered this, however, modern rationalism usually relies on sophisticated understanding of logic and rationality. For instance... your 'sociological evidence', an abundance of belief, is argument to popularity... so where you need to grow your vocabulary is a solid understanding of the basis of contemporary epistemology and understand the...

dichotomy that presents itself as evidentialism and reliabilism (SEP). But I'd first suggest the work of Robert Audi so you get a clear view of what modern rationality and knowledge entails. There's nothing wrong with quoting the Bible, but the Bible is marginally a philosophical work by modern standards. This is a divide that has developed between theology and secular philosophy since the advent of natural theology. Modern Catholic theologians, like the Pope himself, are scientists by training

So, you have to confront that modern evidentialism, secular AND theological, places a heavy emphasis on scientific evidence, and then cultivate a view on that if you want to do contemporary philosophy. I'd recommend Blackwell's. I'm not attacking you or your position, but I'm trying to get across that what passes for contemporary philosophy is the sort of stuff found on philpapers.org

@JD I've created a chat room myself to avoid too many comments (first time, hopefully I did this right!)

1. Design is "evident" in nature if you don't look too deeply. Once you dig into evolution (and how even the most complex interrelated body parts can be boiled down to small incremental steps driven by mutation and natural selection) and how our bodies are a disorganised mess that would make no sense for a competent designer to design as is (but makes perfect sense if animals are just stumbling through evolution, repeatedly adapting to whatever environment they happen to find themselves in)...

Once you dig into that, the "appearance of design" thing falls apart rather quickly and rather spectacularly.

2. The Kalam has more flaws than the number of premises in the argument.

3. There are many deleterious mutations, yes, but asserting that this is "faster than natural selection" is just a creationist assertion that's contrary to the tons and tons of evidence we have of common descent and increasing complexity. Related question on Biology: Is our genome decaying...?

4. I wouldn't call many people believing something "evidence", or at least it's not (good) evidence "for" that thing being true. To use this as a differentiating criteria from the teapot suggests that it IS good evidence, that it gets you closer to that thing being true (otherwise it would be irrelevant). But a lot of people used to believe all sorts of things that now seems absurd to us, because we have so much evidence to the contrary. One needs to consider WHY people believe.

5. Far from "excellent", the evidence for the resurrection is... really weak. Most attempts I've heard to make that case involve arguments like "this other guy mentioned a preacher named Jesus once, which is strong evidence that this particular Jesus existed and was the son of God and died and resurrected and performed all those miracles and all those people saw him after the resurrection". Or they're like "this guy said 500 people saw Jesus, thus we know 500 people saw Jesus".

Many questionable inferences and all sorts of leaps in logic.

6. Many people martyr themselves for other religions, for cults and for whatever else. No-one (respectable) is saying people don't actually sincerely believe in their particular religion, so this is mostly just addressing a claim no-one is making. Someone being really convinced of something doesn't say much about whether that thing is true.

Many apologists realise that you need someone with actual direct evidence of something (e.g. apostles) to be a martyr for it to be meaningful, to challenge the "they were lying" claim (which, again, no-one is making). But we have little to no evidence that most of those supposed martyrs were actually martyrs, or that there actually even existed a person claiming to have had direct evidence of Jesus' resurrection or his miracles (the gospels has anonymous authors).

"But belief in God is faith in 'the evidence of things not seen' (Hebrews 11:1)" - well, actually belief in magic grasshopper is faith in the evidence of things not seen (it says so on this piece of paper I have next to me). If this was supposed to set God apart from the magic grasshopper, I don't see how it's doing that, at all. The point of "anything you can say about God, I can say about [whatever thing]" is that most of what's asserted about God is just that: asserted. ...

There is little mention of God in the rest of your answer. You're relying on a lot of questionable inferences: the universe began, therefore (my particular) God exists. Things decay, therefore God exists. People believe in God, therefore God exists. A guy resurrected (?), therefore God exists. People are really sure God exists, therefore God exists (#4 and #6 actually sound really similar when you break it down like that). ...

All of that is mostly/entirely distinct from God existing, the conclusions don't follow from your premises, so whatever assertions you end up making about God has about the same amount of support as those same assertions about a magic grasshopper.

Although this comparison is not typically used in response to arguments like these arguments, but is rather used when theists preach or quote the Bible at us - that's just assertion after assertion about God, and there's typically nothing to back that up beyond "I believe it" or "some guy said it".

1-3 are equally "evidence" for any other religion proposing some powerful creator god. My position is that origin-type arguments like those make essentially zero progress towards the truth of any given religion or the existence of any deity worth concerning ourselves with. 4 and 6 are similarly "evidence" for Islam (and probably also for some religions further back in history).

Could the root issue be with the idea of probabilistic evidence? I think most evidence in practical disputes is probabilistic. For example, if you see a chair that looks solid, you assume it will be safe to sit on, even though technically, there may not be a direct correlation; it could be a realistic prop made out of paper-like material. But I'd say appearance of strength still lends to credibility, even if technically probabilistic.

@PeterRankin I dont consider that as evidence. I consider it a point of interest; it is notable that they would die for the belief and there might be value in investigating. But that point itself doesnt add support to any fact about their belief, just a fact about how strongly they believe it. And since we know strong belief can be (and often is) held by people who are incorrect, that itself is not real evidence.

@PeterRankin I'm not sure I'm following that analogy. A chair looking solid means it shares some properties with chairs we know from experience are solid, and most chairs we have proven to be solid. But I dont see how that is analogous to people willing to die for their beliefs.

I havent been exposed to an overwhelming number of cases where people dying for their beliefs are absolutely correct. People are willing to die for mutually contradictory things all the time, my experience doesnt correlate self-sacrifice with truth, just how strong a belief is.

@JMac Well, I guess I'd differ on that point then. I agree that sincerity of belief doesn't imply truth, but I still think it adds to plausibility. If someone came barrelling out of the woods saying they saw a bear, I wouldn't necessarily believe it, but after seeing the look on their face, I would think they probably saw something! :)

@JMac As for the chair analogy, it wouldn't have to be an overwhelming number of cases as I see it; it's just that the probabilistic value of the argument would have to be adjusted accordingly.

@PeterRankin I would be inclined to believe that person too, because I know bears exist in woods, and accepting that belief has minimal impact on my life. Religion is not such a straightforward and trivial claim.

@PeterRankin But how do you even determine how to adjust that probability without an overwhelming number of correct martyr experiences? Again, the visual properties of the chair correspond with physical properties of solidness, and you have many past experiences of this holding true. But for people who die for beliefs, this is not so clear cut, because people frequently die for beliefs that are either clearly wrong, or at odds with another belief someone has died for.

@JMac True about religious claims being practically impactful, but I think that's getting into a separate question...whether we consider a statement probably true, versus putting our trust in it. I don't think the personal import of a claim has a bearing on actual plausibility.

I.e., it's one thing to say, "This roller coaster is probably safe, but I need more than a 'probably' to ride it," versus saying, "I won't consider this roller coaster to be probably safe, because I don't want to ride it." I'd consider the second statement fallacious.

@JMac I'll have to give your question on probability weighting some thought. I feel like it's a significant piece of evidence going for it compared to the teapot or grasshopper example, but I'd have to think more about the specifics.

(@JMac "I'd have to think more about the specifics"....i.e., about how to put a precise number on the martyrs argument, that is, in case my last comment was unclear.)