Debating the existence of God

The following exchange comes from a blog entitled 'A Bigger Circle'.
As someone who takes forever to get his thoughts in writing, I had spent too much time on my entries to not want to replicate them elsewhere.
The debate began with an entry by Mike Gouthro who wrote:
…so-called atheists among us….surely … cannot believe in nothing – they have to believe in something even if they do not want to call “it” God.”
Belief is not knowledge. Knowledge is acquired by curiosity, reason and healthy skepticism. Belief results from need, as the words “have to believe” imply.
I’m interested in how universes are born, evolve and die. If this curiosity ever provides answers about who creates universes and why – that would be amazing – but not essential to my well-being.
Others need to focus on who and why; and many need to have a personal relationship with the ”who”. Without a benevolent creator, some people feel distressed or incomplete. But their creator cannot be known, only believed, at least at this stage in human learning.
From belief in a creator, inevitably arises the belief that atheists are lacking an essential human component, namely the ability to believe. That strikes me as a closed loop, a logical short circuit, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a rationalization of the believer’s need – not a viable assessment of those who don’t have that need.
Belief is not knowledge.  

In response I wrote:
To say ‘I know’ is a statement of faith. Period. Whether we are talking about knowing there’s a sun in the sky, a thought in our head, or the theory of relativity.
To say ‘there is no God’ is likewise a statement of faith. Just as to say ‘there is no anti-matter’ is equally a statement of faith. Whether we are talking God or anti-matter, we are talking about things we cannot see, but only surmise the existence of, because of what either helps to explain.
When I say ‘I know there is a God’, I am not out of mind. I am making a statement as viable as anyone claiming to have a thought in their head, or the existence of anti-matter. Just because we can’t see God, or thoughts in our heads, or anti-matter, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. To know is not to necessarily see.
If knowledge were confined to mere facts, I would concede to Mike, that belief is not knowledge. But knowledge isn’t confined to mere facts anymore than science is. Knowledge includes theories not only about anti-matter and relativity, but theories about economics, mental health, racial equality as well as how we might resolve some fundamental social issues like homelessness.
As to what I know and believe:
I know and believe in love, hard to quantify factually, but impossible to live without.
And I know God has a name. For much the same reason I know I have a name. Because somebody told me and repeated enough, I started answering to that name when called.
Jesus taught that were we to ask for anything in his name, God would answer. I started asking and have discovered God answers.

To which another contributor Dan Cooperstock wrote:
John, there is a lot more hard evidence for most of those things you say we only believe, not know, than for the existence of God. I really think it is stretching the meanings of words a lot to say that knowledge of the existence of God is on the same level as knowledge of the existence of the sun, our thoughts, etc.
I’m sorry, but prayers apparently being answered is not a proof for the existence of God. What about all of the prayers that aren’t answered? Do you think that most of the people that die of diseases each year were not praying to be cured? Just because something happens (sometimes) that someone asked God for, does not mean that there is a God that made those things happen!

To which I responded:
There are people who see God in everything, and others who can’t see God at all.
For the former, everything is ‘hard evidence for his existence’, for the latter, the evidence is woefully lacking.
My contention is simply that whether one understands ‘what is visible to have its origin in the invisible’ or the visible to be all there is; both are statements of belief and both are knowledge based. Neither is more scientific than the other, both rely on a set of propositions impossible to prove.
As one who has lived long enough to find life more a mystery than an answer; fed as much by the intangibles of hope, awe and love as by any ‘tangible’ food; I know we do not live by bread alone.
Ask me to prove it and I resort to the same logic that scientists rely on to insist that light is both particle and wave…’if light were only particles, then how do you explain this?’…’if humanity were the product of only the visible, how do you explain poetry, Mozart, Rembrandt, the hunger for equity and justice, the love of one’s enemies, or the homeless man embracing the rich man as though his brother?’
Despite the ‘hard evidence’, we know that life isn’t really about ‘the survival of the fittest’. Otherwise we would be hard pressed to explain our collective esteem for the likes of Mother Theresa, Gandhi and anyone else who lives as though in this life the poor are blessed. Such people are driven by intangibles, by realities not seen by either a microscope or telescope. When asked to explain themselves, God is in their answer.
Some would call them fools, but seeing the deep marks they’ve made on history, human thought and activity, I believe that knowledge for us is to discover the things they discovered, with the same passion as Einstein sought an universal law to explain everything, but with this caveat, that we learn to love our neighbour regardless of who our neighbour is.