Who says? You? And where did you get this special knowledge? From your special magical, Christian revelation powers - that we atheists don't possess? Another word for metaphysics is nonsense. Metaphysics is where they give you a 30,000 page menu and no food. There are no privileged knowers who appeal to special sources of knowledge—available to them by way of heavenly revelation, or authoritative status, or intimations to which their group was privy. This mean you.

Surely you must be speaking only for yourself with that statement.

Well, yes. When you use the pronoun "I," are you ever speaking for anyone but yourself?

Just a few preliminary observations and impressions (I know I'm joining the dialogue a bit late! Just getting trying to get caught up a little with my back-log:

1. Fabulously apropos GK Chesterton quotes!
2. I guess I made my feelings about Harris clear in my reply to Doug Shaver below. Am I alone in thinking him very silly, very small minded, and just full of ego and hubris? He cannot be as ignorant as he makes himself out to be could he?
3. Someone who cannot trust chairs - a great idea for a Monty Python skit :)
4. Faith is based in reason and evidence - this is very important to emphasize to atheists who claim otherwise. Just because someone cannot clealry articulate all the reasons that they believe the God of the Bible, that Jesus is God, or the tenets of the Christain faith, does not mean that they have not arrived at those beliefs through a rational, evidence based process.
5. The tension between predestination and free will is only touched on in some of the Bible verses quoted. This however, enters into the whole question of faith in big way, at least for me. I think that "Middle knowledge" aka Molinism (which has some other implications and nuances), as presented by Wm. Lane Craig has helped me resolve some of the seemingly intractable dilemmas presented by the two doctrines. At least there is a rational means of understanding their coexistence.
6. Faith requires our work, our assent, our acceptance. This is true for everything we believe. It's just that the stakes are so huge when it comes to belief in God and more specifically in the claims of Christ, that everything else just places in comparison. That makes the study of the evidence probably one of the most important things we can do in this life.
7. "The Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting Aquinas, teaches,
"In faith, the human intellect and will cooperate with divine grace:
Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by
command of the will moved by God through grace" (CCC 155)."
I think that is well said. This covers all aspects of faith, the will, reason, logic, evidence, as well as the gift of God's grace that enables us to see and to assent and believe. We know that our rational faculties can be quite unreliable, but if we use them well, they can go far in bringing us to clarity and insight into the nature of reality. It's not so different from how we assent to anything else.
8. Did I say that Harris strikes an astoundingly ignorant and idiotic pose? His evangelism for the evolution of "progress" through technology seems to disregard the harms done through that faith. Surely he knows about what that evolution has brought us in the 20th and 21st centuries. I don't think I need to get into the Brave New World or the rational scientific eugenics or the killing fields of modern atheism.
A few Harris quotes.....
"Religion is evil, spirituality is good". Is that not vacuous and banal to the extreme? He loves to hop on the pop bandwagon. It keeps the money flowing.
"Eastern mysticism is a thoroughly rational and legitimate means for living a full life." I'm not sure a Buddhist or Hindu would agree, but look how the gullible eat it up. Sign me up Sam.
"Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao:
Although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was
little more than a political religion". Great example of the potential consequences of a false religion.

9. Re. the crutch objection that Freud was so fond of: Let's not forget that faith in Christ always leads to persecution; we are promised that.
10. GKC, the apostle of common sense.....
"Every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it
firmly. The possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so
long as to have forgotten all about its existence. This latter situation
is certainly possible; in fact, it is the situation of the whole modern
world. The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly
that they do not even know that they are dogmas."

"Chesterton suggests elsewhere that if you wish to be free from contact
with superstition, bigotry, and violence, you’ll need to separate
yourself from all human contact. The choice is not between religion and
non-religion, but between true religion and false religion."

"Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort
of schism between reason and religion," wrote Chesterton in The Everlasting Man,
"The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever
tried to combine reason and faith" ("Man and Mythologies"). The
challenge for every Catholic is to give assent and to have faith, while
the Catholic apologist must strive to show that such assent is not only
reasonable, but brings us into saving contact with the only reason for
living."

Great stuff. This was a wonderful essay.

That's certainly one aspect, a very important one, of faith.

" I have not seen one succeed yet."
Surely you must be speaking only for yourself with that statement. Which makes me wonder how much you have really looked into apologetic arguments. You present simplistic caricatures of the Christian position that indicate that you have not really looked very deeply into the concerns outlined in the essay.
As an aside: When someone like Harris speaks and writes, it's just so much genuinely ignorant blather, or even worse, patently dishonest attempts to deceive his pop culture audience - he's a great example of a man who is entirely closed to evidence (or, again is a really evil man who will lie about reality to make money and be popular). He cannot even present opposing arguments with any remote semblance of accuracy or fairness. His is a hateful agenda, IMO.

Your claim that plate tectonics is repeated every time an earthquake happens is an example of the fallacy of affirming the consequent.

I don't see how. What you're suggesting I did, assuming there is anything wrong with it, would be an example of equivocation.

I believe "repeat" as used in Brian's original comment above (now deleted?) refers to the ability for the same test to be conducted through human agency under controlled circumstances.
Your claim that plate tectonics is repeated every time an earthquake happens is an example of the fallacy of affirming the consequent.

(most science is not repeatable, from plate tectonics to cosmology to evolution)

Plate tectonics is repeated every time an earthquake happens.

Folks will question anything.

Are there some things they should not question?

There are some things we all assume to be true if we hear them from certain sources. You can call that assumption an act of faith if it you wish, but when I make that assumption about those sources, I do not further assume that those sources are infallible. A lifetime of rude awakenings has taught me never to make that assumption about any source.

I could be mistaken about that. There could be some people who I should think cannot be wrong when they tell me certain things. But no one has yet proved to me that such people exist.