"He totally ignores the plausibility assessments that are implicit when we suspend judgment on something.". Does he now? So why is (a) god more plausible that fairies? Dawkins's point is that god(s) have no more plausibility than fairies in your back yard; that the arguments for fairies are just as good as for god(s). So no, no straw-man there.

@MichaelK you're seriously asking why? My whole answer is about this! If you disagree with the reasons given above, fine, criticize them. But do not pretend I haven't given any justification. That's just too ridiculous.

@wolf-revo-cats Yeah, and you do it really poorly, which is why I down-voted. Essentially you are saying that the more removed something is from our immediate understanding, then the more plausible we should consider it. I say the opposite: the more removed, mysterious, intangible something is, the more doubtful we should be about it. You are familiar with the Sagan Standard, no doubt: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". You just argued the opposite: that the more extraordinary a claim is, the more credible and possible we should consider it. I call "nonsense".

@MichaelK I don't think your personal opinions have any value. Only arguments count. The rule “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is long debunked and based on an incomplete understanding of probability theory; the odds of the lottery results being 1 8 12 15 46 48 5 are extremely small, and so that's an extraordinary claim, yet if we read that somewhere in a normal newspaper (which is not extraordinary evidence), we would believe it without much skepticism.

@wolf-revo-cats I did provide an argument as to why I am of the opinion that your post argues poorly for your claim that Dawkins is straw-manning. Also your example with the odds of lottery number sequences vs extraordinary claims is just a plain non sequiteur. An unlikely event happening is not equal to making an extraordinary claim. An extraordinary claim would be to say "I can accurately predict the sequence every time, before it is drawn" and would require extraordinary evidence before we accept it as true. The god-hypothesis is more extraordinary than that.

@MichaelK I really fail to see any arguments. It feels more like … some new atheist soundbites. If “extraordinary” doesn't mean “unlikely” what does it mean then? You should give a definition for “extraordinary”! On the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation there's an article about parallel universes and speculation about their existence isn't called out as irrational. Is the claim “parallel universes exist” extraordinary?

@wolf-revo-cats The Sagan Standard that I am talking about ("Extraordinary evidence require extraordinary evidence") is not "new" in the least. It can be traced back for both Laplace and Hume. Laplace expressed it as "he weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness".

@wolf-revo-cats Hume expressed it: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish."

But that such stuff gets cooked up again seems pretty new; everybody knows that Laplace's concept of probability is fatally flawed. Merriam-Webster says that “unlikely” is a synonym for “extraordinary”, so…

Also, we aren't talking about miracles here. And how the falsehood of a testimony can be miraculous is probably something Hume didn't understand himself.

@wolf-revo-cats No, you are conflating probabilities with claims about miracles and/or supernatural beings acting on our reality. The claim that "If I roll a 20-side die 20 times, I will get a series of numbers" is not extraordinary at all.

@wolf-revo-cats Yes we are... Dawkins is commenting on whether claims about a miraculous being should be considered plausible or in any other way anything other than pure fantasy, as we do with fairies, unicorns and such.

I'm not conflating anything, I'm asking you to define “extraordinary claim”. If you define it so that it just means something like “claims of supernatural beings”, it's obviously a petitio principii.

A unicorn is just a horse with a horn. I don't know what's so miraculous about unicorns; the existence of the unicorn would be perfectly compatible with naturalism.

@wolf-revo-cats "A unicorn is just a horse with a horn". Sorry, but I will not engage in that querulousness. And your argument for the claim that Dawkins is straw-manning still sucks.

You just propagate your personal opinions and what you read from Dawkins. Precise thinking… not so much.

Merriam-Webster: “unicorn”: a mythical, usually white animal generally depicted with the body and head of a horse with long flowing mane and tail and a single often spiraled horn in the middle of the forehead.

@wolf-revo-cats To say "He totally ignores the plausibility assessments that are implicit when we suspend judgment on something" is just a big mess. Essentially you are arguing that just because agnostics have made an assessment that the god-hypothesis is plausible, then we must accept that it is more plausible than — say — a hypothesis about fairies.

@wolf-revo-cats According to your argument, if I make the assessment that I am talking to a religious believer that is bothered by getting the likelihood of their favourite deity existing compared to that fairy-tale creatures... then the fact that I have made that assessment means there must be something to it and therefore the assessment is more plausible than if I just made some stuff up about you.

@wolf-revo-cats I disagree... even though I get that feeling, I will not make that claim about you... because any such assessment is no better than if I just pulled some stuff out of my rear end. Both methods of creating claims about you are as invalid, and the argument should not be made that this is something that might be considered.

I'm just saying that depending on the usual, normal plausibility assessments humans make, God and fairies aren't analogous at all. And there's a difference between personally believing something and wanting others to accept your belief. If you believe that I'm a theist, I wouldn't call you irrational. But without evidence you can't call somebody else irrational if he doesn't accept your claim.

@wolf-revo-cats gods and fairies are entirely analogous in that the body of evidence for them are the same: non-existent. So when someone says "Well... we should consider that a god may be possible... but we should not do that with fairies", then that is an invalid argument made from special pleading.