Reply to Theophilus on pages 2 and 3

Good point. You have uncovered a further debate between those who believe sensory experience constitutes the best evidence one can have and philosophers like myself who think sense experience is only evidence in a derivative sense.
Here is your argument, as I see it:
"Tony's argument compares two similar cases: bad reasoning about God and bad reasoning about Bush. He shows that in the Bush case, because the reasoning is invalid, one is not justified in denying that Bush is president. He believes the God case is sufficiently similar so that if one is not justified in denying that Bush is president as the result of bad reasoning, one is not justified in denying God exists as the result of bad reasoning. But he misses an important difference: the Bush case involves the possibility of verifying the conclusion with sensory experience whereas the God case doesn't. Since we have a sensory route to determine that Bush is president, then we ought to suspend judgment in the Bush case. But since we can't verify through the senses that God exists, we are justified in going further and concluding God does not exist."
I think this is an important argument and reveals fundamental issues.
There are several routes I could take in response.

1) I could first show that our knowledge via sensory experience is subject to skeptical concerns and thus our knowledge of the physical world is no better than our knowledge of the world of abstract unseen entities like numbers, the laws of math and logic, and some other things. I particularly like this approach since it shows that ultimately science rests on philosophical assumptions which it cannot prove using the methods of science.
However, the person on the street is unlikely to be persuaded by this argument.
2) I can argue that we do have sensory evidence for thinking God exists. We don't perceive God but we perceive the work of his hands (the improbability that the world would evolve to support life, that the only way to think our cognitive faculties are designed to discover truths is to assume God's existence because evolution does not care about truth but only survival and reproductive success, there must be a beginning to the universe because matter can't be eternal, etc.). Similarly, I have never actually seen Bush. I have only seen representations of Bush via photos and video cameras. They don't give me direct visual access to Bush in the way that standing in front of him at arms length in good lighting may. So I infer his existence from evidence, not from direct access to him. But I could argue that the same is the case for God. So in one sense, the nature of the evidence is the same; its the quality of the evidence which is in dispute.
One might reply that in the Bush case, we could still see him by standing in front of him and thus bypass seeing him via cameras, but with God we can't do that. At this point, we must focus on the 'can' used in the prior sentence. We can see God in the sense that it is logically (and a we would argue, physically) possible for God to show himself to us using his voice, or light which emanates from his presence, or taking on the appearance of someone (a majestic old man with white hair and a beard). But one could say, "But you don't actually see God himself; you only see the effects of his presence." But I could say the same about Bush. We never truly see Bush himself since light bounces off Bush, transmits information to the retina, which is then passed on to the brain ultimately producing an image of Bush in the mind. We never actually see the man himself given the way perception works. So it is logically possible for us to see both Bush and God in the relevant sense and physically possible as well (as far as I can tell). And suppose that we actually do see the surface of Bush: his clothes, face, hands etc. All we really see are colors and shapes, and Bush is not identical with any of these. We only see one side of Bush at a time and not all of him. So we still must infer his existence from the sensory evidence.
3) I think what your argument is ultimately hinting at is that when it comes to God, the absence of evidence for God's existence is enough to warrant the belief God doesn't exist, whereas, in the case of Bush, the absence of evidence only warrants the suspension of judgment. The same is true of unicorns, one could claim. In the absence of reasons for thinking unicorns exist, we are justified in believing they don't.
First, I don't think atheists or agnostics are justified in thinking unicorns don't exist. They are only justified in thinking unicorns don't exist in the parts of the universe which have been discovered. We are told the universe is infinite (or constantly expanding). What justifies us in thinking that from our minuscule knowledge of a small portion of the universe, we can make a legitimate inference about the whole of it. A child might as well argue that since he and his friend have a bed in the shape of a car, all children must have a bed in the shape of a car. In fact, the inference in the unicorn case is much worse, since we could conceivably check all the children whereas we can't check every corner of the universe. Also, in the case of the kid, one would only need one example of a child without a car shaped bed to disprove the claim that all kids have car shaped beds. But to disprove the unicorn case, one actually needs to search at least half the universe before one can rightly make a conclusion. This is a problem that atheists have recognized: they must show a universal negative - there are no divine beings whatsoever.
So only the christian who has access to God's mind may have a good reason to think unicorns don't exist because God has not told us they do, and it seems he would mention the possibility of such strange beings.
Also, suppose our astrologist uses astrology to argue that numbers or the laws of logic exist. We can't see either of these things. Despite this fact, we would not be entitled to conclude that they don't exist from bad astrological reasoning. But one could argue that in the case of math and logic, we do have evidence for thinking these abstract entities exist (although some philosophers argue vehemently that math and logical entities are not abstract but are like scientific laws which capture generalizations about the physical world. Needless to say, the view runs into difficulties.). True, there is evidence for thinking abstract numbers and logical laws exist and some evidence to think they don't. But the same is true in the case of God. I think only someone deeply biased would say there is no shred of evidence whatsoever for thinking God's exists. Such a person either has not read the argument's for God's existence (which taken as a whole, make up a collage of good evidence) or is simply refusing to recognize that the arguments for God's existence have something to be said for them. In the former case, the person shouldn't be make any claims whatsoever on the presence or absence of evidence for God's existence, and in the latter case, all we can do for them is pray.