Hmm....
Well, this is all very interesting.
Since I last caught up with this thread, almost 300 more posts have been added, but there's still precious little that the theists have posted in terms of evidence.
Jan Ardena's focus in the thread has been on making excuses for why he can't or won't present any evidence. There's essentially no useful on-topic content in his posts, so they can be safely ignored.
Yazata attempted to come to Jan's rescue by summarising a few of William Lane Craig's arguments for God, most of which do not involve evidence but instead try to create a logical progression that points to God, based on dubious initial assumptions. A lot of Craig's arguments, when you look at them closely, sneak in God as a hidden premise at the start. The result is that they end up begging the question. It is hardly surprising that Craig's conclusions end up with God, when that's exactly what he starts with.
A detailed examination of the many flaws in Craig's various arguments would take this thread off-topic, I fear. Besides, that which is presented with no supporting argument can just as easily be dismissed with no supporting argument. For those who are interested, here is an interesting article about William Lane Craig, his arguments and his debating methods. It also includes refutations of Craig's arguments:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_Lane_Craig
So Jan agrees with everything Craig ever wrote about God? Good for Jan. But an expression of Jan's personal beliefs is not a response to the question in the opening post of this thread. Clearly, 900 posts in, Jan has no intention of addressing the topic of the thread, so his contribution to this thread is just noise.
Musika has complained at length that empiricism is not a good way to get at evidence that God is real. We must use non-empirical epistemologies instead, he says. This is all well and good, but I have yet to see him present any evidence that God is real, derived from these non-epistemological methods. In short, Musika has concentrated on telling all and sundry that we are approaching the whole evidence-collection business the wrong way, but as far as coming up with the goods goes, his own superior evidence-collection methods haven't yet borne any fruit either. Has he actually put forward any evidence for his God in this thread? I don't think he has, but maybe I missed it.
A few other theists have thrown in the odd sentence or two suggesting various evidences. I'll try to sort through those posts soon.
I'm in two minds about what to do with all the off-topic excuses and personal rubbish that has been added to the thread in the past 300 or so posts. On the one hand, leaving them
in situ speaks fairly eloquently as to Jan Ardena's complete lack of good faith in this discussion, in particular. And in a general sense, the longer this thread goes on and the more excuses the main theist participants make as to why they can't or won't try to respond in simple terms to the direct question of the thread, the worse the theist case for God looks in respect to the claim that God is evidenced. But on the other hand, all the petty insults and stonewalling might, by sheer volume, act effectively as the kind of smokescreen that Jan is trying to put up to hide his inability to address the topic. In other words, the casual reader might fail to see the wood for the trees.
Previously, I thought it was appropriate to split the off-topic nonsense to a separate garbage-collection thread. I would appreciate your thoughts, readers, on whether the latest prevarications and attempts to distract should be shifted to the same thread, or left here as a kind of testament in themselves to the weakness of the case of the particular group of theists we have attracted.
This post, as I'm sure you've noticed, is meta. I intend to respond to what new substance there is that has actually addressed the topic in the last 300 posts (for example, Musika has earned a thoughtful response on certain points), but it might be another few days before I have time to devote attention to that.
