A response to a reader named Vic Steblin who replied to my article… Vic said, “Apply Bayes' formula to all of history and also all of science, and one gets ZERO probability of anything supernatural. Use honest humility; there is NO GOD, and move on!”

Now here is my reply… Vic, Bayes' theorem does not give a zero probability for God or the supernatural. You inserted the zero before doing the calculation. Bayes' theorem can be written:

P(God | Evidence) = P(Evidence | God) × P(God) ÷ P(Evidence)

The posterior becomes zero only when you assign God a prior of zero, or claim the evidence would be impossible under God's existence. Neither claim comes from Bayes' theorem. You must defend those assumptions before using them. You have not calculated God out of existence. You have defined God out of your model.

Your claim is simply circular: assume only natural causes exist, exclude every supernatural explanation, run the evidence through a naturalistic model, then announce the model found no supernatural cause. That is not a discovery. It is a rule imposed before the evidence was examined.

A probability of zero means logical impossibility, not "I have not seen it" or "science does not study it." To assign God a genuine zero, you would need to prove God's existence contains a logical contradiction. You have not done that.

You are also confusing methodological naturalism with metaphysical naturalism. Science searches for measurable physical causes. That method does not prove physical causes are the only causes that exist. A metal detector finds metal. Its failure to detect wood does not prove wood is imaginary. It was not built to detect wood.

Your appeal to "all of history" fails the same way. No one applies one equation to all of history and receives a universal verdict. Every Bayesian model requires selected evidence, defined hypotheses, assigned priors, and estimated likelihoods. Those judgments do not descend from the equation. The person using it supplies them.

"There is no God" is a universal negative. What gives you knowledge of everything that exists, everywhere, beyond all physical observation? To know with certainty that no God exists requires something close to omniscience. You deny God while claiming a level of knowledge that belongs only to God, then call it humility.

Humility says: I do not believe the evidence establishes God. Dogmatism says: there is no God, and everyone should move on. You chose dogmatism and named it humility.

One more thing, on your own terms. Under strict materialism, your sentence was produced by neurons, chemistry, and conditioning aimed at survival, not truth. Why should anyone treat a chemically compelled sentence as a rational conclusion? You borrowed logic, evidence, honesty, and probability to write it, none of which are physical objects your worldview can account for.

You have not shown that God is impossible. You have shown that your worldview will not permit God to be considered. That is faith. It is simply a faith that calls itself reason. Thanks for watching.