(December 19, 2016 at 6:43 pm)Asmodee Wrote: I've thought about it and come to the conclusion that I don't know what would be "good evidence" for the existence of God, specifically. I once had a Catholic ask me if I would believe if God were standing right before me and I had to answer, "I wouldn't be sure. The Bible says that the devil can disguise himself as an angel of light."
But here's the deal, it doesn't even matter that I don't know. Because if God is real then SHE (God is genderless right? So this is EXACTLY as accurate as "he") knows what it would take to convince me. What's more, she WANTS me to believe. I would not deny the evidence God, herself, put before me. So IF there really is a God and IF she really wants to save me, I don't need to know what would convince me because she knows and she is going to do it because she wants me to be saved.
That's assuming that satisfactory evidence is possible in principle. Given the typical characteristics given for God -- omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence -- it seems unlikely that one could construct adequate justification for believing that a being has these traits, if at all, it would seem the evidence of such would itself be transfinite. What's more disturbing is that people are regularly convinced by less than adequate evidence for such traits. If that is the case, it seems beside the point to ask what evidence would adequately justify belief in such a god. So obviously that's not the relevant standard in play and the question would more sensibly be, what evidence does it take to convince a person that God exists. The answer to that question appears to be "because my parents told me so." The standards of evidence the typical theist employs in justifying their belief is woefully inadequate.