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One would have to be omniscient to know for sure that there is not enough knowledge to draw a conclusion as to the existence of God. So to say that it is a "state of being", as opposed to a mere claim about a state of being is nothing more than a claim of omniscient ignorance.

Yes, that's true. There certainly is knowledge out there that we can't and don't know. Someday we may know it. Maybe we never will. But for now, there isn't enough hard empirical evidence to suggest to me that there is a God. Because of that, I don't have a basis upon which to form any kind of a supernatural religious belief.

Thanks to the three of you for some interesting discussion without the tedious name calling. I do appreciate it. Gratuitous invective on the religious theme threads has become an unfortunate feature of life here on FR.

But for now, there isn't enough hard empirical evidence to suggest to me that there is a God. Because of that, I don't have a basis upon which to form any kind of a supernatural religious belief.

I would humbly offer this as a counter-point: What you say is true - we do lack hard, empirical evidence. But that doesn't mean we are left without clues - or reason. And as I've mentioned previously, the clues (as I see them) rule out chance as a reasonable answer to the questions of our origins.

Which begs the question: if there is a Designer, why would He not leave hard, empirical evidence? For many, the answer is unsatisfactory - because the answer deals with the metaphysical.

But what can you do? the Designer gets to make the rules; and we can deal with the reality of those rules - or to our detriment - fight them...

But for now, there isn't enough hard empirical evidence to suggest to me that there is a God. Because of that, I don't have a basis upon which to form any kind of a supernatural religious belief.

I would just point out that the mere fact of your presupposition of the validity of universal, abstract principles and laws evinced in your two sentences above is incontrovertible evidence in and of itself that your non-theistic world-view is not true because there is no basis for said non-material, universal, invariant entities in a non-theistic, impersonal, ever-changing, random universe of mere matter in motion.

In other words, you are not being consistent with your own world-view; you are presupposing the existence of transcendent, unchanging, non-physical entities and laws just like a theist does, except you have no way of accounting for such entities in an atheistic world-view. If the universe was actually nothing but impersonal, ever-changing, matter in motion you couldn't string two coherent sentences together or make sense of anything because in an atheist world there would be no such thing as a universal. There would be only random, ever-changing, physical particulars.

Your espoused worldview cannot make real things such as unchanging laws of logic (and thus your own rationality) intelligible.

Cordially,