I thought it was worth making an effort for this topic. I'm going to eschew the usual pick-and-quote method of responding and try to address your main points. I don't intend to ignore or disregard any of your points by doing this, so if I miss any critical challenge or question, please tell me. You posed the challenge that the justification for a claim like the Resurrection has to be empirical, since the Resurrection, if it occurred, would leave empirical evidence. I have no disagreement there. Determining whether or not there had been a Resurrection would require you to look into the matter with your best epistemic tools: seeing if there's an empty tomb or even meeting the Risen Christ. It's a bit ironic that in that earlier post I linked to a video that told the story of Doubting Thomas. Empirical evidence would lend support to the Resurrection story, and at the same time there's evidence that would seem to falsify it; for instance, finding the body. Of course, as the Resurrection (if it happened) occurred almost two thousand years ago, we can't make an investigation like this, and we need to rely on the historical method. A while back I read a book by Richard Swinburne called The Resurrection of God Incarnate which went about doing this. It was a fairly solid work so I'll defer any further questions on the Resurrection there. The important point here is that I do not disagree with you about epistemology. You introduce an objective-subjective distinction pretty quickly, and it seems to me that a lot of your argument turns on it. For instance, the general and scientific images of the table are both objective, and the religious image is not. I question the use of this distinction. All images of the table are subjective, in the sense that they are all simply ways of thinking about an external object. (I'm being a bit lazy with the way I phrase this. I should not be implying that there is an objective table at all, strictly speaking. The assumption that there is depends upon more of those unprovables.) All the images are grounded in the experience of the table, but that seems as far as you can go. (On a side note, I'd like to point out that the science of the Islamic Golden Age was not modern science, precisely. In any case, I'm not particularly committed to any claim about the history of science, and I do see that Islam is a quite scientifically respectable religion.) You note that my spiritual experiences are not objective. I have to respond to that with, "Yes, that's absolutely correct, and you'll notice that I made it clear in my post that I was not attempting to use those experiences as proof of the existence of God for others." Then you also introduce a distinction between provability and testability. I'm not entirely sure what this distinction is or how it's supposed to be relevant. The premises behind modern science are things like 'there is an external world which behaves in predictable ways', 'the universe is governed by certain objective and consistent laws', 'the human mind is capable of comprehending and systematising these laws', 'it is neither immoral nor impious to make an empirical study of the universe', and so on. I don't see how these are testable hypotheses. I have no idea how you would go about testing the idea that the universe follows consistent laws and is not just an arbitrary set of random events, and that's leaving aside the worry that using scientific investigation to justify the premises of science is hopelessly circular. Lastly, you followed along Yuthura's definition of faith as 'believing in something in the absence of evidence or in spite of evidence'. All I have to say is that I don't use the word 'faith' in that way. It is true that faith always goes beyond the evidence, of course. If I have faith that my significant other loves me than I am believing something that cannot be determined beyond any doubt from any evidence available to me. In a sense faith does surmount doubt, and maybe that's what Yuthura's definition is getting at. In any case, I have nothing much to say about the practice of believing things in spite of evidence, so I'll leave it there. I suppose here I should make a note about the idea of proving something. My purpose in this topic is not to prove to you or anyone else that my religion is correct. As I said, I think the best way to go about showing one's religion to be correct is to live it. You show other people the fruit of your religion and let them make their own judgements. If a person comes to me and asks me to evangelise them I will do my best, but that's not what this situation is. If you are asking me to present you with a proof that will convince you to convert, then I am afraid you will be disappointed. I'm just trying to explain the epistemic situation I'm in and why I think it's legitimate to have religious faith.
Yeah, but it's argued based on evidence and logic, not faith, which is contra-defined relative to those things. Logic is not taken on faith. Logic is required for the concept of faith to exist; faith cannot antecede it. Evidence is not taken on faith, it has room for significant doubt, assuming the process is not pseudo-scientific/cherry picked/ad hoc. Emotional degrees of certainty in regards to an unprovable or unproven position is where a tentative belief can become faith. Assume any knowledge could potentially be overthrown and you have no real need of faith. Psychologically, many people may not be capable of this. Assuming the above, this doesn't mean that any and all statements are of equal validity; assume there is a real world and that many things can actually be known better than pulling shit out of your arse and daubing the first thing that comes into your head on the wall. A little skepticism is good for overcoming faith, but don't let it become the most important part of your epistemology, or you lose all knowledge and become a postmodernist or solipsist or similar douchebag that anyone with sense can smell the mysticism and bullshit on. Nor does every phrase require excessive weasel-wording. The world is real and let it ground you. Language evolved as a "good enough" system of neural communication between beings that survive on "good enough" senses and assumptions. The absolutes of languages do not represent the limitations on human knowledge that we survive with. But they are useful. So just relax, distrust obscurantist, ignorance-promoting cults and know you could be wrong. Trust scientific authorities unless there's a decent basis for not doing. No need for faith in an epistemology like that, though much of your life will look that way to someone in a cult because they receive the majority of their thinking from authority - culturally, from the bottom up (populist status quo authority), and from the top down (political/clerical authority). Most of what we do is unconscious and doesn't need rigorously checking with logic and evidence all the time. Indeed, most of the time if we are prompted to do that, we will rationalise rather than rationally inquire. This doesn't make us bad people, it makes us normal. I think faith just takes that feature of the brain and runs with it to extremes, hence it should be automatically distrusted and looked down upon. The brain and its suppositions should probably be recommended to have a periodic check of where it's going and what it believes and why, though. It would probably help a lot of people avoid turning things into faiths and keep things a little more grounded.
Okay, I'm going to start here by taking your point about the null hypothesis. This isn't a quibbling detail, it is a very, very important one. If we took a position of agnosticism for every hypothesis until it offered proof, science would collapse. It would require us to take seriously every single one of a million mutually contradictory ideas about how the universe worked, even if they offered no proof or evidence to support themselves. It would lead to hypothesis bloat, since we would be unable to dismiss the vast majority of false ideas out of hand. There is only one reality, that means that most ideas about how it works are going to be wrong. The right one will have evidence, and thus the only logical - the only viable - standpoint to take, given the sheer number of wrong ones it is possible to generate, is to demand proof before an idea is taken seriously. Not absolute proof, no, but at least some form of evidence to show that it's even worth consideration. Otherwise you wind up having to consider an infinite number of ideas, and wind up never moving forward. If you don't have a filter to sort out the jewels from the slurry, things grind to a halt. The Null Hypothesis is that filter. It is a negative claim, a claim of non-existence, which says "your idea is wrong, and there is no such thing as what you are proposing. Nothing is there, and the effects you are observing are occurring by chance." If I observe alpha particles scattering back from a sheet of gold foil and hypothesise that there is an extremely concentrated point charge that they're bouncing off, rather than a diffuse charge that's altering their trajectory slightly many times in succession until they've made a complete 180 degree turn, the null hypothesis says "no, it is random chance from a number of interactions with the diffuse charge that is turning them around". It is up to me to prove statistically that it is more likely that my explanation is correct than the null hypothesis. It is up to me to show, by probability, that it is more likely that my model is causing an effect than it is that it happened by chance. If the model is correct, it should not be too hard to show that the likelihood of the observed effect happening by chance is far, far smaller than the likelihood that yes, there is a concentrated charge at the centre of the atom. This means that my hypothesis gets through the null hypothesis filter, whereas all the other hypotheses - that there are very small men with tennis rackets wandering around the atom, that alpha particles sometimes just reverse their course randomly for no apparent reason, etc - do not. If I had to say "well, mine might be true, but so might these" for every possible explanation imaginable - which is what you're saying, with your claim that agnosticism should be the null hypothesis - then I would have to individually disprove each and every one of those claims before mine was taken to be true. Which is impossible. Because there are an infinite number of them. The null hypothesis is the primary tool of science, the first gauntlet that any idea must run. It is the challenge to show that the effect you are trying to explain does not happen merely by chance, that your idea has a higher probability than random chance doing it. That the dice is weighted, rather than just happening to come down on that number. That it comes up 6 more often than one sixth of the time, and that your idea explains why it does that better than any other. If you can't do that, then your idea fails. And the God Hypothesis can't. The layman's view of the table is a model, which makes predictions on how it should behave and how it should not behave - for instance, it shouldn't abruptly become intangible. He can test these predictions, and does so, and the table always behaves as he would expect it to. And it is possible for it not to. It explains the behaviour of the table in a way that massively furthers our understanding about the universe, and allows us to use that understanding in order to use the table in an effective manner according to its known, testable, observable properties - supporting plates of food, for instance. The scientific view of the table is a model, which makes predictions on how it should behave and how it should not behave - quite a lot of predictions, some of which seem wildly unintuitive. We can test these predictions, and do so. And quantum/particle physics is the single most accurate part of science we have developed to date, with the behaviour of the table agreeing to astonishing accuracy throughout thousands of trials in experiments where there are many, many, many ways for it to be proven false. It explains the behaviour of the table in a way that massively furthers our understanding about the universe, and allows us to use that understanding in order to come up with many new technologies that exploit the rules and laws we have found. (I should also point out in response to one of your other points that quarks are not unobserved. They aren't a hypothesis, they are a theory - one backed by a considerable wealth of evidence. We have detected subatomic particles in colliders like CERN, and our models of quarks predict behaviour perfectly in line with what we observe to be the case. In essence, we know that matter is made up of entities that act in exactly the same way that we have predicted quarks to act, and which have all of the same properties that we predict quarks to have, to ludicrous degrees of precision.) The religious view of the table tells us nothing. It makes no predictions as to how the table should behave. We cannot test whether it is or isn't part of God's creation. No matter what the table does, it is possible to claim that God intended it to do that, and such a claim cannot be proven false. It does nothing to explain the table's behaviour in a way that furthers our understanding of the universe. It is a useless explanation with no reality check that boils down to "a wizard did it", with no way to prove this wrong and no evidence to support it as correct. The layperson's view of a table is backed by evidence. The scientific view of the table is backed by evidence. The religious view of the table is not backed by evidence. These three are not equivalent. Two of them are supported by evidence. The third is not. Actually, that one is falsifiable. If the universe was an arbitrary set of random events, then we would expect it to act randomly, and see a probabilistic change in the laws of nature as time passed. Throughout human history, to all observers, the laws of nature have never changed, altered or deviated from what we know them to be today. The probability of a random number generator spitting out the same number on a trillion-sided die for all that length of time is so low that we can pretty much conclusively take as an axiom that yes, the universe does appear from all our observation to be consistent in its behaviour. Argh! This is one of the most infuriating analogies I have heard from religious people. Love is testable! If I have a significant other, I can observe her behaviour! I can watch how she acts towards me, I can experience how she enjoys my company and shows her love for me and displays her feelings! And I can weigh that against the null hypothesis, which is that she doesn't actually love me and is acting in this manner for some other motive, with no slip-ups that I can detect, and has been doing so for as long as I have been dating her. And I can consider which of these two is more likely. And guess what? It's more likely to be the former! Whereas if I was hilariously rich and famous, that would lend a higher probability to the latter hypothesis, that she's only acting like that to get at my money at my fame. That's how you can test love. Experience, observation, weighing of probability. Now, show me how you can do that for God. Show me how you can observe his love for you. Show me how you can experience things that God has definitely done to help you and make you happy, which couldn't have been anything other than him - as I know about my girlfriend, since she was right there, physically, in the flesh. And then weigh that against the probability that there is no God, and that you are ascribing random bouts of fortune and good luck that are no more common than is to be expected and the entirely natural, neurological feeling of peace and happiness that comes from being a part of a warm and inclusive community (your local church) to an omnipotent super-being who supposedly created the entire universe. Those odds don't look quite so hot. The definition of "faith" used by atheists - and indeed most definitions I have encountered - is the belief in something based on no empirical evidence or proven facts. Yes, everyone takes certain axioms for granted - that chairs aren't going to break under their weight, that co-workers aren't going to suddenly turn around and stab them in the face, that madmen on the road aren't going to suddenly come tearing down the street and cause a terrible accident. But they have empirical reasons to believe these things - the fact that such occurrences are rare, and that the chair shows no signs of being unsound; the fact that the co-worker has never acted in a homicidal manner and has no weapons on them; the fact that horrible traffic accidents aren't common in their city and that they've already looked both ways down the road and seen no traffic coming. These are probability-based predictions rooted in our experience of the outside world. But God isn't in the outside world. He's not something we can see definite signs of. Anything outside your own head that you can attribute to God can be equally and more completely attributed to naturalistic causes. You don't have to determine something beyond any doubt to act as if it were true, you just have to determine that it is more likely to be true than any alternative. We can do that for things like collapsing chairs, homicidal co-workers and car crashes. And we can't do that for God. So why should we act as though he exists?
I had written most of a response here, but sadly the forum ate it. Firefox saves what you have typed into forms in vbulletin, but it doesn't appear to do so in XenForo. Forgive me if this response is a bit truncated. It would not. My feeling here is that you're a bit confused about the process of hypothesis-formation. Science does not attempt to systematically test every possible or relevant hypothesis. That's never been on the table. Exactly how scientists come up with hypotheses - both how they actually do so and how they ought to do so - is a significant issue. So as not to drag the topic down, I'll just say that I'm fairly sympathetic to Popper's view that intuition and imagination play a significant role. Bear in mind that any negative hypothesis can be turned into a positive hypothesis with just a minor rephrasing, and vice versa. The null hypothesis you speak of is not an automatic assumption of the negative. Rather, it's a refusal to make any assumption at all. As I said before, 'X exists' and 'X doesn't exist' are both positive hypotheses. When we think about how we build our scientific picture of the world, we're basically trading in concepts, aiming for simplicity, explanatory power, and predictive power. An obvious example is phlogiston. We included phlogiston in our scientific image in order to explain something about combustion. It's a postulated unobservable entity; there are lots of those in science. When it became apparent that phlogiston didn't do this very well, and we could find a better, simpler, and clearer picture without phlogiston, we ceased to include phlogiston. The overall scientific endeavour aims to build the simplest picture of the world possible which nonetheless explains all observed phenomena and accurately predicts future events. I understand your argument here to hinge on the idea that God is basically something like phlogiston: a concept intended to explain something about the world and to predict events. However, I don't recall where in my post I suggested that God is a scientific hypothesis of that sort. I thought I made it fairly clear that I'm not thinking about God in that way. I never made or implied any theory-hypothesis distinction. I'm not sure there is a robust distinction to be made, to be honest. In any case, that was just a side point on the philosophy of science. I don't accept scientific realism when it comes to postulated unobservables. It's a fairly controversial issue and I thought it best to put that on the table. (Just to name drop, you might have heard of van Fraassen or Larry Laudan?) I'm not sure where I suggested that the religious image was meant to be a predictive model. I don't really feel I need to make a response to this; the bit you quoted stands on its own to refute your response. In short, your response is circular. You mentioned seeing changes in 'the laws of nature' if the universe were arbitrary. However, the very question at hand is whether there are such things as laws of nature. You can't test whether or not the universe obeys consistent laws by reference to those very laws: it's blatantly circular reasoning. The idea that the universe is rationally ordered is not one that can be tested as far as I can see. I think you've missed the point of the analogy. You cannot show indubitable proof of your loved one's intentional mental states. You don't have access to them. You may have good reason to believe that she loves you (I used this term in my initial post and made it nice and clear), but there's an epistemic leap involved, as you jump from 'my significant other's behaviour is consistent with the hypothesis that she loves me' to 'my significant other loves me'. Thus you put faith in your significant other. This faith is well-grounded in reason, in the case of most outwardly loving relationships, and that's a very good thing! As far as God goes, I believe I made my point back in my first post. My conception of faith in God is of a similar sense of confidence and trust. I already made it quite explicit that I am not attempting to convert anyone in this topic. I am not attempting to prove to you that God exists. I don't feel I need to do that and I don't feel I can do that either.
"God exists" is far less likely than "God doesn't exist", for the simple fact that the god you are talking about is one that is only known via culture; a culture with no evidential basis but a social one. An inherited tribal deity from the Levant region when most people were not literate or had any notion of naturalistic philosophy is so unlikely as to be laughable. Not only is there no evidence, but all evidence of the origins of the concept logically point to it being a primitive superstitious idea with little to nothing to do with reality and everything to do with culture. If you raised some kids on a desert island, never once mentioning God as per the western/middle eastern Judeo-Christian tradition, they would not conclude it from any evidence they naturally have available to them. If they ever turned to it later, it would only be out of emotionally seductive influence from members of our culture and you know it. And a person's trust in another is based on behaviours, statements and other real things. It's difficult to fake things like pupils dilating when your loved one looks at you. Can you say the same of God? Fuck no. There is fuck all there because it is all in your head. Sorry if that bluntness offends you, but I think you secretly know that's the better explanation and you choose otherwise out of habit - you don't want to break your self-imposed spell. I suspect the notion of doing so makes you feel uneasy and even guilty, like you are betraying a friend. An invisible friend. The mind constructs some weird autosuggestive, emotionally painful shit.
You should write lengthy responses in word documents and then paste them when you're finished. I disagree. Faith is often enough for people to believe in things which make no sense, and many in the US do act on their beliefs instead of common sense. I think that faith may not get a 'free pass' per say, but it certainly isn't criticized or ridiculed in the way that it should. Faith is a poison when it comes to reasoning, and should be actively fought if people's well-being is at stake.
Deleted my previous post 'cause it was a little too facile. Of course not, but that's only because there is a significant historical and cultural context to Christianity that cannot be derived ex nihilo. But pretty much every culture out there came to the conclusion that there were deities. I see no reason why your hypothetical desert island culture would develop any differently, given overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Of course they did. Humans have this thing called theory of mind and false pattern recognition that they apply to natural forces in error. All gods in all cultures are symptomatic of that; that's why cultures evolve animism, polytheism and occasionally monotheism. The gods are natural forces seen through the looking glass of man's evolved ego and paranoia.
So. . . all cultures, historically, have come to the conclusion that there exists some supernatural entity or entities which humans do not really understand, and which control the natural forces which humans can observe acting around them. Or, to rephrase, millions upon millions of independent observers, all throughout history, have come up with variations on the same basic hypothesis from observing the same or similar phenomena. And this is evidence. . . against the hypothesis in question? I'm an atheist myself. I don't believe that there is a God, though it is of course always possible that I'm wrong. But this particular argument really doesn't work.
To extend on that, going by the model of deities arising due to faulty pattern recognition and false attribution of causation, we would expect most cultures to develop some sort of powerful deity figure based on things around them which they attribute to power. But all of them different, since the process is more or less random. We'd expect a vast collection of gods that look and act like powerful humans, of animalistic gods, of gods closely linked to impressive and frightening natural phenomena such as lightning, earthquakes, ocean storms, war, death, disease, etcetera. We would expect very few running themes that everyone has picked up on, though we'd also expect a certain amount of inter-cultural contamination and memetic drift. And we'd expect wildly different ideas on what those gods do, how they behave, and how the metaphysics of their various deeds (creating the world, causing disasters and miracles, etc) work. Whereas if there were a single true god who everyone is picking up on through some sort of intuitive understanding, we would expect solid, consistent themes. Perhaps not in appearance, but it's reasonable to expect some degree of similar behaviour and mythology - it is, after all, the same god. We would expect it to give fairly similar commands, unless it's schizophrenic or suffering from MPD, and we would expect consistent narratives of how it did various things in the past, and so on. We might even expect far-flung groups of worshippers to be aware of one another in a decent amount of detail through their god. And as it turns out, the first one is rather more like what we see than the latter. In fact, the observable evidence fits almost perfectly with the predictions, and raises rather large questions as to why, if everyone is picking up on the same universal god, they all came up with such radically different notions of it. Unless they are basically making up everything except the basic fact of its existence - in which case I'm of the opinion it's likely they're making up that as well - it's a rather difficult question to answer without just going "oh, well God works in mysterious ways", which is a complete cop-out and a refusal to even consider the massive logic holes in the hypothesis.
Primitive cultures often have a "god of Gaps" explaining things they don't understand, it is wholly unsurprising, it's also one of the first aspects of divinity that disappear as more of the physical phenomena are understood.
That does not necessarily follow, and would depend on the deity in question, and how this deity chooses to reveal itself.
It's a likely possibility. It's certainly how one would expect a loving creator who wanted to be acknowledged to act. And the thing that's always struck me about gods that you can't even begin to understand, and which act in seemingly random, contradictory ways that make no sense and cause vast amount of suffering, is that however much one might speak of God having a plan; a) there is no way to know that this is the case, and it's not just being a dick and b) you are for all intents and purposes basically worshipping Cthulhu. Or to put it another way, if God has a grand, ineffable plan that involves working in mysterious ways, and that plan is nonsensical and impossible to understand, and those ways cause suffering and pain and evil in the world, or at the very least allow for their existence... then it doesn't really matter what God's intentions are. We wouldn't let off a certified genius who went around acting according to some nonsensical plan and killing people just because they said that they actually loved everyone and were working for some cosmic greater good. Why should God get that trust? It's the difference between unqualified faith and qualified belief again. We trust authority figures because they show themselves, prove themselves to be trustworthy (or more often in today's world, we don't trust them because they've proven themselves not to be). There has never been any evidence that a God even exists, which means that if one does, it's been deliberately withholding that evidence. That's already one black mark against any hypothetical deity in my book. So yeah, this brings us back to the original question. Why does God get that free pass? Why does faith not have to provide any evidence? Why is the problem of evil allowed to go unanswered without throwing the whole basis of an all-loving God into doubt?
What 'intuitive understanding'? I'm not sure what you mean by that. And we do actually see a lot of that kind of similarity, certainly in the core teachings of various religions. There are really a lot of points of similarity between very different religions. The Ten Commandments of Judaism and Christianity, for example, are almost the same as the moral instructions found in chapter 17 of the Qur'an; that's not surprising, given that Islam comes from a very similar tradition. But they are also almost the same as the Five Precepts of Buddhism (as well as the nearly-identical Five Precepts of Taoism), which definitely does not come from the Abrahamic tradition. And all of them are very close to the ten traditional Hindu Yamas, too, and Hinduism is a third completely different belief structure. At their core, the moral teachings of most religions are nearly identical. Of course, every religion has a constellation of ideas that have grown up around those core moral teachings, and those are commonly wildly different from each other, but if you refer back to the actual holy texts of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, you find a huge degree of parallel thought among them. So I'm afraid the argument that 'Religions are too different to all derive from the same source' is hard to make, particularly since every religious figure I've talked to, at least, willingly admits that divine inspiration has to come through mortals, and mortals fuck the message up or insert their own biases all the time.
My OP addressed the very specific issue that people treat the positive statement of their faith as different from the way they treat other positive statements. That treatment is the "free pass". We can argue for a thousand pages about religion and faith, but so long as people treat their faith differently from other positive statements, the free pass remains. Choosing to operate from a point of view is not faith. Faith within the context of the debate we are having is a very a specific and narrow concept. Based on the available evidence, I evaluate the least-false outcome for each possible course of action, then embark on the one which suits my goals. Probably not especially thoroughly. Faith is not involved at any point in the process. Faith is not "being uncertain based off the available evidence, but making a choice anyways". Science and logic have no problem making choices with uncertainty, in fact, they accept such as inevitable. Faith is believing in something in the absence of evidence, or even in spite of evidence. This is not the same as "being uncertain based off the available evidence" because that scenario still involves the presence/possibility of evidence. Faith is belief in something for which there is both no evidence for, and for which there can be no evidence for. Such is radically different from how science operates. Ok. This is the core issue really. Religion will make a claim about empirical reality. Then, when science attacks it, and demonstrates that the claim is objectively wrong based off the available evidence, religion will retreat to the subjective "I don't need to use evidence" sphere of thought, all while still insisting its claims are applicable to the objective sphere. It is this attempt to straddle both spheres that makes religion a problem where the average non-religious philosophy does not. Faith healing is an excellent example of this. It deals with events occurring in empirical reality, and science makes it clear that it doesn't work, yet the religious insist on it anyways using non-empirical grounds. This gets people killed, which is generally sub-optimal for the goals of religious and non-religious philosophies alike. The first two images are attempts to describe objective reality, the third is an attempt to describe subjective reality. That they are rooted in the subjective nature of the human experience is irrelevant, as if you are going to play "human experience is subjective and unknowable", the only working philosophy is solipsist absurdity. Ok. Ok. 'there is an external world which behaves in predictable ways': If the external world does not behave in predictable ways, this would be evidence against. 'the universe is governed by certain objective and consistent laws': If the universe can be observed to not follow objective and consistent laws, then this would be evidence against. 'the human mind is capable of comprehending and systematising these laws': If a systematic failure to develop coherent models of the universe occurs, then this would be evidence against. 'it is neither immoral nor impious to make an empirical study of the universe': If empirical studies of the universe result in scientists frequently being smote by lightning or something, then this would be evidence against. That... wasn't hard at all. They're all quite testable. That is not faith. Science not only has no problem with uncertainty, it recognizes that it is the only possibility that can exist when it comes to decision making. Acting as if something is uncertain is not faith, in fact it is the opposite of faith, which involves believing that things are certain despite lack of evidence. (since no amount of evidence can render something certain, believing something to be certain is always an act of faith). According to basically every philosophy followed by anyone, embarking on a course of action that leads to an outcome sub-optimal compared to other courses of action is "bad". Available evidence indicates both that applying faith to matters of empirical reality tends to lead to sub-optimal outcomes, and that faith is by definition applied to empirical reality. That is why religious faith is illegitimate. It contravenes the very philosophical goals its associated with in the first place. For example, let's say a person is sick, and you want to, as a goal, see them get better. You decide to use faith healing because you have faith that it will work. The person dies, even though they in all likelihood would've lived if you had just done what science tells you to do. Your application of subjective values to objective reality has resulted in a failure to achieve your own subjective goals. Faith involves a commitment to the belief of applying subjective values to objective reality. So long as you consider faith acceptable, you are considering a course of action that any philosophy would consider inefficient to be acceptable. It is very much like the GOP has been behaving ever since the Reagan Revolution. They advocate positions not because the evidence indicates they will work, but because they believe they should work. My favorite example is the matter of abortion, where the GOP has declared that they follow the ideal of "abortion=bad", then embark on a course of action for which empirical evidence indicates will increase the abortion rate, because actions which do decrease the abortion rate don't match their ideological tastes. My problem with the GOP is less about them having a different ideal than mine, but about them following a course of action which is strictly inferior to others when it comes to achieving their ideal, or my ideal, or basically any practical ideal. And it wouldn't surprise me in the least if all that foolishness is rooted in faith.
There was a time when it was acceptable for Christian scientists to look for evidence for their faith. However, the obvious bias is that whatever they have come up with is obviously horribly biased and studies to debunk their theories are written by the dozen. The opposite does not happen. So if, by default, we all assume that there is no evidence then we are free to safely ignore attempts to the contrary, continue finding evidence that supports our preferred view, and mock those with faith because they have no evidence. I don't know, maybe it's because I'm a psychologist in training, that I am quite used to having a phenomenon that works in predictable ways and hearing two wildly differing hypotheses (one that it evolved, another that it was crafted to be simple) and both sides being explored. Science, especially theoretical science, is not as objective as we would like it to be.
You're making the extremely questionable assumption that you can operate on the same sort of level that a being capable of creating and maintaining an entire universe can. And I've got a question for you: What authority do you claim to be able to make such an absolute and profound statement?
I'm not actually sure how much we agree, I just think you're a perfect straight man for absurdity. And I think you do 1000000000000000% of the meth.
The same level of authority that one can use to dismiss and assert the absence of evidence my penis ejaculated the universe into existence.
