I speak the minds of many Christians when I write that converting an atheist to Christianity on the pretense that there is objective or scientific evidence of the so-called Abrahamic god would be unsatisfactory because Christianity prescribes other reasons for belief in God. For the set of Christians that believe this, an atheist's demand for objective or scientific evidence of God is equivalent to a direct refusal to consider the tenets of Christianity. The resulting disagreement reduces to a difference in epistemology, which would be interesting to address. Theists and atheists struggle with different aspects of epistemology: theists tend to be informal and often fail to describe their epistemology in detail, while atheists tend to appeal to the scientific method without discussing what makes the epistemology of the scientific method valuable and what its limits are.
What are the epistemological standards you use to judge whether you know something is true?
Monotheists, how do your epistemological standards justify your belief in God? If you would respond with simple arguments like `I believe in God by faith alone,' then please explain when and why you think faith is warranted and where else in life it is appropriate or necessary to invest faith to produce knowledge or belief. Is your scheme reliable? How do you know?
Atheists, what are the epistemological limitations of the scientific method? What are its strengths? How do you know, and how do you know that your argument is reliable?
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