How low a percentage does one need to assign a claim in order to declare it to be closed? I'd assign around a 5% chance that there exists something approximating God (using this liberally to include the large variety of entities which fall under that label). I suspect that my probability estimate is higher than many people on LW. (Tangent: I recently had a discussion with an Orthodox Jewish friend about issues related to Bayesianism, and he was surprised that I assigned the idea that high a probability. In his view, if he didn't have faith and had to assign a probability he said it might be orders of magnitude lower.) So how low a probability do we need to estimate before we consider something closed?

Moreover, how much attention should we pay to apologetics in general? We know that theology and apologetics are areas that have spent thousands of years of memetic evolution to be as dangerous as possible. They take almost every little opportunity to exploit the flaws in human cognition. Apologetic arguments aren't (generally) basilisk level, but they can take a large amount of cognitive resources to understand where they are wrong. After 10 or 15 of them, how much effort do we need to spend seeing if # 16 (variation of first cause argument number 8) is worth spending resources investigation? Also, given that there's a vibrant subset of the internet that is dedicated to handling just this question and related issues, why should LW be the forum for handling the issue?

There's a related issue: humans are overactive agent recognizers. We love to see patterns where none exist and see intelligence in random action. Theism fits with deep-seated human intuitions. In contrast, MWI, simulationism and full-scale Tegmark all clash strongly with human intuition. They may seem weird, but the weirdness may not be a product of evidential issues but rather that they clash with human intuitions. So putting them in the same category as religion may be misleading.

Incidentally, I'm curious, would you similarly object if LW said explicitly that homeopathy was a closed subject? What about evolution? Star formation? If these are different, why are they different?