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Hitchens’s Razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”1 The point Christopher Hitchens was making is that miracle claims asserted without objective evidence can be dismissed.
Ockham’s Razor has to do with the burden of proof. It’s placed squarely on the person making miraculous claims, since they require additional entities.
What doesn’t count as objective evidence are subjective feelings, inner voices, dreams, visions, or third person reports of them.
From the outset, I’m forced to admit we cannot, technically speaking, completely rule out the possibility of a god who performs hidden unevidenced miracles.
They’ll ask us to explain what science hasn’t yet explained, even though science has amassed enormous amounts of information so far. They’ll ask where this universe came from, or life itself. They’ll ask for objective evidence of beauty. They’ll go on to ask us to account for the laws of logic, or to solve the problem of induction, or to explain how we know we’re not in a Matrix, or dreaming right now, or being deceived by a devil.
Yes, we do have fourth century manuscripts, but that’s only evidence of ancient non-eyewitness second-, third-, fourth-hand hearsay testimony, as written down by authors who were not themselves eyewitnesses. So this is irrelevant objective evidence which does not directly support a miracle claim, precisely because it’s irrelevant. Believers will also point to objective evidence such as the archaeological findings of the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem, where Jesus supposedly told a blind man to go to be healed and was healed. But findings like these are not considered relevant objective evidence.
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