Claims are usually evidence
I'm a bit late to this, but the online debate (if a series of reaction videos can be called such a thing) involving Matt Dillahunty, Joe Schmid, and Alex O'Connor has been in the back of my mind since it happened, so I figured I might as well say my piece. Seeing as this happened in the online "atheist community" and bears on issues like the resurrection, this seemed like as good a place as any to post it.
My contention is this: Matt's slogan, at least on a very reasonable interpretation, is wrong. Claims are often evidence (EDIT: specifically in the Bayesian sense).
To be more specific: the makings of claims often serve as an important kind of evidence, at least in the context of personal belief formation.
I'll relay an example from Joe to make the point clear. Suppose you have a friend whom you know is generally trustworthy and likes to play soccer. You also come into this situation with background knowledge about the world, such as that soccer is a sport that many people play, soccer equipment is fairly easy to obtain, etc. Given this state of knowledge, you might give, say, a 1% credence that your friend has bought a new soccer ball sometime in the last month.
Now your friend tells you that they bought a soccer ball in the last month. The only piece of knowledge you've gained here is that your friend has made a claim. And yet, knowing this, you seem to be justified in giving a much higher credence to the proposition that your friend has bought a soccer ball in the last month.
Given everything we've said, the fact that your friend claimed to have bought a soccer ball in the past month served as evidence that he did, in fact, buy a soccer ball in the past month - at least if the notion of evidence we are working with is the very popular Bayesian notion.
EDIT to more fully defend the thesis here: while this is just a single example, I think we should acknowledge that most instances of claim-makings are like this. It is usually the case that people are more likely to say things that are true than are false. There are of course counterexamples, but the soccer ball example is quite typical. Hence, claims are usually evidence.
Now, there are stricter notions of evidence according to which that might not qualify. As the friend is not under oath, the claim would not be admissible as evidence in court, for example. Many scientific fields only admit claims as evidence in very specific circumstances, or perhaps not at all. But it is evidence, even if some disciplines exclude it on methodological grounds.
The problem which I'm trying to confront and do my part to correct here is that the "atheist community" at large seems to have latched onto Matt's slogan and applied it too broadly. The position that seems to have caught on is that claims are not evidence in any sense, and that even in seemingly clear contexts like the soccer ball example, the "real evidence" at play comes from something other than the making of the claim. The result has been a disconcerting confusion around the concept of evidence and how it works theoretically, sometimes verging on anti-intellectualism. I'm not sure how much of that will be present here, but I feel that this needs to be pushed back against in the atheist sphere at large, so that the community can hold itself to the intellectual standards it professes.
Anyway, I've said enough. Let's discuss!