Atheists, what do you believe is the best argument for the existence of a deity?

[Violet]

The words are interchangeable in many contexts, that doesn't mean they have the same use in all contexts, for instance;

Believing in someone, as in saying to someone who is facing a challenge "I believe in you" is the same as saying "I have confidence you can do this", it's not the same as saying "I believe you exist".

Asking a theist "why do you believe in God?" and getting the response "Because I have faith" would be a tautology if they were identical in meaning, the same as "Why do you believe in god?" and getting back "Because I believe in god" - The word Faith is trying to answer the why, the word believe is stating a matter of fact, this makes it clear that the word 'faith' is attempting to convey a different concept than the word 'believe'.

I could give dozens more examples, but these two are sufficient to demonstrate these words are not synonyms, even though they may be colloquially interchangeable in certain contexts.

I agree that although they essentially mean the same thing: they are often used to say it in a different way. One can use 'big' 'huge' and 'colossal' to describe a building... but though they all boil down to the same thing: the feeling of the word completely changes.

They are infact synonyms. But they are used to convey very slight differences in a statement.

That's sort of more along the lines I was thinking, but not quite. It's hard to pin it down. This is precisely why I'm a big fan on the principle "replace the label with the concept", it makes arguing about definitions irrelevant - If we discuss what we mean when we say 'faith' and one of us means 'to believe in and trust something with responsibility' and the other means 'belief without evidence' we are talking about two different things, we may as well give them new labels.

Agreed. Even though I pretend to be a pedant about definition: the goal of language is to communicate. It's therefore not about 'whatever the dictionary says'... it's about what the person is saying.

No, it "clicks" with me just fine, I just don't see whether or not a concept clicks with me as being in any way relevant. Working explanation is sort of right, but I'm not waiting for a better explanation, I don't see it as being in any way insufficient or lacking as an explanation, It's simply one possible metaphysical position and happens to be the one I believe is most likely true.

So we're back to you accepting it as the case (for now) but not believing it to be the case?

I think the Agnostic/Gnostic distinction plays heavily in my definition of knowledge.

For instance, I believe I know (Gnosticism) that there is a Convenience store around the corner, I can only be said to truly know this if I am in fact correct, The difference between my actually Knowing or Believing is independent of my subjective experience, it depends on whether or not the Convenience store exists in objective reality. In contrast I believe in the multiverse but I do not claim to know this (Agnosticism), even if it turns out that the multiverse does exist I still did not have knowledge of it at the time.

This essentially places certain knowledge out of our reach with regard to anything but logical necessity, It's a rigid and rather extreme definition, but all other definitions of knowledge are so problematic that I'm willing to go out to the edge in order to have a term that I consider actually usable. I guess if you made a distinction between 'presumed knowledge' and 'true knowledge' you would get the same result.

Objectivity... it's messed up. So much so that if one can only know by being correct in relation to an objective state: we know nothing.

What is "true" knowledge anyway? I think it's just nonsense No True Scotsman

Brane theory has credence far beyond it's use of 'big words', You should look into a phenomenon known as 'dark flow', a great many galaxies seem to be attracted to the edge of the universe and there is a ton of data to suggest that unlike the rest of the universe in which galaxies are expanding away from each other, in one region they appear to be moving towards the same region - The most likely explanation for this at the present I believe is that there is another universe that has a gravitational influence on ours, there is also the fact that such a phenomenon was predicted by string theorists before the data was uncovered - This does lend credence to the idea of Brane theory and is unexpected given an alternative 'inflationary' multiverse. There is no currently proposed single-universe explanation for this phenomenon.

Sounds interesting. I am rather apathetic towards deep-space science right now. Seems more useful to focus on that which is at hand (nearer space).