Atheists can't relate to the reasons people have belief because they have not experienced God. How could someone born blind understand the difference in blue and green or yellow? There are parts of the brain that seem to be hard wired to the God concept. Belief in God is part of even our biology, it's part who we are as a species, but atheists seem to be those who either don't have this sense developed, or who have found a way to "sublemate" so to speak, this sense and turn it off or direct it into something else. I think for many atheists science functions as religion in their lives.
It is probably impossible for me to explain to you how the power of God that I have experienced fits into the overall framework of my life and forms a coherent world view that for me makes sense of the world and blows away other alternatives. I can only give an inadequate thumbnail of the real picture.
(1) Atheists are always theorizing about why people are religious and in my view, it's always simplistic an totally wrong headed. For the most part they seem to think all belief is epistemological and believers are seeking "explanations of things." Not exactly the case, not in terms of physical phenomena.
(2) The experiences of presence and love and miracles combine with the intellectual aspects of the ground of understanding to form a coherent intellectual world view that is satisfying and interactive.
(3) The dimension of realization is like a sixth sense in that it supplies something that can't be communicated, either you see it or you don't. At that rate it seems pointless to mock something just because you can't understand it.
(4) Christian existentialist would say that the arguments are just hypothetical. The experiences pertain to life and really relate to meaning and mean something.
What all of this amounts to is that the atheist critique is shallow and senseless. Atheists can tell us just find why they don't belief. They can say the evidence is inadequate for them, and it is, because maybe they just don't have "it." But their attempts to locate everything in this shallow "religion is primitive failed science mentality just belies a lack of understanding.
Religion doesn't exist because people tried to explain why it rains. It exits because people sense the numinous. They sense this aspect of something, the sublime, the spiritual, the nether regions but something that is special and beyond our understanding.
So where does that leave us? Atheists are just stuck right? But it's not about demonstrating some truth through logic. It's about setting up a decision making paradigm that enables us to handle such questions. You are not going to do that with such a snide attitude, poisoning the well, and trying to explain things away. The privative failed science thing is an attempt to expansion religion away, in a dismissive fashion, rather than seeking to understand why it matters to people. They only seek that when they can use it as a pejorative.
The thing to do is to enter the inner logic of a belief system and try to understand their decision making paradigm.
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