You say talking snakes are crazy, but you didn't live in those times. Take such claims with grains of salt, but never claim to know the truth.
Folks who take everything literally are obviously misguided. Not everything is meant to be literal. I say God does exist, not just because I feel that way, but also because of some life experiences and a whole slew of things happening that just seemed to line up perfectly - like it was meant to be. But I realize this is just a belief. I prefer to make my religion sports, where it's less dangerous and people get less angry over disagreements. What I see from you is pointless insults to large groups of people that may have some difficulty justifying their beliefs, but also are beliefs that are just as difficult to hold in question for many of the same reasons you or I cannot say for certain the existence of God.
Most things we choose to belief are taken largely on faith. You have faith scientists are not misleading you and did not miss something, etc etc.
I appreciate your genuine attempts at discussion, however you seem to be misinformed on a few things. I bring them up because you have used them as strong talking points.
Einstein did not believe in a personal supernatural god. As you can imagine this is something that comes up a lot around here. He believed in
Spinoza's god, which is an acknowledgment of profound order and structure outside of humans.
Critical thinking is a process which follows rigid rules. These rules prevent the conclusion of God from being a critical conclusion, therefore if there are critical thinkers who believe in God, they aren't applying these critical thinking skills to the subject, or else they openly admit they have nothing but faith. IQ has nothing to do with it. If these rules are broken we no longer have critical thinking, we have pseudoscience. Critical thinking, like science, is completely transparent; the process is open for all to check the work, which means no faith is required in the scientists themselves to accept the scientific answers provided.
The burden of proof always falls on the person making the claim. It is completely irrelevant that I am unable to disprove god's existence, just as irrelevant as the fact that I can not disprove a giant unicorn living in the sun. Name for me one other area of serious knowledge in which we assume something exists for no other reason than we can't prove it doesn't. I don't understand why you feel the lack of disproof is anything to be glib about. And keep in mind that while we can not disprove a supernatural deity, we can disprove many of the human proposed incarnations of such a deity.
Lastly, you seem to confuse the various contextual meanings of the word faith. Having faith that the sun will rise tomorrow is very different than having faith in a supernatural father. The belief that the sun will rise is based on past performance, study, and understanding of it's patterns, IOW, evidence. Religious faith is never stronger than when we believe without any evidence at all, making it a completely different concept, and unfair to conflate the two during debate.
