Hey Religious Believers, Where's Your Evidence? By Greta Christina

You'll have to read all that she wrote but here's the final part:

If religious believers had good evidence for their beliefs, they'd be giving it.

When something even vaguely resembling solid evidence for religion appears, believers are all over it. The Shroud of Turin. The Virgin Mary on a cinnamon bun. That ridiculous prayer "study" supposedly showing that sick people who were prayed for did better... until the study was blasted into shrapnel, and the researchers were shown to be dishonest at best and frauds at worst, and subsequent studies that were actually done right showed absolutely no such thing.

More commonly, believers frequently trot out the old standby forms of religious "evidence": personal intuition (translated: our biased and flawed tendency to believe what we already believe or what we want to believe), and religious authorities and texts (translated: someone else's biased and flawed intuition, passed off as fact). Even in the era of evolution, even when we know in great detail how the complexity of life came into being, many believers -- including moderate, non-creationist believers -- often point to the apparent "design" of life as evidence of God. And any number of coincidences, twists of fate, supposedly miraculous medical cures, and other happy and unhappy accidents -- the kind we'd have every reason to expect in a physical, cause-and-effect world -- will be readily chalked up to spiritual forces or the hand of God.

Believers -- many believers, anyway -- are hungry for solid, non-subjective, real-world evidence for their beliefs. But in the absence of that evidence, and in the presence of positive evidence and arguments countering their beliefs, they'll resort to slippery, contorted, elaborately constructed excuses for why the expectation of evidence for religion isn't fair.

And as I look at these excuses, I think I see why.

Religion is like a paper castle that's formidably protected -- with moats and walls, trap doors and vats of boiling oil, attack dogs and armed guards patrolling around the clock.

The armor has to be first-rate.

Because the structure itself can't stand on its own.

Link.