I was raised to believe that god's existence was a given, that it was so obvious that it didn't merit any more consideration. With that as a given, the rationalizations and excuses and flimsy thought experiments required to explain why I believed god was real did not seem far-fetched at all. Having finally applied the necessary skepticism to the claim that god was real, the rest fell apart pretty quickly and the mental gymnastics seem bizarre to me now. But what I see from many theists here is exactly the things I used to say in an attempt to make god real in my mind.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
