The Evidence Required Is?

[Cyberman]

I think it is sad that evidence doesn't convince people.

Don't be sad, it's only because the evidence isn't convincing. When I was considerably younger I, like most kids brought up in Western society, believed in Santa. Not in any fundamentalist burn-the-heretic way, which might have made my childhood a bit more dramatic, but in the quiet little innocence of youth encountering something magical in an otherwise mundane world. How could Santa not be real in the face of all the evidence? There were of course the presents, which were definitely not at the foot of my bed when I'd fallen alseep the previous night. There was the half-consumed mince pie and glass of sherry I and my younger sister had left out for the purpose, plus the little note handwritten and signed by Santa personally. Sometimes there were sooty footprints on the carpet despite the fact we never had an open fire of any kind. On top of all this physical evidence, the real clincher was the personal confirmatory testimony of our parents; what possible reason would they have to lie about something so important?

As childhood advanced and our innocent yet sincere questions became more sophisticated, the evidence that had been so convincing to a young impressionable mind gradually lost its plausibilty and the rationalisations became correspondingly more implausible. Eventually, naturally, inevitably, the scales of innocence fell away, replaced by the light of understanding, like some rite of passage. When my little nephew came along I carried on the tradition of leaving a little note in disguised handwriting (when such time came that he decided he didn't believe any more, 'Santa' even left him a note threatening to send the elves round, which he thought was hilarious). Right up to the last xmas I was part of I would give the occasional gift to someone "From Santa". I was finally in on the joke.

The point of all this is that evidence in and of itself is just a piece of data to be considered. Theists and others in the game of trying to sell implausibility tend to throw one datum point onto the table, sometimes even machine-gunning totally unrelated points at us, and call us closed-minded when we dare to be unconvinced. All we ever ask for is to be shown something more compelling than a half-eaten mince pie. Unfortunately, most of the time the theist doesn't even have that; instead s/he has an invisible mince pie that someone once told a story about in an atrociously-written book.