You still don't get it. It's not about "current documentation" or anything else, it's about YOUR beliefs. You have confidence in the existence of CERN, but the existence of CERN is not subject to immediate rigorous proof. If you are holding a rock in your hand you can state as knowledge that the rock exists because you can subject the rock to the immediate rigorous proof of existence by looking down at your hand and feeling the weight and texture of the rock.JimC wrote:Still nonsense, Seth. Don't put words in my mouth; I stated my position quite clearly, it cannot be logically twisted into "I believe there is no god"
As for the CERN thing, again, what arrant nonsense. Your main comparison was, originally, to the historical truth of the bible. CERN (or any other well documented modern organisation/activity) is current, and many living observers are participating in it right now, and communicating their observations and conclusions to an interested world. Straightforwardly, it exists. Replace CERN with the NRA administration, or the Vatican bureaucracy, if it makes you happy...
When you examine the distant human past, however, it is a very, very different situation, and one's confidence into the details passed down could never be have the same degree of certainty as the examples above.
On the other hand, If you are not AT CERN, all you have to rely upon when someone says "CERN exists" is their claim. You cannot immediately and rigorously prove that CERN exists, you place confidence in the existence of CERN based on your confidence in the honesty of the person reporting its existence to you. Even though you can go to a library and see pictures that purport to be of CERN, and you can read papers purportedly written by scientists at CERN, you still have no direct, independent, concrete, verifiable physical evidence that CERN actually exists unless and until you go there and observe it yourself. Everything else is a belief you form based on the degree of confidence you have in the truth or existence of something that is not subject to immediate rigorous proof.
The point of this exegesis is not to deny the reality of CERN, it's to demonstrate to you why it is irrational for anyone to draw conclusions about the existence of God based on a lack of evidence of God's existence or non-existence. Absent such immediate rigorous proof any such conclusion constitutes a belief, nothing more. And belief is one of the important aspects of religion.
Your formation of a belief about God is as irrational as you claim the theist's formation of a belief about God is. No evidence, no rational conclusion.
And I'm not even broaching the subject of evidence that you simply disbelieve.