Before we look at any specific claim about gods, let’s agree on the ground rules. Not special rules for religion: the same rules everyone already uses when testing a new medicine, building a bridge, or deciding whether to trust a stranger’s story.
Think about what happened with disease. For centuries, illness meant divine punishment, and the treatment was prayer. Penicillin arrived only when people started investigating what was actually causing sickness. The method that found germ theory is the same method that finds reliable answers about anything, and this section lays out its handful of core principles. Everything else on the site builds on them.
The Foundations
Who Has to Prove It?
Whoever makes a claim carries the burden of backing it up. Skeptics don’t have to disprove anything. This one principle, applied evenly, changes how every religious claim looks.
Claims You Can’t Test
Some claims fit every possible outcome: recovery proves God, death proves God’s plan. A claim nothing could ever contradict isn’t explaining the world. It’s just riding along with it.
Russell’s Teapot
An undetectable teapot orbits the sun, and you can’t prove it doesn’t. Russell’s famous thought experiment shows why “you can’t disprove it” was never a reason to believe anything.
The Simplest Answer Usually Wins
Occam’s Razor: when two explanations fit the evidence, prefer the one with fewer assumptions. Naturalism needs matter, energy, and laws. Theism needs all that plus an invisible realm.
Every Mystery Solved So Far
Lightning, disease, earthquakes, heredity, the heavens: every mystery humanity has solved turned out to have a natural explanation. Five centuries, one direction, zero exceptions.
What Would It Take to Believe a Miracle?
David Hume’s simple test: is it more likely that a natural law was suspended, or that a report is mistaken? A fair standard for miracle stories from every tradition, including your own.
How to Use This Section
Each page stands on its own, but they’re arranged in a natural order: once you see where the burden of proof sits, you’ll see why untestable claims are a problem; the teapot shows why nobody can carry the burden of disproof; the razor and the track record of naturalism show which kind of explanation keeps winning; and Hume’s test handles the testimony that remains. As you read, you’ll also start recognizing familiar thinking traps, appeals to ignorance, circular reasoning, special pleading. We’ve collected all of them in How Our Brains Fool Us.
A Note on Tone
None of this is about anger or mockery. Billions of thoughtful people hold sincere religious beliefs, working honestly with real questions about meaning and mortality. What follows examines claims, not people. You can care deeply about believers, be one yourself, even, and still ask whether the claims hold up. Asking is the whole point.