Atheism, Evidence and the God-of-the-Gaps

[Tonus]

Is there one in particular that strikes you as clear evidence of the hand of god in action?

It would be better to read a good book on Fatima...then all of the photos will be more meaningful.

So I'd require a books worth of explanation just for it to be more meaningful? That's different from just pointing out why those pictures allow us to conclude that we're seeing a display of the divine.

I'm not too big on Grilled Cheezus personally, but my opinion on Fatima is that "an extraordinary message from God requires an extraordinary confirmation from God."

As much as I can be awestruck by the sun bursting through a break in the clouds after a rainstorm, I'm not sure how the event would be extraordinary confirmation from god. The recollections from the event did not match very well (some people reporting seeing nothing out of the ordinary at all, which strikes me as odd in a scenario where a crowd of people is deliberately staring into the sun... unless they didn't stare into the sun, which makes the resulting experiences somewhat more understandable).

What would've been cool was an image of Christ announcing the end of the war, and the sudden cessation of hostilities across the continent. That would've been pretty extraordinary, and practical as well!

It's the stumbling part I disagree with. I think God knows exactly when to play his cards with each one of us personally.

Do you think that he does that? That he puts the knowledge within reach of each of us on some personalized level, thus giving us all a shot at salvation?

The scriptures say that Adam walked with God in the garden. They were friends. What did Eve think she had to fear at that point? God had never been angry with her before. As for death, no, that came later...God banished them from the Garden so that they would not eat of the tree of life and live forever...so "preferring death" was not actually on the table, yet.

That makes it sound as if god left creation to its own devices without sufficient knowledge as to what their actions would mean. Was Eve defenseless against the lies of the serpent, because she'd never been lied to? If death wasn't on the table until god defined it, how did the serpent understand the concept of the lie?

The late Christopher Hitchens once stated that even if God existed he would not worship him because such a being would, in his mind, differ little from an earthly dictator. If God constantly watched over us from the sky like a towering Goliath, this might only reinforce the attitude held by people like Hitchens that God has put us in a police state.

Hitchens was protesting against the concept of the abrahamic god, whom he describes as an angry, jealous tyrant from whom we cannot escape and who makes an offer that he finds unreasonable: worship such a person forever, or suffer excruciating pain forever. Sure, I wouldn't want that god to be real, and if he was I'd be very frightened. But nonetheless, I think we are better off knowing anything for sure than wondering.