The following is an answer and/or comment by inhahe aka ColorStorm (inhahe.com - myriachromat.wordpress.com).

Somebody else:
What is an appeal to ignorance fallacy? This fallacy states that if something cannot be conclusively proven then the opposite must be true.

Example:

“Because we cannot prove that God does not exist, then God must exist”

But how to fix the statement so that it becomes not fallacious?

Well, rephrase it into this;

“Because we cannot prove that God exists, therefore, we don’t know if God exists or not, nonetheless, I believe God exists.

This statement is not a fallacy anymore, because your conclusion is not claiming knowledge of something that you can’t prove, what you just did is state your belief on the matter. This also falls under agnostic theism, the “I don’t know” part is claiming an absence of knowledge which refers to agnosticism, and the belief stated is the theism part.

Watch more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MQRsa5CGOQ

Me:
The contents of the video linked to are as ridiculous as the voice they're spoken in. The example and descriptions he gave of what faith is had nothing to do with the Biblical definition he gave in the beginning, they're just a rationalist reworking of it into matters of proof or lack of proof, as if "confidence in things hoped for" is the same as looking for proof where it doesn't exist, and of logical thinking verses emotional thinking, as if (a) emotional thinking is always invalid and (b) any thinking not strictly logical is nothing more or less than emotional.

There's actually wisdom to having "faith" according to the given definition, in that, if you were to really understand anything about the mechanics of the cosmos, you'd know that belief can act as a vehicle to take you to where you want to go. A lot of us intuitively understand this, hence we craft certain beliefs according to what we want to be true.

To give a somewhat rationalistic/scientistic/mechanicalistic accounting for this, "At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order." -Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune

In the case of God, I don't think you can literally manifest God with your beliefs if God doesn't already exist, but on the other hand, if God exists and you don't believe in Him/Her, you'll be less likely to experience God in any way.

That being said, the majority of beliefs of Christians and some other religions are ridiculous and harmful, including their beliefs about God, and they abuse the beautiful notion of faith (which can also mean other beautiful things, such as a confidence in something like things always working out in the end that we may have, based on eons of past experience that we can't consciously remember) by saying that their blind adherence to their arbitrary childhood indoctrination with a meme complex is based on "faith," as if that somehow legitimizes it.

"This statement is not a fallacy anymore, because your conclusion is not claiming knowledge of something that you can’t prove,"...the problem with the statement "Because we cannot prove that God does not exist, then God must exist" is not that it claims knowledge of something we can't prove, it's that it claims that such knowledge is derived specifically from the absence of proof that it's false. A better correction would be "Because we cannot prove that God does not exist, I'm not necessarily obligated to change my belief that God exists."

You and the guy in the video linked to seem to be implying that the only rational alternative to proving something true (or false) is saying "I don't know" or "we don't know." This is typical toxic rationalism. There are many possible legitimate/persuasive reasons to come to certain conclusions that aren't on the level of full-on "proof" (and even what we admit as so-called proof is of an arbitrary level rigor; for example, even a conclusion drawn from something repeatedly observed under laboratory conditions isn't strictly proof, because how can you prove you weren't tricked by an evil demon who altered your perceptions to believe in the experimental results? Or that you weren't otherwise hallucinating, or that you're not a brain in a vat, etc.? Or that the same results that occurred in 100 tests will necessarily be obtained in the 101st test? Etc.). In fact, almost everything we actually believe in our everyday lives isn't based on any kind of proof, let alone based on proof carried out by us personally.

For example, if you were to tell me you're wearing a blue shirt (outside of any context regarding the philosophy of deception or some such), I'd have no reason not to take your word for it without any kind of proof. And yeah, you could say the existence of God is a more important or extraordinary belief than what color shirt you're wearing, but the principle is the same: there are possible good reasons to believe without proof (and they're not necessarily just that someone told you so), and the threshold for convincingness may just be somewhat higher for God while still not being on the level of proof. And, of course, just how "extraordinary" the belief in God is in the first place depends on one's priors/fundamental outlook/worldview/episteme and experience.

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