My prior responses and the discussion overall seems to have, indeed, shifted off the original topic. To bring it home:
The reason I started this topic is that I was interested, as I mentioned, in how other atheists could or could not relate to Thomas Nagel’s statement that he didn’t want to live in universe where there is a God. The reason is that I believe, in the end, we all either choose to believe, or we don’t, and for many that choice boils down to the fact that they just don’t want there to be a God.
There are sufficient reasons and evidence to believe, if one wants to believe. Is there mathematical certitude? No. There is always room to dismiss such evidence if, like Nagel, one simply doesn’t want there to be a God. Most human decisions are made for emotional reasons…only later does the mind rationalize it’s way to some sort of reasonable or evidentiary justification for the decision. Of course, most will at once exclaim, “While this is true for most of you peons, it isn’t at all true for me!. I am purely rational and base my beliefs only on the soundest of foundations!” Sound familiar?
Being the skeptic is always the easy route. It is immeasurably harder to make a case for anything, than it is to critique said case. The atheist can sit back and say, "Go on, believer! Amuse me with your ‘evidence’ and ‘reasons’! They can sit back and wait for any deficiency in knowledge, any flaw in a premise, any wiggle room in an explanation, and claim all such arguments fall short of their lofty, lofty standards. The truth is, none of us know for certain whether God exists. There is a leap of faith in either direction, because there is not sufficient evidence in either direction to say with ontological certitude one way or the other.
In Christianity, though, there is moral culpability in the decision we make. We either accept God, or we reject him, and there is moral culpability in that choice for all of us. So, the evidence, I think by design, is not absolutely overwhelming. You can always find the evidence was “just too scant for me” or the Christians were just “too ignorant or hypocritical” or the world was just “too filled with evil and suffering” for there to be a God. In the end, it comes down to a personal, moral choice we all must make. As Blaise Pascal said:
In faith, there is enough light for those who want to believe, and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.