I’m borrowing this from my new favorite atheist site Evangelical Realism, because it really is the bottom line for me and many others (my emphasis added):
Notice, the reason given for why people believe in God is because of the more or less complicated arguments of men—many of which even believers no longer find credible. The claim of the Gospel, however, is not that men decided God must exist because of centuries of abstruse philosophizing. Biblical stories are about the existence of a type of concrete, objective evidence that you don’t need a Thomas Aquinas to elucidate for you.
That evidence, however, consistently and universally fails to exist outside of the stories, superstitions, and subjective feelings of men. It is absent even from the experience of believers like Vox, which is why he must appeal to complicated (and fallible) human arguments as being the justification for Christian faith. And if even Vox must dismiss as irrelevant “the reasons some people used to believe in God 700 years ago,” imagine how irrelevant the 2,000 year old arguments must be!
Truth is consistent with itself. The evidence Vox appeals to, and which he castigates Dawkins for not considering, and which he lacks the courage to offer as a defense of God’s existence, is evidence which is not even the same type of phenomenon as the purported evidence the Bible claims as the basis for belief in God. There is one type of evidence in the stories, and an entirely different sort of “evidence” in actual experience, even among believers. The Bible stories simply are not consistent with what we see in real life, which is why Vox has to grasp at bizarre straws like the “over 30″ ageism he opened with. Thus, he “refutes” atheism by demonstrating its fundamental correctness.
I would love to hear the harrumphs and fumfuhs of theists defending that little statement of fact. Anyone?