Evidence that could convince me includes:
- Miraculous occurrences, especially if brought about through prayer to a specific god. If followers of a particular religion were consistently able to perform unambiguously miraculous acts or cause them to be brought about by prayer, that would be very convincing evidence. For example, if a double-blind study showed that prayer to a specific god could increase hospital patient survival rates in a statistically significant way, I would probably convert to that religion.
-If a religion had followers (or a holy book) that made specific, unambiguous prophecies about events that have not yet occurred, and those prophecies came to pass. The prophecies would have to be something that was non-obvious and that didn’t require mental gymnastics to interpret.
-A holy book that contained a lot of scientific/technical information that couldn’t have been known to the people who wrote it. That would be pretty convincing evidence that the knowledge in the book was given to its authors by a “higher power”. Again, it would have to be specific information that didn’t require mental gymnastics to interpret. It would also have to be mostly correct – I wouldn’t be impressed by an ancient book that contained a few correct pieces of information and a huge number of incorrect pieces of information, because then I would assume that the authors had simply made a large number of claims and gotten lucky on a few of them.
That’s just the first few things that come to mind. Christians want to believe that there is good evidence that god exists. Since there are many people who do not believe in god, Christians have to convince themselves that atheists are simply impossible to convince, that atheists would ignore any evidence. It's the only way for them to reconcile their belief that evidence exists with the fact that some people aren't convinced. It also seems to have something to do with a desire to reduce both sides of the argument to “faith,” as VitalOne demonstrated in his opening post. Apparently it’s comforting for Christians to imagine that it’s faith against faith, rather than faith against empirical evidence.
The truth is that any atheist can tell you all sorts of things that would convince them. It's not that we ignore all the evidence - there are things that could convince us, but those things do not seem to exist.
This is all especially ironic because when I started a similar thread a while ago asking Christians what it would take to convince them that they were wrong, I got a boatload of people saying that there was nothing that could convince them that their religion was wrong.
