**Evid3nc3,
We’re all born atheists. And we may actually stay that way despite having grown up in a religious tradition, despite what we may profess even, and despite what reasons there may be that compel us to profess it.
FWIW I’ll tell you first off I’m not particularly impressed with opinions about God associated with the level of ones education, regardless of the field of learning, and regardless of whether one is believer or atheist. I’m not anti-intellectual by any means; I value the enormous strides made in knowledge but, while I’m just a dumb farmer, even dummies know there are limitations to human understanding; the body of knowledge now in the world’s possession is rapidly increasing but will prove itself to be far from complete as we gain even more.
Personally, I think there’s glaring evidence for the existence of a creator-god, of a rational mind behind the universe. However, very few of the attributes of such a god could be determined based on observations of that creation alone. Knowledge of the nature of a god such as the Christian one could only be obtained by revelation, if such a thing is possible.
This idea may sound simplistic, but I suggest you read some of the Catholic “mystics” (a traditional term for people claimed to have received private direct revelation from God), such as Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross. These experiences are very rare, and I’ve been privileged to have received a few myself (I seldom share this fact since the subject of private revelations are, by nature, controversial, although the Church recognizes and teaches that God works in that way at times for His purposes), and, having run in Pentecostal circles for a few years, I can tell you that these “mystical” experiences have absolutely nothing in common with the so-called experiences professed by Pentecostals-all bogus IMO. The real things are strictly direct communications received,** nothing more or less, impossible to produce on ones’ own, and in that sense no different than this direct communication I’m posting now. We can question why God doesn’t reveal Himself to all in this way on a regular basis, or why evil exists in this world if God is good and worth knowing, but those are separate questions from the one at hand, which is, does God exist at all?
In any case, had you had the kind of communications I’m referring to you’d be incapable of no longer believing in God-and the reasons you think are valid for doing so now would be reduced to ‘so much straw’. God can communicate directly, bypassing the senses but ending with the same results as with communications received in the normal way *via *sense perception, and these communications have nothing in common with hunches, feelings, or senses that we’ve been touched in some way; we simply play no role in the matter. Emotions may or may not be involved as well, depending on content.
And, BTW, while these experiences I’m speaking of are generally experienced subjectively, I’d suggest that all experiences are ultimately subjective by their nature; we can’t prove that anything we claim to experience has ever actually taken place. Every single normal experience received in life, all of which come to us via the five senses as far as we know, are solely experienced subjectively by us, including the experience of communicating with others. We can confirm our experiences by comparing notes with others as we simply interact with them in everyday discourse or as we set out to prove or disprove a theory and in this manner we arrive at a high degree of certainty that we’ve ascertained some truth or another-that our experiences aren’t just personal dreams. Similarly, people who’ve received supernatural experiences can compare notes in the like manner.
Ultimately God is an experience, like any other reality in that particular sense. Religion is supposed to give us information about that experience, i.e.* about* God, but can’t provide the experience itself.
