I Am Hugh
Researcher
Belief, faith, trust, means you don't know, you think something is true, will prove to be true, or will occur in an expected manner. Science, for example, couldn't proceed without it. Perhaps with skeptical oriented people lack of belief tends to be not so much a disbelief in the immaterial, but a lack of confirmation. If you look historically at science, there is often a problem, as there should be, with the unconfirmed, while science is the process of confirming. Mechanical flight, and the germ theory during the miasmatic school of thought, were problematic.
If you have no reason to believe a thing then you shouldn't believe it, but part of any evaluation regards possible outcomes. Those outcomes may or may not be what is expected and in either case can increase knowledge. So, you can't truly know that the God of the Bible does or doesn't exist. You can believe or disbelieve.
You can see a magic (supernatural) trick performed with your eyes but you know it isn't real. It isn't that it hasn't happened. You can see the color red, but the color red doesn't exist. There are sounds, color, living entities surrounding us that we can't sense.
Gods are human constructs like gender, marriage, religion, class, government, fashion, money, family, beauty, time, race, etc.. If something, material or immaterial, physical or non-physical, natural or supernatural is worshiped (venerated) it is a god and exists as such. The question of literal existence needs to be specific and clearly defined. In the case of the Bible there are different applications of gods. Jesus and Moses were allegedly men who existed and were both called Gods in the Bible. The ancient word simply means mighty, venerated. The modern English word God means to pour, libate, sacrifice. Things that you do in worship.
Spirit (spirituality) simply means invisible to our naked eye, but producing visible results. Breath, wind, impelled mental inclination, electricity, pathogens are examples of the spiritual. But also spirit beings as described in the Bible. Jehovah God, the angels. But those words, God and angels were also given to mortal men you would have no trouble determining were possibly real.
People often dismiss the Bible as being the product of primitive ignorance and superstition, man's grappling with ontological possibilities and creating some sort of explanation, but you don't see that in the Bible. You see people who were concrete in their thinking and knew how their world, their reality worked because they were immersed in it. Some outside entities were allegedly suggesting something beyond that which they didn't understand and they didn't need to understand because it didn't affect their material world. Modern science is more accurately defined as representative of the perspective which critics of the Bible project upon primitive man in that sense. They (primitives) weren't curious about things they didn't understand or didn't affect their materialistic, practical, concrete perspective.
It's sort of like the example of people boiling water long before science could explain what happens when water is boiled. They didn't need an explanation to see the results. But the modern man has convinced himself that he has a better grip on reality when he postulates (usually incorrectly) what motivated the superstitious or even primitive.
The obvious problem with that is that it is limited to existing knowledge, or perceived knowledge as it currently exists. The miasmatic vs. germ theories mentioned earlier. Semmelweis Reflex. At one time whales and giant squids were supernatural, perceived the same as mermaids. So, is imaginary real? Imaginary (complex) numbers are not real in the sense that they can't be quantified on a number line, but they are real in that they exist and are used in math. I suck at math, but I Googled that and I trust that, believe, have faith that it is true with very little evidence or confirmation. It could be debated, but I wouldn't know what to do with it or care because it isn't useful for me personally in my everyday life.
Like imaginary numbers to me. That's fair, don't you think? Specifically, that you don't believe, trust or have faith in those things. What I've found in over a quarter of a century of those admittedly insignificant and meaningless discussions is that, like with most things, there is ignorance of both unbelievers and believers on the subject. Science (knowledge) without evidence (examination). I often call this the dividing line between the quixotic (idealistic to an impractical degree) and the mundane (irreligious).
For the unconfirmed to be examined or evaluated or the confirmed to be reexamined and reevaluated you have to use care in dismissing evidence but you do have to do that. It isn't fair or accurate to do it in ignorance, assumption, or previous misrepresentation. With the Bible and religion there has been a lot of that.
I don't take any offense at all in disbelief. It makes perfect sense to me if there is reason for it. People see things differently. To object to another's findings is the stuff of ideologues.
