You seem to want to keep setting yourself up as the decider of what is evidence and what is reasonable according to your own biased ideology.
The academic community has collectively made those decisions, and its bias is in favor of skepticism and empiricism over belief by faith, one of the most powerful and productive biases ever conceived by man.
Like many other theists, YOU want your ways of deciding what is true to be respected. You want to call how YOU evaluate evidence just as valid as this academic method. You want to call how YOU connect evidence to conclusion reasoning whatever its rules or non-rules might be - exactly what you accuse others of doing: setting yourself up as decider of these things. But rogue ways of thinking are not respected unless they produce desired results.
you don't get to define what is and isn't evidence, or what is and isn't reasonable for everyone else.
Sure we do. The critical thinking community defines what is reasonable and what is fallacy. Others don't have to agree or even understand, but make an unreasonable argument and see how quickly it is rebutted and rejected by those standards. It's not negotiable. These other ways of seeing are sterile. The creationists, like the astrologers, have contributed nothing to man's fund of knowledge, and are unwelcome to publish is respected scientific journals for that reason. And they object, calling it conspiracy and turf protecting, but they and their rogue ways are still rejected and excluded from the academic community however much they plead for respect and acceptance.
You're trying to insist that faith is unreasonable by definition, and that is just a silly bias. Because reasoning covers a huge array of thought processes and criteria regardless of your or anyone else's approval.
You can call that reasoning, but if it doesn't conform to academic standards, I don't, at least not without a qualifier like "invalid" or "fallacious." Reasoning is not a subjective process. Arithmetic is reasoning. One either learn the rules of inference in addition and applies them to addends to arrive at correct sums, or he brings his own subjective "rules" to the process and generates wrong sums.
Here's how faith derails reason.
“If somewhere in the Bible I were to find a passage that said 2 + 2 = 5, I wouldn't question what I am reading in the Bible. I would believe it, accept it as true, and do my best to work it out and understand it."- Pastor Peter laRuffa
By definition, God inhabits a realm of being that transcends the question of origin.
That's not my definition. Nor does the definition define such a thing into existence.
Physical matter does not determine existence. Ideas about existence also exist.
As far as we know, ideas are epiphenomena of physical processes, and only physical reality exists.
the God character and story has emerged in every culture and time that humans have been on Earth. Dearth Vader cleary did not.
Irrelevant and incorrect. There is no "God character." There's a spectrum of unfalsifiable claims about an imagined and unseen reality sometimes rendered as a person or persons and sometimes in other terms.
Darth Vader - the manifestation of the dark side and evil - also appears in most of these stories under different names such as Satan in Christianity.
So if you're trying to imply a equivalent signifigance between them I would disagree with that.
He wrote, "If you want to say that god exists in the same way that Darth Vader or ideas exist, then I agree." The equivalence is in the areas where the two overlap, not where they are different. God and Darth Vader have in common that they are fictional characters that exist only as ideas in some heads. Their relative importance in human cultural history doesn't change that or negate its relevance, just as the relative lack of impact on human history of the idea of Santa Claus compared to gods does not mean that they aren't analogous and very comparable ideas.
I'm simply talking about the fact that we humans have to trust in the unknowable outcomes of our chosen course of action no matter what that course of action is based on: hope, whim, experience, divine revelation, reasoned probability, or whatever.
You conflate belief based in experience and reason (justified belief) with belief based in whim and alleged divine revelation (unjustified belief). That's your fundamental error, and others have already noted your equivocation there. On this basis, you claim we all think by faith.
Faith is not just hope, but the decision to act on that hope.
Faith is neither hope nor a decision to act. It's nothing more or less that unjustified belief, or belief of a guess. You can attempt to glorify it like those that call it a virtue that pleases "God," but there is no virtue there. From Pat Condell:
"The truth is that faith is nothing more than the deliberate suspension of disbelief. It's an act of will. It's not a state of grace. It's a state of choice, because without evidence, you've got no reason to believe, apart from your willingness to believe. So why is that worthy of respect, any more than your willingness to poke yourself in the eye with a pencil? And why is faith considered some kind of virtue? Is it because it implies a certain depth of contemplation and insight? I don't think so. Faith, by definition, is unexamined. So in that sense it has to be among the shallowest of experiences. Yet, if it could, it would regulate every action, word and thought of every single person on this planet, because, let's not forget, even an impure thought is a sin."
Applying knowledge of the past to our expectations of the future is an act of faith.
But it is not irrational like belief NOT based in experience properly understood. You create endless confusion by insisting on calling both justified and unjustified belief by the same name and thinking that that makes them the same thing. It doesn't any more than naming both of your daughters Faith makes them the same person.
Other actions require a great deal of faith; like buying a lotto ticket
Buying a lotto ticket requires nothing more than a ticket be for sale and the money to buy it. Faith is unjustified belief, such as that God will cause you to win the lottery. If one has the justified belief that he has a very small chance of winning a large amount of money, he is not acting like the faith-based thinker who believes what feels comfortable by gut feeling - guessing, but forgetting that it's only a guess and considering it fact. You've seen the TV "prosperity" preachers milking their flocks telling them to visualize their reward before sending in a shovel full of money, and that if their faith is strong enough, it will make it come to pass. It's still guessing.