(March 5, 2012 at 8:51 pm)AthiestAtheist Wrote: My question is what evidence is required to make you not believe in a God? I would have thought that the fact that every religious text in the world is full of holes would have been enough, but I guess not.
Physical evidence did not prompt me to get religion, philosophy did.For many years I considered myself an existentialist and an atheist for many of the same reasons as most members here: a profound respect for science, inconsistency in the text, and the hypocrisy of many religious people. But neither a bottom-up physicalism nor a top-down idealism seemed adequate to explain the way I experience and interact with life. The old cliche "no matter, never mind" bothered me so I kept trying to reconcile these two approaches. Doing that forced me to grapple with various meanings of "cause" etc. Many of these concepts are grounded in some form of theism. So in my case, since physical evidence had no part in my turn toward religion. But that does not mean that continued study and reflection will not turn me away from it again. If I find a better theory that fits reality than that's the direction I will go.
