Trav,

Indeed, what is “objective” evidence? My dictionary has the definition of evidence as “the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid” which implicitly means that

(1) this “body of facts or information” must on its own be supported by evidence or be self-evident,

(2) the verb “indicate” used is weeker than “prove” but stronger than “suport”, (which would better fit the definition of "supporting evidence" not much different from "argument").

(3) it all depends on the context, namely who are the recipients of this indication constituting evidence, like the jury in a court trial. (For instance, a photo showing the accused about to stab the victim would be incomprehensible a couple of centuries ago, would be a strong evidence in the first half of last century, and is practically worthless since Adobe Photoshop.

For fundamental worldview statements like “the cosmos is all that is” or “all reality is physical or derived from it and can be in principle investigated by scientific methods” or “there is a divine realm - alternatively there is God - beyond both the physical and the mental” you will never find evidence sufficiently convincing to both theists and atheist, i.e. “objective evidence as evidence that anyone recognises as evidence” as you point out.

So I would not say that atheists who demand evidence for God are necessarily irrational only that they cannot say what would be that evidence which would convince atheists as well as theists.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=wruten+sIGNED+WITNESS+RELIABILITY&i

never put it in writing
because?

writing is a higher proof
when signed before witness..its a matter of honor*
[pRESENT YOUR PROOF THEY LIED*]

''..A hearsay witness is one who testifies what someone else said or wrote. In most court proceedings there are many limitations on when hearsay evidence is admissible. Such limitations do not apply to grand jury investigations, many administrative proceedings, and may not apply to declarations used in support of an arrest or search warrant. Also some types of statements are not deemed to be hearsay and are not subject to such limitations.

An expert witness is one who allegedly has specialized knowledge relevant to the matter of interest, which knowledge purportedly helps to either make sense of other evidence, including other testimony, documentary evidence or physical evidence (e.g., a fingerprint). An expert witness may or may not also be a percipient witness, as in a doctor or may or may not have treated the victim of an accident or crime.

A reputation witness is one who testifies about the reputation of a person or business entity, when reputation is material to the dispute at issue''

Please..PRESENT PROOF THEY LIED
i for one have faith..in theIR EXPERIENCES
IN FACT..SEEN..MANY things your science say imPOSSABLE
BUT THEY WERE MINE..

go ask god for thyne own
[in fact just wake up..to what he has been doing..for YOU YOUR EVERY LIVING MOMENT.]

as mahamoud said..
FIRST*..make just one..LIVING BEING..or witness..like it

Oh well, Trav. If you’re just speaking from your own personal definition of what a fundamentalist is, then I guess I can’t argue with that. Though to avoid confusion, you may want to clarify what you mean by “fundamentalist” in the future if you are going to use your own definition.

<<Faith. You say it’s used when “We can’t know something” or when we “have a reason to doubt it”…>>

Not quite. It’s used when we can’t know something or when we have a reason to doubt it, yet we assure ourselves of the truth of it anyway. I think I made that pretty clear.

<<The fact that something can’t be known with certainty is far from a good argument against it...>>

Absolutely, and I’m surprised by how often I need to explain to theists that it is not an argument for it either.

Regarding evidence, it’s not just about the lack of it. There’s actually evidence against the Abrahamic god. The problem of evil and free will debunk an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent god. We can know that the Abrahamic god does not exist.

<<What is “objective” evidence anyway?>>

Evidence that would be bias/worldview independent. And before you ask why we should even expect to find such evidence, remember that we are talking about a god who has an important message for us all and wants to share it. George’s points ignore this and are only relevant to a god who is not willing or able to communicate with us in any reliable or effective manner.

I don’t know what evidence it would take to convince me that a god exists. It would be arrogant for me to assume that I knew. But one thing I do know is that if this god of yours does exist, then they’d know what it would take to convince me of their existence, and the fact that they haven’t yet done so means that either this god doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t care enough about those who understand the nature of evidence to actually present it.

So which one is it?

>> Evidence that would be bias/worldview independent. <<

You don’t have this even in contemporary theoretical physics. As I quoted Hawkins-Mlodinow in www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14464 :

“our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. … These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no model-independent test of reality. It follows that a well-constructed model creates a reality of its own."

>> George’s points ignore this and are only relevant to a god who is not willing or able to communicate with us in any reliable or effective manner.<<

You are confusing the belief in something beyond both the physical (investigated by science) and mental that I called the divine REALM, and the Abrahamic REPRESENTATION/model (terminology borrowed from philosophy of science) of this realm.

For instance, Einstein (and Spinoza) accepted the existence of the former but rejected the Abrahamic (and Christian) model of it, actually any modelling of the divine on the concept of "person“. So what I wrote was relevant to BOTH what Einstein believed as well as what a Christian believes, although the latter believes also in the adequacy (again a term borrowed from philosophy of science) of the Christian model of the divine. We can KNOW neither the physical nor the divine reality AS SUCH without referring to this or that representation of it in our brain. (The adequacy - closeness to “the truth” - of this or that representation is a different matter, tackled differently in the two case.)

>> if this god of yours does exist, then they’d know what it would take to convince me of their existence <<

This is a subjective complaint, not an argument. Why did God make Himself “known” to others but not to me? Why do others understand mathematics more than I?

Here we are on the grounds of psychology. These questions cannot be answered by your “brain” only by your “heart”. How can you understand mathematics, if you close your “brain” and how can God make himself known to you if you close your “heart”?

There's a reason we believe (chorus)

Oh I'm looking out my window
And I can't believe my eyes
There's a lamb and there's a lion
There's a rainbow in the sky
1 Corinthians 13 is totally devoted to the subject of love, and one of the attributes of God given to us in the Bible is that God is love (1 John 3..,..4:1-14..NOTE THE eXAMPLE

WITNESS,1 JOHN 4;..15-21..,5;1-9..WITNESS..,10-11[RECORD]..12-21

, 16).

The foundation of the Christian system is rooted in love,

Many people find the teachings of Jesus to be impossibly difficult when they read that they are to love their enemy, to do good to those who do evil to them, to turn the other cheek, and the like.

All of this is rooted in our problem of comprehending
what love is all about and in seeing the logic of love...OF good.[god]

Then a bullet breaks the silence
Oh, how many can we stand?

Till the day we find an answer
Please don't let go of my hand

we have characteristics in our make-up that are like God, and one of those characteristics is love.

The Greek language is especially helpful to us in this discussion, because the Greeks had different words to describe different kinds of love. When the Greeks wanted to describe passionate sexual love they used the word eros from which our word erotic is derived.

This word is not used in 1 John because that is not what real love is about. The word phileo was used in the Greek language to describe a brotherly kind of love, and our American city of brotherly love (Philadelphia) gets its name from that root.

The word that is unique to our discussion and is the key to understanding the biblical concept of love is the word agape which refers to a self-sacrificing, non-demanding, unselfish kind of love

I suspect you might be using Occam's Razor to split hairs, George.

>>This is more explicit if one reformulates it as “the existence of God-of-Christianity (guaranteed by the Bible) is evidence that the God-of-Christianity exists.”<<

An argument - especially the "guaranteed" bit - that only a Christian would even consider vaguely relevant to the point I was making. Which is, strangely, exactly the point I was making.

>>A third example of this kind would be the claim “since all that there is can be investigated by (natural) science, and science cannot find God (does not need that concept), it follows that the existence of God (who by contemporary understanding is beyond the reach of science) is most unlikely.”<<

I am guessing this to be the thought process that you attribute to atheists. In which case, you are entirely wrong.

Science does not search for God. Only those who believe in God do that. Unsurprisingly, in these investigations they often do find God, usually in some "holy" text or other.

>>Well, you obviously did not meet philosophically sophisticated Christians. Even the medieval Aquinas ARGUED (in his Quinque viæ or Five Ways) from philosophical considerations, not from the Bible<<

Yeah, our churches are packed with Christian philosophers who argue their faith from first cause, are they not?

What? They're not?

Then my argument stands, with some minor, irrelevant exceptions.

Even Aquinas' arguments fail in their task to produce a God. Except, as usual, to those who already believe in the existence of one.

Every one of the "five causes" is open to interpretations that do not include a divine presence. He carefully sidesteps this by making such self-justifying statements as "et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum" - "this is what people understand to be God".

When (or if, of course) you break this into its component parts, it stands at the same intellectual level as "Cats have four legs. My dog has four legs. So my dog is a cat".

Only one who already believes in a deity would countenance Aquinas' conclusion.