It is a must that for God to be with you, you have to be with God. Is that not fair, in your opinion?
Actually, the responsibility lies with the deity to make itself known if it can and wants to. Nevertheless, I spent a decade as a Christian trying to find this deity, and it was nowhere to be found, which is why I left the religion. So, no, putting the responsibility for that on the seeker is unjust. To say that this God actually exists, and that if the seeker didn't find it, the seeker just didn't try hard enough is like blaming a child looking for its parents who know he seeks them, and can see him, but simply never appear.
You do know, do you not? that the story of Adam and Eve can be believed in a lot of different ways. ?
That's true for all of scripture, once you permit the reader the freedom to decide what to take literally and what to view as mythical. What do you say to the person who considers God metaphor? Or the resurrection metaphor? God represents the limit of man's evolution and perfection, as man learns more and becomes closer to omniscient, the limit of his learning, and becomes more powerful and in greater control of his environment, which includes the distant stars. Resurrection symbolizes the rebirth (renaissance) of reason and enlightenment in humanity, and eventually, power over death itself (immortality). Why not? Who's to say it's less correct than any other interpretation once we cut the anchor of literal interpretation and allow the language to mean what we choose?
Christians won't agree, but the beneficent and perfectly moral God of the Christian Bible, who wants man to know, trust, and believe Him, is already ruled by the evidence supporting evolution. This is not to say that evolution cannot yet be falsified. As unlikely as that would be, it's still logically possible. So what do we do if that falsifying finding is found? We reinterpret that mountain of evidence that was previously thought to support naturalistic evolution.
As best I can tell, that rules in a deceptive intelligent designer, one that planted the strata of the crust with fossils in just such a way as to fool man, by putting the forms that look most like extant species closer to the top and with a mix of radionuclides to make them appear more modern, and the opposite fossils which appear more different and older more deeply, not to mention loading genomes with ERVs and other biological markers supporting the ruse of naturalistic evolution. That not only is not the Christian deity, it need not be a deity at all, just an advanced and powerful alien civilization capable of orchestrating this deception. So, given that, I am more justified in my interpretation of God in the Bible representing something other than the literal deity described, which can be ruled out according to the above argument. If you can find a fallacy in this argument, please indicate what and where.
So how do you prove abstractions like "evolution" or "gravity"?
Abstractions abstracted from experience are categories that unify those concrete observations. Evolution refers to the sum of the observed processes grouped together, which are not abstractions, but concrete occurrences. There are also similar ideas not actually abstracted from anything but imagination, and which have no concrete referent, like vampires. The word gravity refers to the collection of observable effects related to matter attracting other matter according to their masses, whether that be an apple falling or a planet orbiting a star.
We see a question like yours when people are trying to equate God with abstractions like love. They tell us that love can't be held or weighed, just like God. But we can point to the physical and social interactions from which we abstract the concept of love, the many sacrifices made for the benefit of the other. But we can't do that for God, an idea not abstracted from experience like love, gravity, and evolution, but imagined.
Spirituality can often violate rationality
Spirituality is unrelated to rationality. The spiritual experience is nonrational, that is, not the result of applying reason to experience. Most conscious phenomena fit into that category. When we hunger, that is not the result of reasoning, hence nonrational by definition. Preferences such as food or sexual are nonrational. We simply experience a preference, not conclude one. The experience of beauty is nonrational. Actually, just about every phenomenon of consciousness other than reasoning itself is nonrational, including sights and smells, and hopes and fears.
Reason has a specific adaptive value: interpreting the phenomena of experience in order to better anticipate outcomes and more successfully navigate life. Evolution gifted us with this because organisms that accumulate more data about their surroundings and reason better based on it are more successful leaving viable offspring, which is why reason was selected by nature. But that is its sole application - understanding and anticipating our reality. It is only in this arena that I consider nonrational a problem. I choose to reserve the word irrational for failed reasoning, failure to understand the clues around one due to flawed reasoning or no reasoning.
This is another area the apologist likes to broach in support of his beliefs not sufficiently supported by evidence. He points out the value of nonrational thought such as the spiritual experience of a sunset or the thrill of rapturous music. If those things are nonrational and still good and desirable, why not a God belief as well? The difference is that the first two are not beliefs at all. They are not thoughts that can be communicated by words. They can't be right or wrong. Only ideas that can be demonstrated to be correct can be called right. Once we're in the business of evaluating our world to understand and anticipate it, only then can right and wrong, true or false, be applied.
Incidentally, my definition of faith is synonymous with a violation of this process of reasoning and inducing generalizations from experience that can accurately predict future outcomes, that is, it is synonymous with what I have called irrational above, to distinguish it from the nonrational experiences that we covet or try to avoid, and which reason helps us manage. Faith generates ideas that don't work. It is by reason that we decide that a vaccine is safer than the virus, and by faith (irrational thought) that we come to believe the opposite (unjustified belief).
