My Fellow Atheist

[Ryft]

By your admission, faith would be defined more as trust than blind belief.

A slight but important correction: "... as opposed to blind belief."

This would pretty much equate the faith required for a belief in God with the faith that a particular weather forecast is correct. Both require information, assent, and commitment to the subject material in one way or another.

First, faith is not required for belief in God. That is actually backwards and practically ignores my post. Flip it around: belief in God is required for faith (i.e., assensus is a predicate of faith, not vice versa)—because faith without assensus leaves just notitia and fiducia, and is therefore "not faith." Remove any of the three predicates and it is no longer faith, becoming instead untrusting belief or blind trust and the like. Remember, faith is the sum, the right-hand side of the equal sign (N + A + F = faith).

Second, your analogy is not analogous. The trust we place in a weather forecast does not come anywhere close to the trust we place in God, which involves a deep commitment characterized as dying to self or giving up human-centered living in favour of God-centered living. "My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20). Is that our attitude toward weather forecasts? Not even close. I might trust the forecast but I do not deeply commit my very identity to it.

A belief spouted by many to be the product of an objective, absolute, and very well defined God has to have objective evidence to back up that claim. Without it, any subjective faith would be irrelevant and hold importance solely to the believer.

First, belief is a predicate of faith, not to be conflated with faith. Remember, assensus is one of three terms in the equation, the sum of which equals faith.

Second, you slipped the term "subjective" in there inappropriately. If an objective claim goes unsupported by objective evidence, that does not mean it is therefore a subjective claim. That is a non-sequitur conclusion. At the very least, the only thing it means is that you cannot yourself agree or accept that it's objective. "The truth-tracking method of effective philosophic inquiry would lead us to believe a proposition when the evidence available to us justifies our believing it, to reject a proposition when our evidence disconfirms it, and to suspend judgment about it when our evidence neither confirms nor disconfirms it," writes David Lund in Making Sense of It All: An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry (Prentice Hall, 2003), which could not be stated more succinctly and articulately.

Third, the assensus involved in my faith holds importance to me, yes. That should essentially go without saying. But how is that supposed to count against me in any way?

Faith in a God that is not objectively verifiable traverses into the realm of delusion ...

No, that is not how 'delusion' is properly understood. Even Richard Dawkins properly understands what 'delusion' means: a false belief persistently held in the face of contradicting evidence (The God Delusion, Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Consider that carefully and understand its enormous burden of proof before deciding whether you want to apply the word here, because I will indeed press you to shoulder it.

Just because an argument is persuasive enough to convince someone does not make the actual concept true or false, nor will it persuade people with a higher standard of evidence.

First, I never suggested that an argument being persuasive somehow means its content is true. "I have reason to believe X is true" on the one hand, and "X is true" on the other, are two very different things. Second, I never suggested that my being persuaded of X somehow automatically makes you persuaded of X; additionally, your rejecting X as false does not somehow make X false. Third, "higher" in this context is a value term; the fact that you happen to value a certain standard of evidence does not mean other people should agree or follow suit. Fourth, my claims have to meet your standard of evidence only if your accepting my claims is required or relevant (and it's neither).

(Phew! You sure packed a lot of rhetoric common with atheists into a single sentence, including the common practice of objecting to things never said. Sorry for being so curt in unpacking it all.)

To the outsider without evidence, it's easy to perceive that the believer practices in blind faith, even if they are absolutely convinced of their claims.

If Bob forms a conclusion about Jane without bothering to interact with Jane's beliefs (relying on mere perception), that says something about Bob and nothing about Jane.