Why is your prior so strong ? Is this due to the usual somewhat arbitrary combination of your genetics and upbringing -- which, IMO, is where most of our priors come from -- or is there some other reason ?

Virtually entirely due to my upbringing.

Hmm, well, I hope you don't see me as one of those people.

No, I don't see you as one of those people. Such people are to atheism as militant fundamentalists are to any religion; they're there, they're outspoken, they won't listen to anyone who disagrees with them, and they're fortunately very rare.

All of the evidence for the existence of gods (of any kind) that I have ever seen was either faked for a profit (weeping statues, faith healing, etc.), hearsay (friend of a friend of a cousin who heard about this one time...), or unfalsifiable ("god acts in mysterious ways"). What's worse, many phenomena that have been historically attributed to direct intervention by gods -- such as thunder, lightning, living tissue, formation of planets, rainbows, volcanic eruptions, disease, etc. -- have since then been explained in terms of purely natural mechanisms. This leads me to believe that future acts of god(s) would likewise be reduced.

I've given a bit of thought to the idea of proving the existence of miracles in a laboratory setting. It runs into a few problems.

For a start, let's divide miracles into two types; the once-off miracle, which happens only once and cannot be reproduced under laboratory conditions, and the repeatable miracle, which happens every time the right conditions are in place.

For obvious reasons, the once-off miracle is not suitable; since it cannot be reproduced, it cannot be used in a scientific context to show more than coincidence.

So let us then consider the repeatable miracle. For the purposes of discussion, I will pick out one potential example; let us say that all fires refuse to burn any orphan. This would be reproducible in a laboratory, and it would be clearly miraculous, by our current understanding of science.

Now, let us consider a world where no fire had ever burnt an orphan. How would it differ from our world? Well, there are a few obvious ways - almost all firemen would be orphans, it would be possible to prove a parent's death by checking if their children are burnt by a candle flame, and some psychopaths would kill their own parents to become fireproof.

And scientists would struggle to find a mechanism for the fireproofness of orphans. Sooner or later, someone would suggest something that sounded vaguely believable... and it would be tested. If it fails the test, then someone else will suggest something else, and so on. The history of science is full of theories that later turned out to be false - phlogiston, luminiferous aether - and were replaced by better theories. In this case, the theory would be wrong (since it's direct divine influence saving all the orphans) - but unless it could be disproved, it would be accepted (and if it could be disproved, it would be replaced).

Either way, the laboratory tests wouldn't say 'miracle'.

If you posit the existence of an incredibly powerful and mysterious entity -- be it a god, or an AI, or a Matrix Lord, or whatever -- then how can I prove to you that any given phenomenon was not caused by him (it/them/etc.) ?

Quite honestly, I haven't the faintest idea. Trying to prove the non-existence of God is exactly like proving a negative, because it is a negative.

What criteria do you use to judge whether any given event was caused by the god, or by some perfectly natural mechanism (the exact nature of which may or may not be known to you).

All perfectly natural mechanisms were set in place by God as well.

Hmm, I think I do disagree with you on something (other than our conclusions, that is). When I consider a piece of writing, I consider all the things that you mention, but I also compare the setting and the events in the book to those in the real world.

Thus, for example, if I were to read a story that is written in the style of a news report, about perfectly ordinary people who live in modern-day San Francisco, behave in ways consistent with human nature, and fight vampires -- then I would still discount the story as fiction, because I am quite certain that vampires don't exist (given the total lack of evidence for them). The same applies to elves, magic users, alien visitors, etc.

That said, I am still not clear about your own approach. From my perspective, the vast majority of the Old and New testaments is written in the same way as the Book of Job, with the possible exception of commandments ("thou shalt not do X" / "thou must do Y") and the infamous "begats" in Chronicles.

Presumably, you would disagree, so could you perhaps contrast Job with some other passage, which you do take to be literal ?

The infamous 'begats' in Chronicles have a problem, in that they assume that Adam and Eve were real (that's where the biblical literalists get their 'the Earth is six thousand years old' from; counting generations and making some assumptions about how long people live).

As for literal; that's a very high bar to meet. I often hear (and even make) statements which are intended to communicate a true fact, but which are not literally true; and even in court, eye-witness statements may and often do conflict on minor details.

So, given that I hold it to the bar of 'eye-witness statement' or, in parts, 'hearsay' rather than to the higher bar of 'every last literal word perfectly true', I shall present to you the four Gospels as an example