That is your first lie. The scientific method only works for a very specialized activity and anybody claiming to live their life by this method is immersed in deception of themselves and others. It is in fact demonstrable that science cannot answer all questions and demonstrable that people can know things for which they haven’t a shred of evidence.
Now you are indulging in equivocation. The evidence that science accepts as relevant is vastly different than the evidence used in courts which is vastly different that the evidence used in other activities and by necessity the least objective of all is the “evidence” by which people conduct their lives, for the simple fact that life will not wait for objective evidence. We are force to make choices whether there is evidence or proof of things or not.
Christianity along with the rest of religion and philosophy is far from a monolithic enterprise and the degree of honesty and rationality varies greatly. Some even indulge in as much dishonesty and deception as has you have, believing things which is incompatible with the evidence and what is demonstrable.
Take for example the virgin birth. Anyone with the slightest bit of scientific knowledge knows that pregnancy does NOT require sexual intercourse and thus it is more than possible for a virgin to give birth. Only the fact that the one reported in the Bible occurred thousands of years before in vitro fertilization techniques make it seem at all miraculous. And the dead coming back to life? Are we talking about dead before there were any M.D. issuing death certificates? Surely you know something about cases where people who are taken to be dead nevertheless revive – please tell me you are not that uninformed. And finally there is the flood… if you check the discussion in the other thread, almost none of the participants in that discussion take the idea of a planet-wide flood seriously. Why should they when we are talking about a book written at a time when there was no conception of the earth as a planet, so it would be absurd to think that “the world” meant anything like that to the writers.
Though there are plenty like myself who do not think any proofs for the existence of God have objective validity. And I would certainly challenge the claim that any so called proofs are the reason why 80% of humanity are theists.
What a load of nonsense. Reason requires faith for the simple fact that logic can ONLY take you from premises which you accept on faith to resultant conclusions. And it is well known that evidence cannot fix this problem since the best it can do for reason is an argument by induction, the flaws of which are well known. This is not to say that science does not offer a superior epistemological foundation for knowledge, for it certainly does. But your idea for why is just plain wrong.
The correct explanation for the superiority of scientific knowledge is the following. First there is a methodological standard of honesty often called the scientific method which requires the scientist to test proposed hypothesis rather than seek supporting evidence like a lawyer or used car salesman. Second claims of knowledge consist of written procedures which anyone can follow to get the same result no matter what they believe. This is very effective at both getting past our subjective biases and resolving disputes BUT it most certainly is founded on accepting a few premises ON FAITH. Besides the faith we have that these methodological ideals will get us to the truth, there is the faith that there are no demons or something out there arranging the evidence to deceive us. To be sure this is a reasonable faith, but it is still faith.
Thus the dichotomy you push is an utterly false one. It is not a choice between reason and faith – for I have just shown that these cannot be separated. The only coherent choice involved is the one between reasonable faith and blind faith which which ignores any evidence to the contrary.