I think the comet and color discussions are fairly peripheral to the topic, but I understand what you say later on about others sharing your observations of God. Now let me see if I can tie it into the topic.
Atheists base their lack of belief in God upon the absence of objective evidence for God. You respond that their inability to make observations of God in no way bears upon his reality because there are many others who do not share this inability and who do observe God, and who share and confirm their observations with others, thereby satisfying the replicability requirement associated with establishing something objectively.
But as much as you might like to believe you're making objective observations, you're not, for a host of reasons.
You're not using any of the five senses, either by direct observation or indirectly through instrumentation, to make your observations, so your observations are based upon internal subjective feelings.
The natural progression of objective study is toward improved understanding of the phenomenon, something that certainly cannot be said about God.
What you call verifying observations is actually sharing of religious feelings. That this is subjective is evidenced by the wide variety of organized religions, and of personal beliefs of members of those religions, and of personal religious beliefs of persons outside organized religions. Christians like yourself can find other Christians like Faith who share your religious feelings and beliefs, but as you've discovered it is also easy to find Christians who do not, such as Jar. And you'd have particular difficulty reaching any agreement about your observations of God with Hindus or Buddhists.
The difference between your belief in God and the atheist's belief that there is no God is that the atheist's observation about the lack of any meaningful consensus about God, and about the lack of objective observational evidence of God, cannot be disputed. The objective evidence for God is about the same as the objective evidence for entities like pink dragons, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness monster.
And there's nothing wrong with that. That there is no objective evidence for God is not proof that there is no God. As RiverRat observed at the outset, you can't prove there is no God, which agrees with what scientists have known from very early on in the development of science, that you can't prove a negative. I can't prove there's no Loch Ness monster, I can't prove there's no Bigfoot, and I can't prove there's no God. But there's no objective evidence for God, and so belief in God is a matter of faith, not of evidence.
What RiverRat was actually trying to say in his OP was that believing there is no God is equally a matter of faith. Well, okay, but if you want to argue that way, then believing there is no Loch Ness monster is also a matter of faith. This is just another way of saying that everything is a matter of faith, and by that argument, as I pointed out in my previous message, all beliefs are equally valid, which is obviously not true.
--Percy
™ Version 4.2
