Page "Existence of God" Paragraph 22

One approach, suggested by writers such as Stephen D. Unwin, is to treat ( particular versions of ) theism and naturalism as though they were two hypotheses in the Bayesian sense, to list certain data ( or alleged data ), about the world, and to suggest that the likelihoods of these data are significantly higher under one hypothesis than the other.

Most of the arguments for, or against, the existence of God can be seen as pointing to particular aspects of the universe in this way.

In almost all cases it is not seriously suggested by proponents of the arguments that they are irrefutable, merely that they make one worldview seem significantly more likely than the other.

However, since an assessment of the weight of evidence depends on the prior probability that is assigned to each worldview, arguments that a theist finds convincing may seem thin to an atheist and vice-versa.