No reason justifies disbelief.

[LadyForCamus]

[quote='LadyForCamus' pid='1893547' dateline='1553218370']
Well, considering the hubris with which you condemn atheists for not being persuaded by them

Please quote to me the post in which I condemn atheists for not being persuaded. I don't believe I have done that. How could I when I am not sure about them either? 

I think you've been imagining judgements which I haven't made.

You're here, on an atheist forum, challenging atheists to reconsider their "metaphysical commitments".  Let me ask you yet another question if I may, since you're presenting your position on the question of the existence of god and other metaphysical truths as completely neutral:  Are you also registered to theist forums where you challenge the quality of their reasons for belief in the same way that you challenge our reasons for disbelief, and our judgements of their reasons?  That's what I would expect from a person who truly has no inclination on the subject yet, one way or the other, and who is looking to challenge all the information and ideas available before taking a committed stance.

It appears that some things appear obvious to people which aren't in fact true. If people could calm down a little bit with their accusations we might be able to understand each other better. 

Maybe it would help if I went back to bare-bones epistemology. This is what I believe:

~ Sense impressions in themselves have no meaning. 

~ When we get a sense impression, we interpret it in the mind. Anything of which we are aware has been interpreted already.

Sure.  No pushback from me on that one.

~ The mind has structures through which it interprets sense impressions. These can be pretty elaborate. It appears that there are innate structures (e.g. the Kantian categories) which guide our interpretations. Beyond those, there is memory, association, and any number of learned categorizations, theories, assumptions, etc. (The extent to which these structures differ among different ages and cultures is an interesting question, but not of first importance here.) Usually the interpretation happens so quickly that we're not aware of it. 

~ If we get a sense impression of something that isn't immediately familiar to us, we use our interpretive structures to think about what it is. To work out where it fits into our familiar world, we can fit that impression into known structures, and we can use logic to extrapolate about it. 

~ If we want to know more about familiar things than our interpretive structure currently gives us, we can fit that familiar thing into existing structures, and use logic to extrapolate, to propose further knowledge.  

~ Some of these propositions will be testable through further sense-experience, which is itself interpreted through our theories and structures. This is science.

~ Some of the propositions could be interpreted through theory and logic in ways which aren't testable through further sense-experience. In such cases, we just have to use logic, and the lack of empirical testing may mean we can never be sure. This is metaphysics. 

There is no mysterious third way of knowing the world, as your question seems to imply. I have never said there was anything like that.

How do you determine which propositions are and are not empirically demonstrable? Is there a separate category of "real" that is, at the same time as real as a tree, or the ocean, or my house, but possesses some mysterious distinction that renders it undetectable? As I mentioned to you many times now, logical arguments for god rely on assumptions about the observable universe.  I thought we couldn't use observable data to draw conclusions about god?