why is it I find it so difficult to believe claims without evidence, while others appear to accept almost any claim absolutely uncritically.
I had an insight recently following the vaccine discussions, when I kept reading, "That's just your opinion" regarding facts easily deduced from available data. And such people call themselves critical thinkers. What I realized is that they don't know what critical thinking is or can do. We were all like that once as children, and we pretty much believed anything from a trusted source by faith.
Apart from experience, through which we learned where to find things in the house or what TV shows we like, our beliefs only came by that single, uncritical method, and we knew of no other way of knowing. Huge numbers of people never advance beyond that, especially those indoctrinated with the idea that belief by faith was a virtue prized by God, and the wisdom of the world (education) is foolishness. Those people have learned that reason and evidence are prized by others, and so have adopted the language, but don't really understand what they're saying, as when I read "My faith is based in evidence."
The insight was that they believe this, and that all thinking is like theirs, which is basically guessing what you prefer to be true and saying that it is. It's from that perspective that they say, "That's just your opinion" to facts. They can't recognize that the opinion is factual, so it's just another opinion, making all opinions equal. And you know the name of that phenomenon - Dunning-Kruger. The insight was that such people don't have an elevated sense of their own mental ability as much as an unawareness that there is a better way to decide what is true about the world - empiricism.
You learned another way and its value in deciding what is true about the world, and with it, why the other method - belief by faith - was undesirable. Once you've seen that, you don't go back. It's like having some sorcerer's stone that can tell you which ideas are correct, the existence of which many if not most people are unaware.
Isn't that why we see creationists that know almost no science at all arguing with people educated in the sciences? They don't see that there is a difference between what they believe and what the others believe. It's all just somebody's opinion, and they see theirs as as good as any other.
Science cannot say that God did not or does not exist
Science has no need to rule gods out. Nobody does.
What's wrong with saying that God has always been there?
Doing what?
God does everything the natural way.
That's nature, not a god.
Not everything is falsifiable.
We don't benefit by thinking about unfalsifiable propositions. They can't be confirmed or disconfirmed, predict nothing, and are useful for nothing.
