"Well you have faith in science!"

 

"Like all parents, god must punish his children."

 

These are two very similar deceitful tricks. Conflation is to treat two different concepts as if they are the same thing, and an equivocation fallacy is to draw an analogy between two things to prove a point, where the analogy is not valid. In both cases, it's trying to make out two things are equivalent, when they are not. This needs to be immediatly pointed out as everything that follows from it is flawed.

 

In the first example above, this is a very common trick of trying to say we have faith in science just as theists have faith in religion. This is using two definitions of the same word as if they are the same, in an attempt to level the playing field. Religious "faith" is belief without evidence. The more everyday use of faith is having justified confidence. We have faith our friend will not steal our things, because we have years of experience of them leading us to know them very well. We have faith that when we drop an object, it will fall the ground, because that's always been the case before. We don't claim to have absolute certainty of these things, but neither are we assigning faith without good reason. It's a probability judgement based on evidence. So if a theist keeps changing the meaning of the word like this, I would recommend insisting on a different word for everyday faith, such as confidence.

 

In the second example, this is another common trick of comparing god to a human parent. This is flawed because god is usually described as having massive, if not unlimited power. He could prevent bad things happening in the first place, or not give people the desire to do bad things. He made us exactly how we are, and so he should take responsibility if we don't act the way that he likes. A human parent has no such amount of control over our construction or our actions, and must use much more primitive methods such as punishment or correction. Also, god's punishment is almost always hugely out of proportion for the "crime" such as cursing every human that will ever be born because Adam & Eve ate a piece of fruit, or turning a woman into a pillar of salt because she disobeyed and looked behind her.