Start with a definition, because the definition is where the argument is already won.
Evidence is what survives the death of the witness. It is data that another instrument can confirm. It is a measurement that does not change when the believer leaves the room. By that standard, the case for unidentified aerial phenomena is now the most evidentially supported strange claim in modern life. The case for any particular god is among the least. This is not a polemic. It is a ledger.
The UAP Ledger
In November 2004, a Tic Tac-shaped object was tracked over the Pacific by the AN/SPY-1 radar aboard the USS Princeton, the APG-73 radar in a Super Hornet’s nose, the ATFLIR infrared pod under its wing, and the eyes of four naval aviators, including a wing commander. Four independent sensor modalities. One object. The Pentagon declassified the footage in 2020 and did not contest the chain of custody.
In 2023, David Grusch testified under penalty of perjury before a House Oversight subcommittee that the United States is in possession of non-human craft and biological recoveries. Lt. Ryan Graves, a former F/A-18 pilot, testified that he and his squadron encountered unknown objects daily off the eastern seaboard for years. Neither has been charged with perjury. Neither has recanted.
The Pentagon now has a standing office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, with a congressional mandate to catalog these encounters. France has GEIPAN, which has been operating since 1977. Japan’s Defense Ministry issued formal engagement protocols in 2020. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act preserves the UAP Disclosure framework that survived the deletion of its more aggressive provisions.
This is a partial accounting. The full one runs to thousands of incidents, dozens of multi-sensor cases, and a paper trail you can request through FOIA.
The Theist Ledger
The central documentary evidence for the Abrahamic god consists of texts written decades to centuries after the events they describe, by authors who were not present, in languages most modern adherents cannot read, preserved through copy chains with documented errors, and selected for inclusion by councils with political stakes in the outcome. The same structural problem applies, with variations, to every other major faith tradition.
No instrument has ever registered a deity. The most rigorous test of intercessory prayer ever conducted, the 2006 Templeton-funded STEP study, found that patients who knew they were being prayed for had slightly worse outcomes than those who were not. Personal religious experience is offered as evidence, but every faith offers it; the contents are mutually exclusive, and the neurology of it has been mapped in laboratories from Montreal to Pennsylvania.
The cosmological arguments are philosophy, not evidence. They may be excellent philosophy. They do not constrain the possibilities. They do not survive the death of the witness in any sense an aviator would recognize.
The Inversion
A naval officer with a security clearance testifies under oath about an object his radar, his infrared pod, and three of his crewmates also recorded, and the response in respectable media is a smirk and a segment producer rolling the X-Files theme. A presidential candidate says God told him to run, and the response is to print it as a credential.
We have inverted the burden of proof for our two most consequential categories of claim. The claim that costs nothing to assert, because it cannot be tested, is socially mandatory. The claim that has video, radar, and oath-bound testimony, because it can be examined, is socially radioactive. The asymmetry is the tell.
I take both questions seriously. Philip K. Dick spent the last decade of his life trying to work out whether the pink beam that hit him in February 1974 was a deity, a satellite, or his own pancreatic chemistry. He never reached a conclusion he trusted. What he did was keep writing it down, dating each entry, and noting which instruments registered what.
That is the posture. Write it down. Date the entry. Note the instruments.
One of the two ledgers is filling up. The other has been the same length for two thousand years.
You can decide for yourself which one is the extraordinary claim.
This reminds me of something interesting mentioned by Luis Elizondo in his book "Imminent": a certain military official did not want to investigate UAP because he already knew what was behind it—demonic activity.