Not recently.

>I don’t believe in any of those things because I haven’t seen any evidence of them, just like you haven’t seen any evidence of God. On the other hand, I see evidence of God daily.

Again, I question your definition of “evidence”.

>This has been a great discussion and has caused me to look inward at what I truly believe. And like you, I stand by my original position.

Fair enough. I don’t expect you to change your beliefs. I hope I’ve provided food for thought on what constitutes evidence. I hope you can at least understand why many of us don’t agree with you on your “evidence”.

I can’t believe you missed leprechauns! (You’re not really Irish, are you?)

I don’t believe in any of those things because I haven’t seen any evidence of them, just like you haven’t seen any evidence of God.

On the other hand, I see evidence of God daily.

This has been a great discussion and has caused me to look inward at what I truly believe. And like you, I stand by my original position.

So, Squatch, do you believe in fairies, elves, goblins, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Sugar Plum Fairy, Zeus, Thor, the Invisible Pink Unicorn, the Boogie Man, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Om, or Diskworld? Because there’s no proof of the non-existence of any of them.

You’re falling victim to the common fallacy of equating belief with faith. Belief is what you think you know. The difference between science and faith is not over belief – both are used to justify beliefs. The difference is the basis of justification: evidence, rational thought, and critical evaluation, or desire, emotional comfort, and “’cause that’s what I was told”.

It is just not sensible to live your life believing in everything you’re told until you prove it doesn’t exist. We all practice filters for evaluating claims, believing in some things and not others. Most of the time we do not have evidence it doesn’t exist, we just have nothing to convince us it does. That is the skeptic position – show me some evidence or I will refrain from accepting the truth of the claim.

As to seeing the Sun pass over head from horizon to horizon, the only “proof” that offers is the Sun appears to pass overhead. If you are looking at the scientific process, one cannot draw other conclusions from that observation. Science doesn’t like conclusions that exceed what is observable. Conclusions beyond what is implicated by the evidence are called hypotheses.

Astronomers had much more than the Sun to examine the position and movements of the Earth, the planets, the Sun and the Moon. They had the night sky, they had observations of the Sun from different latitudes on Earth, and they eventually had the Sun’s reflected light on the Moon once they figured out that was the explanation of Moon’s phases.

None of these observations and conclusions have any relationship to your faith in a god. I don’t have “faith” what I observe is true. I conclude that what I observe is the best explanation of the evidence I have. I know that conclusion is based on evidence which might be erroneous. I don’t need to have “faith” in the scientific process. Instead, I can observe that the results of the scientific process are valid. I can observe that the conclusions of the scientific process are valid. I can test and verify science. It isn’t a matter of “faith”.

One might draw the wrong conclusions and have to correct those conclusions when more evidence is discovered. But one doesn’t draw scientific conclusions specifically based on faith regardless of the correctness or incorrectness of the conclusion.

It is a fallacious argument to equate faith in the observable and measurable with faith in some supposed inner feeling that a god exists or faith in a religious text that was not based on careful systematic observation of the world.