blacknad wrote:
"Belief in God is clearly not the same as believing in fairies, for all sorts of reasons."

A challenge if I may. Point-by-point ... state your reasons. They are far from obvious.

I suspect it will be extremely difficult and that the harder you think about it ... the more difficult it will become. In the end ... what we believe based upon faith is done because we can not believe in it due to objective evidence.

blacknad wrote:
"You also discount any kind of historical/comtemporary accounts of God's interaction/revelation in human affairs which far outweighs (in both amount and sophistication) any evidence for the existence of fairies or the Invisible Pink Rhino."

I don't think there truly is any historical accounts of any god's interaction with humans. STOP! I know you are going to point to anecdotal accounts. We all know them. There was Moses and the burning bush. There was Joan d'Arc. There are thousands others. But then there are also people who have worshiped the image of the Virgin Mary on stop signs and burnt toast. How do we objectively determine which are real and which are not? We can't even, objectively, determine whether Iran wants to make enriched uranium for weapons and we have a benefit or two when it comes to verification.

The best possible way to objectively falsify there being a god is to seriously consider the following quotes:

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do."
~ Stephen Roberts

"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours."
~ Stephen Roberts

"God made man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor."
~ anonymous

Scriptures: the sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
~ Ambrose Bierce

The planet earth has approximately ~6.7 billion inhabitants and approximately ~4,200 separate religions.

Sources:
http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop
http://www.theologicalstudies.org/classicalreligionlist.html

Of these the two with the largest number of adherents are Christianity and Islam with 2 billion and 1.3 billion believer's respectively. The remaining 3.4 billion people are divided among the other ~4,198 religions. Given that the Christians and Moslems agree on almost nothing of substance (Jesus Christ and Mohammed) ... we can conclude that either:

1. One of them is right and the other wrong
or
2. They are both wrong
because they can't both be right.

Which leaves us with a simple objective question:

If there was truly a deity that created the entire universe ... could it also be so inept as to create such staggering ambiguity with respect to its existence? Could it "design" something as complex as cellular biology and stub its toe on something as simple as a single declarative sentence? Or ... should we presume that part of that deity's plan is to be ambiguous and fuel warfare, hatred, rape, and the inevitability that the majority of mankind will be born in the wrong country, to the wrong family, with the wrong belief system, and go straight to hell.

DA Morgan