(January 11, 2017 at 10:52 pm)Yadayadayada Wrote: You won't get CCTV footage or DNA samples as evidence of God. So, what would constitute enough "proof" or "evidence" for atheists to believe in God, or at least to consider God as the most credible explanation for the existence of the universe and life on earth?
Think about how you worded your statement-- you won't get any direct evidence of God's existence, so what would be enough circumstantial evidence to make you believe in God?
Part of the problem is that much of this kind of evidence doesn't point to God. If the geological and archeological records showed that fully-developed life forms suddenly appeared at the same time, followed by humans suddenly appearing with no precursors, that there was a cataclysmic event at one very brief point in time that killed everything and that the world was repopulated from a single point on the planet --at which we'd find the remains of a large ark-- then you'd have a massive fingerprint that would point to God. If there was any sort of evidence of this nature and on this scale, God's existence would have been so clear that not only would we all believe in God... we'd believe in the same God.
But no, the evidence comes in the form of unverifiable personal experiences, or statues that bleed, or images on toast. And here you are, wondering if that would be enough to convince us. Can you understand where we're coming from?
"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