I've struggled with religion my whole life. I've read every major Holy Book to greater or lesser degrees, read religious and historical philosophers and intensely studied physics, astrophysics and genetic biology. And after a lifetime of that, I still don't feel like I'm any closer to "the truth" than when I started.
I was in my childhood a pretty keen religious student, then eventually an anti-theist, then softening into an agnostic and now back to Christian leaning. It's a long journey intellectually to undertake and there's absolutely no way that people who have been religious since their birth have wrestled with these problems. Religions are very much cult like to a wide portion of their population; unquestioning devotion to the Word. It took me legit 10 years of study to even contemplate the idea of a God, let alone accepting one which I still haven't done.
Here's some of the many thoughts that plague me:
1. Removing religion from this for a moment, if some interdimensional beings travelled to Earth several thousand years ago and tried to tell the local uneducated peasants of the Big Bang, multiverse theory, consciousness moving into new dimensions after death, etc, and those uneducated peasants of 4000 years ago wanted to write that down, what would that even look like? How could you explain quantum physics to a person who doesn't even understand how to count? Doesn't know what the Sun and the Moon are? I think about this when I read Genesis. I think about what the person who was writing it was trying to describe using their very simplistic understanding of the world and the Universe.
2. If religion is a cult like force for evil, why have billions of humans over thousands of years found joy, happiness and learned life lessons by reading the same stories as each other over and over? If nothing else then religious texts as a book of moral tales connects us to people from tens of generations ago. Tribal elders have always passed down wisdom to the young, maybe we just invented a whole system around this and called it faith? Also notice that I used the word wisdom rather than knowledge.
3. Throughout my life I've learned about what happens inside the smallest particles and the most massive stars; how the winds work, how the Sun shines and how the plants grow. Yet despite having all of this knowledge, it brought me no wisdom. I can tell you facts about loads of different stuff but I still can't even begin to explain the nature of evil, why time ticks or what constitutes living a good life. What is the point of being able to explain stellar-nucleosynthesis to someone if you then can't answer the question the most basic questions of "am I an evil man? How do I teach my children to be moral people?". Literally, what even is the point?
4. What is Homer Simpson's favourite beer?
This seems like a stupid question but I think about the implications of it more than pretty much any other single question. I used to believe in a materialistic view of the world whereby "truth" was a Boolean concept - things were either true or they were false or unproven (which were the same thing essentially). This one question challenged and redefined my understanding of the nature of truth. If I were to answer the question with "Duff beer", is that true or false? Well obviously everybody knows that that is true, that Homer likes Duff beer. But Homer doesn't exist, he's a figment of Matt Groening's imagination, he doesn't have a favourite beer because he's some lines on a piece of paper. But is saying then that "Homer doesn't have a favourite beer" what we recognise to be true? No. Very obviously no.
Nor is this a badly formed question; something I've considered a lot. Does Homer "exist" in SOME form of existence? Sure, he inspires people every day to some degree and that thing that is inspiring to people through their character and their fictional actions has to have a name. He has traits, a likeness, a character, catchphrases, etc. The Simpsons has greatly affected society, the way many people look at their family or society. It's certainly affected our media which in turn affects our lives greatly.
Now it's important to see that I'm not using Homer Simpson as a synonym for God or an argument of the existence, only to make a point that the boolean nature, the materialistic nature of truth cannot be correct because it doesn't explain what we see around us nor does it make accurate predictions to the world.
There has to be different levels of truth. And if there's different levels of truth, separating the materialistic from the philosophical truth, then the arguments against the existence of a God that are based in material thought fall down. And once they fall down then it becomes a whole different argument - a much more interesting one I've found.
5. Time is God?
I think of time a lot. People think time is a human invention like the clock or something but it isn't, it's a physical substance that exists in the Universe. You are passing through time now (or time is passing through you) at the rate of one second per second in the same way that you are moving through space at whatever speed you are moving. What we call "time" is probably better described as "change". Things change, even on a quantum level. They move, they heat up and get more energy, they collide, they release energy, they combine together to make new things. The Universe isn't a photo, it's a movie and the moving film reel is what we call time. Time is the ability for things to change from one state into another and we know we can alter that experience (for example through the famous "twin spaceship" experiment) then we understand it as a physical object with which we presume space is formed i.e. spacetime.
What we term the Big Bang is scientifically speaking, the exact moment that time started ticking. There is no ability to understand the "before the Big Bang" because time didn't exist (or it did exist but never ticked) so the question doesn't make sense. It's North of the North Pole again.
So what start the first tick? What created the notion of unchangeable nothingness into changing somethingness?
I used to argue that time needs no creator because if you say that God did it then the next question is that who created God? Then ultimately ending back up at the same place as "it doesn't need a creator". So if God doesn't need a creator then why does time need a creator? May as well cut out steps 2-10.
The only possibility that makes any sense is that something outside the laws of the Universe created it. And if we accept this, a far a leap as it is, then we do satisfactorily hit the "it doesn't need a creator" mark because we have no possible way of knowing what laws exist in the Universe outside the Universe so to speak and we can't presume that they are same as ours. So maybe time is God? The problem with this is that it means that time is a part of our Universe thus regulated by the rules of our Universe thus cannot fulfil the initial need for creation outside of this Universe. You cannot be a part of the Universe but not governed by its law, we know this to be impossible. If you're here, you obey the same rules as everyone else does, nobody has superpowers unfortunately.
Once you switch those terms around though, the question becomes significantly more interesting and unanswerable. Is time isn't God, is God time? Is time the way in which some creator being interacts with our Universe? It fits every religious description of God pretty well. I don't know, ask me in another ten years.
The only thing I know about "evidence for religion" is that it's a poorly formed question mixing two different presentations of what "truth" means to score a weird point. There's the same evidence for religion that there is that Homer likes Duff beer (apart from those thousand years of personal testimony). Nobody can provide you physical evidence that Homer doesn't like Duff because we don't have access to Homer. But on the other hand, anybody who has watched the Simpsons knows the "truth" of his favourite beer.
