Chris OConnor wrote:Saying, "I don't believe that claim because there isn't enough evidence supporting that claim" is NOT the equivalent of saying "Your claim is false." I'm not sure why this is a hard concept for many people to grasp.
Chris, you have described a key issue here regarding why debate about religion is so difficult. For believers, asking for evidence is the same as arguing their claims are false. The reason is that religious belief is not scientific, but is just a traditional acceptance of authority, a desire to accept claims that people would like to be true. If you hold this faith attitude, then anyone who links belief and evidence is automatically an atheist.
Evangelical preaching has a strongly rhetorical style, inculcating the teaching that doubt is from the devil. When people are primed with this psychology of suspicion that anyone who asks questions is a disloyal outsider who does not belong in their community, the logic of evidence becomes irrelevant, and has to be dismissed with emotional arguments.
Recent scholarship has shown that there is no evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ, and that the evolution of Christian faith is better explained by the hypothesis that Jesus was invented than by the traditional view of him as the founder of Christianity. This is an entirely shocking and impossible claim for Christian believers, since the myth of Jesus is at the foundation of their views about culture and community and morality.
Once one thread of a person's sense of identity is unpicked, the whole weave begins to unravel. So people have a strong psychological need to reject any idea that looks like it is picking at the threads of their faith. But since science is all about logic and evidence, only accepting demonstrable claims, that means conventional Christianity is simply incompatible with the scientific method.
Believers try to deny this hard fact of incompatibility with evidence by pretending that faith and reason are separate, but this whole framework unravels as soon as they try to use faith to justify claims of fact.