“The absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence.”

An obvious logical error, Richard. But depending on what position one supports with it, it might or might not get you a department chair at a prestigious university.

While I don’t think we can use deduction to prove 100.0% that God exists, I do think that a good inductive case can be made. We can’t use science to show God exists (and saying that something isn’t real unless science can examine it is just the materialist’s conclusion used as a premise) I think that one of science’s key assumptions, used more broadly, is helpful. Induction might be “scandalous” to some, but people embrace it because it has a good track record at helping us understand things, while positivism really just tells us that we can’t understand much at all.

In science it is assumed that anything in the universe we look at has a cause that is external to itself. If we assume that anything caused itself, we cannot use science to understand that thing very well. Indeed the thing would be an anomaly; a secular version of a miracle. But if we assume that each thing in the universe was caused by something external to itself, then why is it illegitimate to assume the same thing about the universe as a whole? If there was a Big Bang, then who or what lit the fuse? If we are consistent and assume that the cause of the universe was external to itself, then the materialist’s credo that the universe is all there is becomes mere baseless assertion. The materialist’s demand that external causality be assumed about all the parts but be impermissible when considering the whole seems to be rigging the game. I think the onus is on them to show why that must be so.

I also like what you said about the strong case. An atheist friend of mine, an otherwise logical person, expects to see justice, kindness, even love, but without a rational basis to expect those things. There seems to be a part of a person that cannot be seen, much less extracted and run through a mass spectrometer, blind faith in impending answers from neurology notwithstanding. In this the materialist switches positions and claims that a collection of atoms, each one lacking a soul, somehow forms a soul when arranged a certain way. It’s amazing what nonsense can have respectability conferred upon it by scholarly titles.