it is precisely because I do not accept things I haven't seen and for which there is no evidence that I'm not a theist.
You have seen the uniformity of nature upon which all of your inductive reasoning is based? Which of your five senses have detected the uniformity of nature? If you were a consistent empiricist you would reject your own statement as un-sensed and non-empirical. You refute your own proposition by the very act of stating it.
You do accept many metaphysical things you haven't seen, such as the laws of logic that you are attempting to use to argue with me.
There are plenty of other types of evidence for the existence of God (see for example, this recent FreeRepublic thread} but you have already ruled all of it out-of-bounds as a premise - apriori - because of your naturalism and empiricism, not because it is a conclusion you reached by examining all of the evidence.
Your arguments themselves against Christianity have no consistent foundation in empirisism and naturalism.
I will leave you with the following. I doubt that you will actually read it and comprehend its philosophical subtleties and depth of insight, but then again I have been known to be wrong before.
Why I Believe in GodCornelius Van Til (1895-1987)
Cordially,
You'd think at some point you would feel compelled to provide evidence for these statements instead of just making them. How does seeing how the universe works through observation and experimentation require theism?
I'm surprised I haven't heard you say it yet, since I know how Bahnsen answers the question of where logic comes from and why it has to be unchanging.
I also know that saying that logic is unchanging because God made it that way is as nonsensical and meaningless as saying that we have free will because God says so.
I've yet to see one good argument that supports your belief that observing how things work in the universe requires a theistic creator (much less requires the God of Abraham).
If you read carefully, I didn't say that I accepted things I haven't seen, but that where there is a lack of direct observation, I don't accept things that have no supporting evidence. It's hard to see immaterial concepts like logic and morality, but there's plenty of evidence for their existence. Logic seems to work; orange trees don't grow apples and atoms function in a certain way, but I'm in no position to say that the function of logic will always be the same, as you do.
I haven't seen you defend against any of the criticisms of Christianity's veracity that I've made, so I'll take your statement as an unsupported opinion on that matter. I think that there should be an understanding that until we have evidence of the dead walking the streets of Jerusalem in Matthew 27 that the Bible shouldn't be called "historically accurate", but that's just me. You'd think a real life episode of The Walking Dead happening in the middle of the Roman Empire would warrant some scintilla of historical documentation, but again, I'm a stickler for real world claims of a zombie apocalypse needing solid evidence.
As to the loss of faith in the age of science, I think it will continue to grow for many reasons. But I think that the main reason is that theism has always in some way been a 'god of the gaps' argument. When Native Americans saw lighting on the plains, they thought it divine. When scientists before Darwin looked at how well creatures were adapted to their environments, they thought they must have been created that way, instead of what we now know, which is that creatures adapt to their environment.
And to tie in something Van Til said, he talks a lot in a deistic manner about creation, but scientists know probably better than anyone that for every bit of creation there is much more destruction. If we look at the heat death of the universe, exploding stars, and even our own soon to be collision with the Andromeda galaxy, if there is a God, he is much, MUCH more interested in destruction than creation.