If you can't see that your position is based on faith just as mine is that is a blindness in you. I can show you that you are wrong but that is not going to open your eyes to that fact.
I just gave you the rebuttal for that claim: "
The foundations of science include philosophical planks such as skepticism, or the idea that no idea should be accepted without sufficient support, and empiricism, or the belief that sufficient support comes from compelling evidence. Are these believed on faith? No. They have been shown to be reliable beliefs by the stellar success of their fruits."
A rebuttal is a counterargument that explains why what is being rebutted cannot be correct if the counterargument is. I've defined faith as insufficiently justified or supported belief, and defined what I mean by sufficient support: compelling evidence. Then I stated the evidence: the stellar success of science and empiricism.
Sufficiently supported belief (empirically correct) and insufficiently supported belief (faith, as I've defined it) are a MECE pair - mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. That means that they can't both be correct and that everything is one or the other. By this definition, every belief can be called justified or unjustified, and none neither or both. This means that demonstrating one to be the case rebuts the claim that other is correct. I did this. If you don't rebut the rebuttal, that is, show why it is incorrect, that empiricism is based in faith, then the discussion has concluded.
Notice that it isn't necessary that you share the empiricist definition of justification for all of the above to be correct. Perhaps a couple of Christians are disagreeing about their religious beliefs, and each believes that religious belief is justified by supporting scripture. What do they do? One points to a scripture he thinks justifies belief, and the other explains if he can why that scripture is being misunderstood perhaps by referring to other scripture. If they can agree on what scripture means the way that the empiricists generally agree about what constitutes sufficient evidence to support belief, then they have a test, and ought to come to a common position the way the empiricists do. Even using their definition of justification, if they can agree on the interpretation of scripture, all beliefs about scripture are either justified or not, and none both or neither.
In the light of that, you claimed that my beliefs were unjustified, and I showed you the justification. One of us is wrong, because we can't both be correct (or both be incorrect). If you can't rebut that counterargument, the discussion is over, and the last plausible and unrebutted argument stands, just like in a courtroom. Two attorneys go back and forth, the prosecutor making a case for guilt, the defense showing why that cannot be correct, perhaps with an alibi, that if historical, makes guilt impossible - he was too far away at the time. If the alibi is factual, guilt is rebutted and thus ruled out.
But then the prosecutor offers cell tower data showing that the alibi is false and that the defendant was close enough to the crime scene to be the perp. If that was the defendant, then guilt according too the prosecutors original argument is the last plausible argument. If it can't be rebutted, the verdict is guilty. If it can, perhaps by claiming that the phone was near the cell tower, but the defendant wasn't carrying it at the time, then innocence becomes plausible again. And this can go on for a while until a plausible argument that cannot be rebutted remains, and a verdict is reached.
Now, if you cannot rebut the argument that empiricism is not faith based but justified belief, the discussion has run its course. Now look at your reply again. It's as far from rebuttal as dissent gets. You've merely repeated the rebutted claim without so much as acknowledging it much less showing why it is incorrect.
I think what you might mean is that science has not found that a supreme being interferes in the affairs of the universe. But that is not proving that a God does not exist.
Agree. But it does support the claim that if a deity cannot be detected even in principle, it can be treated as nonexistent.
science just defines life and consciousness in such a way for example, that it is part of the material universe without the need for spirit.
Science would posit spirit if there were a need to do so - a finding not explainable in a world without spirits. This is the status of dark matter. It was proposed once a physical finding was uncovered not explainable by existing physics to account for it, but not before, and if the finding that necessitate it, an accelerating universal expansion rate, is later shown to be a misunderstanding of the observations suggesting it is occurring, dark matter will disappear along with phlogiston and the ether.
Perhaps you are familiar with the exchange between Laplace and Napoleon when the former was explaining how the solar system worked to the latter. A century earlier, Newton had predicted that the solar system ought to be unstable, and posited the hand of God to make intermittent corrections to the paths of the planets to keep them in orbit around the sun. Laplace's new mathematics,
perturbation theory, showed that the solar system was stable without divine intervention.
Newton's celestial mechanics had a God in it, but Laplace replaced the deity with more mathematical physics. When asked by Napoleon where God was in his science, he said, "I had no need of that hypothesis." A spirit, the god of the gaps, was removed. That's how science works. It posits nothing more than what is needed to account for observation (parsimony). If it needs a spirit to account for new observations, it will posit one then, not sooner. Maybe they'll show that dark matter exhibits intelligence. The spirit might be back in, but not before. This is exactly how empiricism works, and how empiricists decide which ideas are in and which out - only the ones needed to account for all observations and no more.
I speak about OBEs in NDEs and atheists go out of their way to argue that the obvious is not true, because the obvious is what disagrees with their world view.
Not obvious to me. All I see are interpretations of psychological experiences that ignore naturalistic possibilities such as a stressed mind having experiences that it misinterprets.
And I will not argue that others don't have such experiences or that they do not mean what those who have them understand them to mean. I'm telling you that belief of that is premature at this time, since there are other explanations that have not been ruled out, but have been dropped from consideration nevertheless.
Nothing shows naturalistic materialism to be true except the lack of evidence for the other. But of course there is evidence for the other that the empiricist rejects.
That's an incoherent comment, meaning the parts contradict one another. First you say that there is a lack of evidence for anything not part of the natural world, then you say that there is, but that the skeptic rejects it as evidence for a supernatural world.
