The nature of evidence

[TheRealJoeFish]

Hello.

I have listened and witnessed that, when debating about God, the main questions that is present within the atheist party is that they do not believe in God because there is no evidence for Him. I am interested but also confused, because I need to understand what "evidence" really means, certainly what for some people is enough "evidence" for others is not even close to that, so, my questions are:

1. What does the word "evidence" mean?
2. What kind of said evidence would be necessary for you to actually believe there is a God?

The way I think of it (this is not going to be the same for everyone, but this is how I conceptualize it):

1. A fact, object, or observation (in the strict sense of the word) that tends to logically show the truth or falsehood of a proposition (for example, "there is a god"). 

To elaborate: you can't have "evidence" in the abstract; the word "evidence" implies a relationship.  That is, evidence has to be "evidence for" or "evidence against" something.  For example, there's a pen on my desk here.  This pen is evidence for a lot of things: that matter exists, that there's someone out there making pens, that I have a job where I need to write things by hand, etc.  It's also evidence against some things: it's evidence against the proposition that my employer can't afford basic office supplies, or that plastic doesn't exist.  Now, some people could argue "the pen is evidence of the existence of god", using some long chain of logic about how the fact that people can make things implies people are special and combined with other facts of the universe the only way an organism could create this pen is if god created that organism. Or something.  That's where the "logically shows the truth" part comes in.

2. Any combination of facts, objects, or observations that make me think it is more likely than not there is a god. 

I've given this example before:  If I saw a realtime event that I couldn't explain - such as the spontaneous regeneration of a severed limb - that would likely be enough for me to believe in a higher power that I wouldn't distinguish from a god, once I was satisfied that there was no trickery and that a scientific explanation would not easily reveal itself.  In broader terms, it would take something that 1) I knew to be physically impossible and 2) suggested the existence of a supernatural causative agent.  So, examples:

The bible: certainly "suggestive" of the existence of a supernatural causative agent, but certainly not physically impossible.  What's more, there are clear explanations for how it came about without supernatural intervention: the parts about the creation of the world were a primitive fellow's best attempt to tell a coherent story based on very limited scientific knowledge.  The parts about rules and laws were established in order to maintain (the) social order and control people, in both a good (don't kill each other) sense and bad (keep the poor subjugated) sense.  The parts about supernatural things were made up to lend authority to the text and convince people who didn't know better.

First-hand accounts of miracles:  Absolutely won't cut it, sadly.  There are far too many explanations for when someone says they observe something miraculous.  The easiest explanation, of course, is: they're lying.  Additionally, the human mind is a very very complex thing, and its absolute insistence upon perceiving and cataloguing events creates a number of instances where a person "observes" something that didn't actually happen.  There are scientific, naturalistic explanations of things like "near-death experiences" and precognition and the like.  For something to be "supernatural", it must, by definition, have no natural explanation.

A car levitating into the air and flying up into space: I include this example to say that even things that are *very very unlikely* don't qualify as evidence for god if they're not suggestive of a god.  Maybe physics stopped working for a second, maybe aliens did it, maybe some crazy person invented a giant flying spaceship and a tiny filament wire capable of hoisting a car into the exosphere in order to give everyone a good laugh.

Here's what I'd consider evidence for god: If a being physically tells me he is god, and does things that only a god could do.  Secondhand accounts, simply, aren't going to cut it.  They're hearsay; they don't come into the record.

In conclusion, I guess I'll say this: there is nothing that has ever happened that we can't explain by natural means.  For example, the beginning of life - we know how it can happen in broad strokes, and that's easily enough to, logically, make it far more likely that "life happened naturally, even though we don't know exactly how" than "life happened supernaturally, through a mechanism (divine intervention) that has never ever ever been shown to exist."  I'm mathematically trained, and I like to think in terms of sets.  So, everything can be broken into two sets: "things that happen that we know the reason for" and "things that happen that we don't know the reason for."  The first of those two sets can be further broken up into "things that happen that we know are naturally explainable" and "things that happen that we know are supernatural."  That first subset, the "naturally explainable" subset, is frickin' huge.  That second subset - "things that we know are supernatural" - is empty.  As progress marches on, things zoom from the "don't know the reason for" set to the "know the reason for" set all the time and, invariably, those things always find their way into the "naturally explainable" subset. 

I speak only for myself when I say I would love to think there's someone up there, out there, who's watching me and loves me and has the power to make sure I live forever and am happy forever and nothing bad will happen to me forever.  But I know there's no such thing.