I can provide some evidence against it. Although brought up Catholic, as you intuit, in college, I identified as agnostic, and felt atheistic; I said ‘agnostic’ only as a nod to acknowledge I couldn’t prove the lack of a deity. But my basic position was that I had no reason to accept the existence of any god or gods.
But then, I found a reason. I had an experience, a personal experience, which left me quite convinced that there was a God, and a Jesus, and a Mary who was His mother.
So now I had a reason, a strong one. But at the same time, I absolutely acknowledged the validity of my prior position: I took it because I had no evidence to support an extraordinary claim. Now that I had evidence, I could no longer hold to a position of agnosticism – but for anyone else not having shared my experience, agnosticism was a perfectly rational position to take.
And that’s where I stand today. I don’t claim that belief in God is an obvious truth – to the contrary, it makes very little rational sense to believe in God – unless you have had an experience which changes that position.
The best thing I can do is argue by analogy. If individual cells in our bodies possessed some kind of low-level sentience, we can imagine that they might speak of their universe – the body – being controlled by some super-sentient being. And some of those cells might rail at the unfairness of their treatment at the behest of the body. Muscle cells might rage at how the body’s exercise caused them to suffer. But they wouldn’t have the perspective to understand that the entire body’s health improved, and that their unfair treatment was for the betterment of a bigger scheme that they not only didn’t know, but lacked the capacity to even understand.
It is the same with us, and God. You rail against the unfair treatment we get, because you cannot possibly understand the larger issues in play.
But of course that explanation is much less likely, from an Occam’s Razor perspective, than the simpler one that there is no plan, no scheme, no higher intelligence affecting us. And with your set of experiences, it makes perfect sense for you to say, “Look, that’s a fun theory, but it’s extraordinary, and extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. You have speculated, but not provided evidence. Therefore I reject your speculation.”
But what you fail to understand, or believe, is that I have had an experience which provided that evidence to me. Unfortunately, it was not an experience I can share with you in any meaningful way, so I don’t in the least feel you are irrational for rejecting it.
But you should at least understand that, based on my experience, my own view is perfectly rational.
