You’re right about the probabilistic statements, with a potentially tangential elaboration. There are nonsense sentences—not contradictions (“A and not A”) but things that fail to parse (“A and”)--and it doesn’t make sense to assign probabilities to those. One might claim that “God exists” is a nonsense sentence in that way, but I think most New Atheists don’t take that approach.
The distinction that people are drawing is basically which framing should have the benefit of the doubt, since not believing a new statement is the default. This is much more important for social rationality / human psychology than it is for Bayesianism, where you just assign a prior and then start calculating likelihood ratios.
You’re right about the probabilistic statements, with a potentially tangential elaboration. There are nonsense sentences—not contradictions (“A and not A”) but things that fail to parse (“A and”)--and it doesn’t make sense to assign probabilities to those. One might claim that “God exists” is a nonsense sentence in that way, but I think most New Atheists don’t take that approach.
The distinction that people are drawing is basically which framing should have the benefit of the doubt, since not believing a new statement is the default. This is much more important for social rationality / human psychology than it is for Bayesianism, where you just assign a prior and then start calculating likelihood ratios.