Pro: onto your facts. the two that you mention are not actually facts. first, the world all around us “scream[ing] of a creator”. let me rephrase your words. “the world seems so complex that there’s no way this could be a coincidence.” now, the information we collected so far seems to indicate that even the most intricate things – anything, essentially – can spring into existence merely by chance. if you can’t wrap your mind around that, it’s okay – I can’t either. my point is that looking around you and declaring “okay this is too complex for me so it can’t happen by chance, only by a creator” is kind of a selfish supposition. just because you (as a human being) will never be able to wrap your mind around how the world came into existence and how it functions the way it does, does not, again, directly imply that a creator is involved. it just proves that we are all too stupid basically.
second, evidence of Jesus. whether or not being able to prove that he really existed as a historical figure is irrelevant to me, because as far as i’m concerned, he was just a man. what is important though is whether or not he was the son of god. when i say evidence, i mean first-hand experiences of his miracles, HIS writings (not the bible, which is only word of mouth, and wasn’t being written until like a hundred years after his death). the problem is that according to you, there is only one Jesus-scenario: his body hasn’t been found because he ascended to heaven. period. if he hadn’t been divine, he hadn’t ascended, thus his body would have been found, so CLEARLY, he did ascend, so he WAS/IS divine. in actuality, there is another scenario, which doesn’t have any divine elements to it. bodies from 2000 years ago simply can not be identified. he probably died, buried, and did not ascend. did any of the 500 witnesses leave first-hand evidence that they themselves actually witnessed his revival or ascension? nope. not a single shred of that exists – only the bible, which is by no means first-hand, also, i wouldn’t like to get into it (yet).
yes, i CHOOSE not to have faith in Jesus’ divinity, because faith by definition is believing in something without evidence, i.e. the process of “not thinking”. science is appealing to me because it is something based on logic, evidence, and reason. it is about setting up hypotheses, then trying to disprove them. thus, a scientist is always asking questions, sort of always being sceptical about his own ways. religion however discourages, or i’ll go so far as to say prohibits rational thinking by turning beliefs with little to no evidence into unshakeable truth. i don’t need to have “faith” in the physical world, because i have all the evidence that i could ever want.
denying Jesus’ divinity might remind you of people denying the holocaust, but let me add one teeny-tiny detail. holocaust is a fact. everyone knows it happened because there is unshakable evidence to support it. anyone who chooses to simply ignore the cold hard facts is out of his mind. now, do you think that a couple of people telling tales of Jesus long after he died is in the same ballpark as actual, verifiable historical records? if they were, we wouldn’t call it religion, we would call it history.
let me ask you the following: do you think something will be the way you’d like it to be if you have faith in it? would a million dollars fall from the sky if i wanted it to? of course not. but you yourself say: you have faith in god (according to you, your belief is faith+fact, now i’m only talking about the pure faith part). in other words, you believe in him because you choose to, not because you have any kind of evidence. so you DO think that i would be closer to that million dollars just by having faith that it can actually fall from the sky. i didn’t mean to ridicule you, i just wanted to show how absurd the idea of “if i believe, it will be so” is. scientists don’t have “faith” in the outcome of experiments, because they know very well that it changes nothing. god won’t be any closer to existing just by having faith that he does. what is left after we subtract faith? facts, from which, let’s admit, there’s not much of. facts, by definition, can be verified using experiments. name one experiment, containing no ambiguity whatsoever, that even comes close to proving god’s existence or Jesus’ divinity. just to make it more interesting, make it so that it can be used towards proving the christian god or Jesus, but not the other gods or prophets. after realizing there’s no such thing, you will realize that your faith in god is not based on faith and fact, but solely on faith.
i thought of a carrot when you asked, and you know what happened? electrical charges surged through my brain, finding their paths among billions of neurons, stimulating correct ones so that my brain called forth the image of a carrot. thought itself only exists as a stimulus in one’s mind (mind = the consciousness of the brain). if we had the technology, we could actually see charges racing past neurons, we can’t now, but we DO know what thoughts are; by no means mysterious semi-existing somethings, but electrical connections between the neurons of our brain. there’s no mystery here, the only reason why we can’t see thoughts is that we don’t have the proper equipment yet to make them visible real-time. see, there isn’t anything which is “real but undetectable”, because things which are not energy, nor mass do not exist. we might simply not possess the required technology to measure everything, but then again, not being able to measure something and something existing AND NOT BEING ABLE TO BE measured is two different things. the latter is just a hypothetical concept, because if something exists, then it can be measured somehow, we might not possess the required technology to do so just yet.
because of this, so-called “unseen things” or “unmeasurable things” can and do exist, but one day they will be probably revealed for what they are, just as people figured out lots of things since the beginning of christianity that they attributed to god before discovering otherwise.