(December 19, 2016 at 6:43 pm)Asmodee Wrote: 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.
Most of the "what would it take for you to believe" questions I've seen assume that it should only take one piece of evidence --an event, an experience, etc-- to convince us of something as important as whether there really is a god and whether it is the specific god they follow. Aside from the issue of the ease with which we can be fooled into accepting something that is not true --a tactic theists use as well, when dismissing one another's god claims-- why should we expect so little of God? Why would I expect that God will only ever tap me on one shoulder and duck behind the other as a way of proving that he's real?
If he showed up and did the things that only God can do and went about his Godly business for all to see, we'd figure it out soon enough. Instead, I'm supposed to look at the sky and be awed by the view, or see a powerful creature and assume it was designed, and learn about flesh-eating bacteria and, uh... blame it on Adam and Eve???
"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