"Honest" faith, takes over where reason leaves off. The vast majority of people don't have an "honest" faith in that if something they believe is falsified, they will alter their faith accordingly. As you suggest, most people will ignore the information and hold on to their faith. But reason and faith are "compatible" if one is ready to accept that ones understanding can be flawed and therefor needs to be testable.

One cannot "prove" the non-existence of a deity. One can prove the false understanding of SOME deities. (We can clearly see there are no turtles upon which the earth is riding, and they don't go "all the way down".) As such, reason is "compatible" with faith as long as they don't try to cover the same ground.

What you are calling honest faith, I call intuition: I think something is true, but don't have evidence either way. My brain, being a complex biochemical computer, has given me a tentative conclusion without telling me how it got there. I may have an intuition that a lab experiment will turn out a certain way. I can cite this intuition to my boss, to convince her that we should run the experiment. But we still have to run the experiment. I can't publish intuition in a scientific journal. If I haven't run the experiment and want to speak informally to someone about my intuition, I have to qualify it with "but I can't prove it."

So to those who have honest faith about God's existence, you could say "I believe in God, but I can't prove it."

I think you meant to say:

"I believe in God, but I cannot prove its existence."

For some the most accurate statement would be, "...but it is impossible to prove its existence".

If reason threatens their beliefs, then they simply declare them based solely on faith, and thus impervious to reason.

You can't really "threaten" beliefs with reason. Beliefs are generally about the unknowable. Yes, there are those that have goofy "beliefs" that are falsifiable. But the vast majority of belief is about the unknowable. Of course knowledge expands over time so what is unknowable at one time might become knowable at another. That is when a faith can be tested. Most fail the test.

cannot provide verification of something believed. In religion, reason and logic are used in a different way than in science, for example. By positing that an all-powerful, all-knowing deity exists, anything can be called truth, using an imitation of logical reasoning.

The problem is that the initial premise cannot be shown to be true, and without that premise, the rest of the logic breaks down. Faith is the thing that is used to make the initial premise true, so everything can follow from that.

However, faith is not proof of anything, so the initial premise is not known to be true. It is merely believed to be true. All logic that depends on that initial premise, then, is flawed and void.

All theistic religion is based on that faulty logic and such an initial premise, which often goes unstated, but is referenced in the argument.

The answer to your question is no.

The answer is no.

If it were not, no person of faith would be able to reason.

An excellent ending.

can reason logically. So far, I have not found one. Do you know of someone like that?

You just can't see it.

I also accept that you have faith in your own abilities.

Could you be any more patronizing. Feh!

And, as I demonstrated, as your assertion demonstrates, you also have faith.

No need to thank me.

Guill

You seem to be giving this a literal interpretation.

“ Of course, logically, we know that if you cannot provide evidence to back up your belief structure it remains just a theory, a maybe.”

Empirical reasoning uses evidence to construct theories that explain observed phenomena. “Just a theory” is a canard used by anti-intellectual right wing ideologues to dismiss inconvenient truths.

...


"Let us agree not to step on each others feet."

Many say many things. Some are true. Some are not. Evidence speaks more clearly. Where is evidence for "separate magisteria?"

Once again, the initial premise has no evidence, and so must be discarded.

And suggest religious folks should try to be far, far more reasonable, logical, and fact-based. Even in matters of the presently unknown, metaphysics, we should make and rely on reasonable guesses. Not ancient superstitions and surreal emotional dreams.