I think the hangup here, for discourse purposes (not this specific discourse, but the debate itself, and especially BB), is that on one hand, this seems true (you present a persuasive argument!) but it seems like the folks saying theism only has one problem are using this framing kind of cheaply?

Because on a meta-level, when people talk about the various reasons about why they don't believe theism, sure they're not coming at it from being PhD philosophers, so when we talk about suffering, hiddenness, problems with the Bible, problems with religious teachings, etc, these are separate problems! They don't seem separate, so this framing of it being multiple problems is persuasive.

Further, I've seen the argument (by BB and others) that theism only has one problem, while atheism has various others, and without examining the content of those arguments/problems, that mismatch is probative that theism is more likely than atheism.

And then it gets worse! Because then we skeptics are also “well ya see, philosophers of religion also think that we should look at these questions from a hypothesis testing framework,” which (in my experience) seems to be used as a tool to not dismiss bad evidence but fit the data to the hypothesis, despite a bad hypothesis.

From the skeptic/non-theistic perspective, it seems like the conversation is being steered in the direction of theistic perspectives through naked appeals to authority and word games.

Notice, there are 3 specific concessions we have to make before having the conversation:

1) accept a specific framing of problems (the problem of evil),

2) concede the unlikelihood of our POV given 1, all while

3) accepting an evaluation tool that favors the theist (because we can't talk about how bad some evidence)

When you look at the fact that most philosophers of religion came into the field as theists, this makes sense that they would make it the norms of the discourse (I could be wrong about all this of course, but I have seen way too many philosophers of religion and their followers make appeals to “you don't know the literature”)

I could say more here, but I've said a lot, and can't see your full comment on Mobile (fix this substack!), but there are even more problems with this, as I think one could easily reframe the issue where the theistic hypothesis is more problematic/has multiple problems.