IF in the end, you find that God does exist ....

[Tonus]

As I've mentioned in this thread, a lot of atheists use "our" limited knowledge of the physical world to put together a puzzle that has virtually an unlimited number of pieces!

That might be a good description for the universe under any circumstances. It is estimated that there are as many as 30 million different species of life on the planet right now. That's just Earth, and that's just biology. Expanding beyond that introduces millions of other variables. As a species that is constantly seeking knowledge and understanding, this is a situation that definitely does not suck. We seek, we learn, we understand, we answer one question and create four new ones, and the process goes on. In the meantime, we build a pretty impressive world around us with that knowledge.

But we really haven't found any pieces that belong to god, aside from books and experiences and anecdotes. And as we learn about the world and the people in it, we begin to understand how and why religious belief is fostered in communities and societies. I grew up Christian, and so I am aware of the considerable amount of "evidence" that helps to confirm our beliefs. I am also aware of how these work, and of how our biases make them very effective. I am equally aware that we cannot get rid of all of our mental filters --we may actually need many of them just to function from day to day. But we do have ways of seeing past some of those filters and judging how reliable our beliefs are. Too many of the factors that drive belief are either unreliable, can be disproved by testing, or create awkward contradictions if they are assumed to be true.

It's not that I'm closed to the idea that god exists. It's that I won't be convinced by books and anecdotes and philosophical discussion that tries to get around the uncomfortable reality that god(s) refuse to show up and settle the question in the simplest way possible. I think that that stuff works best when we want it to be true, which is probably why it took so long for me to accept that I was an atheist. For a long time after I'd lost faith, I really wanted it to be true. But that's just not enough.