What do you mean by evidence? As Hume, Russell et al. showed that the fact that the sun has risen in the east for the last umpteen mornings is not reason (proof you prefer) to believe that it will do so next morning. I believe the sun will rise in the east next morning (God willing) but I cannot prove that it will.
You cannot prove
anything to be an absolute truth using evidence.
Of course, you cannot prove that anything is absolutely true, so that should be irrelevant.
It is reasonable to conclude based on evidence that the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow. Yes, it is possible that tonight the Earth will be pulverized by a rogue planet traveling near the speed of light and that therefore there will be no sunrise for anyone, but the available evidence still makes the conclusion "The Sun will rise in the East tomorrow" a reasonable conclusion. That's how evidence works.
You can complain all you want about evidence not resulting in absolute truths, but history shows that evidence leads to more valuable and useful conclusions than truths arrived at in the absence of evidence.
Show them elephants. But I cannot make them accept that elephants (as I use the term) exist. Reason does not work that way.
If you show someone elephants and they still deny that elephants exist, then they are not capable of reason anyway and there is no point in trying to convince them of anything. The fact that some people are obstinate enough to deny valid evidence does not change the fact that you are accepting conclusions without evidence (or at least without good evidence) nor does it change the fact that accepting conclusions without evidence is a bad way of determining what is true.
If someone told you that they doubt that McDonald's sells a product called a Big Mac, would you ask them to have faith that McDonald's sells Big Macs? Or would you just show them the evidence?
I wouldn't not show them that evidence as that is too scary.
Nice dodge.
But you do ask people to have faith that the story about the talking snake is true.
Yes
There, was that so hard?
Then you play word games and try to "confuse" different definitions of the word faith and hope that I won't notice the shell game.
You are finding conspiracies where there are none.
You are using different definitions of the word at different times in order to support your claim. You are using this equivocation fallacy without the assistance of anyone else, so it's not a conspiracy. The fact that you are using different definitions of the word is evident to anyone reading this exchange.
Yes, I have "faith" that when I sit in a chair, the chair won't collapse, but when I say that, we both know that we are talking about a different definition of the word "faith." That is the "hope" sense of the word, not the definition theists mean when they use it as support for claims.
I do not care if you choose to use the word hope instead of faith.
Of course you don't care. If you cared, you would notice that you are "confusing" different definitions of the same word in order to create false support for a conclusion. Caring about this would require caring about the whether or not your claims are in fact true.
I've been in a lot of apologetics arguments with Christians and Muslims, and I've noticed that "I don't care" statements increase in frequency as a Christian or Muslim is doing worse and worse in an argument.
A truth-seeker begins with the evidence, then shapes his conclusions to fit the evidence.
If you begin with the conclusion, then shape the evidence to fit your conclusion, then it would be perfectly natural for you to not care about whether or not your evidence is valid.
No, I use the word hope as it is meant to be used.
Yes, both meanings are technically correct. The problem is that you are using one meaning when we talk about trusting a chair to not collapse and a different meaning of the word when talking about religious truth claims.
1: I have "faith" that the chair won't collapse when I sit in it because I have evidence of past chairs not collapsing when I sat in them.
2: You have "faith" that the talking snake story is true.
Your logical fallacy is that because statement one is based on evidence, therefore I am wrong to point out that statement 2 involves accepting conclusions without evidence. This is the equivocation fallacy I was talking about before. Statement 1 and statement 2 are using two different definitions of the word faith. You are "confusing" the two definitions in order to deny what you are doing when you use faith to accept religious truth claims.
If you had evidence that supported your claims, you would not speak of faith at all, just like you don't need to mention faith when you confidently make the claim that the Sun rises in the East.
see above
Did. The shell game you are playing with different definitions of "faith" is not working.
