If you need proof then faith is not for you.
What I need is evidence, not proof, but yes, if one needs supporting evidence to believe, the belief by faith won't be an option.
Then again you are willing to believe many things that have not been proven when there is no God involved.
I don't know what that means. You probably ought to eventually lose the word
prove. Whenever you use it, you make a meaningless statement. No induction that I hold as correct has been proven including that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, and there is no reason to believe a god was involved when it has in the past.
You seem to conflate the agnostic atheist's position with that of the hard atheist, who DOES claim than no gods are involved. The agnostic atheist's position is that he is reserving judgment until gods are either demonstrated to exist or can be ruled out, which will likely be never if they don't exist.
But believer keep going on calling agnosticism denial just like they go on referring to proof when they mean compelling evidence.
How are claims about the past tested to show that what is claimed actually happened?
The same way that detectives determine what happened in the past when they come upon a crime scene.
Let me make a claim about the past - my past in this case - and see if you have any means available to you to assess the accuracy of my claim. I was conceived by the union of a man and a woman, gestated in which time I grew from a zygote to a fetus, was born several months later, took my first breath then my first drink, and eventually learned to speak and write as I grew from a child to an adult.
How can you know if that happened or not? You can't go back and witness any of that if it in fact occurred. There are photos of me at various ages, but are they really me you might ask, and even if none existed, that wouldn't change your assessment of the truth of that claim.
Two mistakes that creationists frequently make. We do not need to have witnessed the past to know much of what happened then, and we don't have to repeat the past. Think of those with regard to the example I just gave you of the history of a typical human being.
I suppose some people have a very strong faith and/or have experienced things that make them certain. That might be different than having an intellectual certainty before you are willing to say that you believe however.
On my side of this discussion, we don't trade in certainty or proof.
not all religions can be correct.
But they can all be incorrect.
And that doesn't address my comment: "between religion and science,
only science is tentative." I wasn't referring to correctness. I was referring to the degree of certitude the two camps express. Faith is typically associated with certainty, whereas empirically derived knowledge is always tentative. Belief should be commensurate with the quantity and quality of the available relevant evidence - it varies from unlikely to reasonably likely to very likely to beyond reasonable doubt (but never beyond philosophical doubt, which understood rather than felt) - and is amenable to revision if new relevant evidence surfaces not accounted for by the existing narrative.
you would also say that atheists outperform 99%of theologians.
Not at theology. Theology is one of several areas that have no relevance in my life, and most of what I know about it comes from my personal experience as Christian and the little of it I've read on message boards like this one. I generally skip over scriptural citations and discussions about whose faith-based beliefs are more correct unless they're relevant to a non-theological discussion.
People of faith imo usually have evidence for their beliefs and skeptics imo usually believe things that have not been proven.
So your standards for your beliefs are evidence but your standards for my beliefs is proof.
What you call evidence for your beliefs is not that if using academic standards for evaluating evidence such as with scientific peer review and courtroom trials. In my experience, believers have offered three kinds of evidence that they (but not I) say support their beliefs: biblical prophecy, medieval arguments, and the complexity of nature. None of those support a belief that a deity exists, which is why there are so many experienced (at evaluating evidence), critically thinking empiricists who are atheists.
Evaluating evidence is what I did for a living as a physician and what I do as a bridge player. In both cases, we collect evidence, and make and tst.
Believers also use what is evident and memory and reason.
You need to use standard (academic rules of inference) reasoning on evidence if you want to arrive at a sound conclusion. If you use rogue logic, you can connect any evidence or premise to any conclusion rogue logic, but those conclusions will be unsound (inaccurate).
If you have already decided that you need God to be proved through the methods of science then trust in science is your faith.
No. I have no faith. You have a faith.
My confidence in science is evidence-based. Science works. What more evidence do I need to know that is methods are valid?
Maybe everything I say is a compelling argument that God exists, but that does not mean it is going to convince people who have closed their eyes to anything but the science of the physical universe showing that spirits and a creator spirit exists.
True. Closed-minded people aren't moved by sound or compelling arguments.
You mistake rejecting faith-based claims for closed-mindedness. My eyes aren't closed. You simply have nothing convincing to show them.
I was just pointing out that science cannot show that God does not exist and that also science cannot show that God was not needed to do things in the past.
Yes, and I was just pointing out that "There is no need to show that gods aren't needed to remain agnostic about them" and that "To change that in the mind of a critically thinking empiricist, you need to provide a compelling argument that they are."
Did you want to address that or just repeat to me what has already been answered by me and called irrelevant. Did you want to make the case that your claim was relevant nevertheless with a counterargument?
