What evidence would it take for me to believe in God?

I've had the view for a long time that I won't believe in God until I find sufficient evidence for his/it's existence. This begs the question: "what evidence would it take for me to believe in God"?

The obvious candidate is a miracle. It's tempting to think something old testament level, like the seas parting or the clouds separating by a shining light would be enough to convince me. But thinking a bit deeper, it's also possible that a very simple miracle like this could also be the result of an hallucination or a well orchestrated magic trick. Sure, the odds of it all being an hallucination or a magic trick are astronomically small, but we know it's possible because we've all been duped by visual illusions and TV shows of David Blaine before. In comparison, a miracle has exactly 0% chance of happening by definition - it's a suspension of natural laws (whether we know them or not) that can't happen, and yet happens anyway. So to be rational, I would need to convince myself that the very obvious miracle being witnessed is somehow not a supernatural event. It's worth noting that in practice, if I saw something like this in real life, I would probably be so overcome with awe that I would end up believing in the closest God I could peg the miracle to. But this doesn't mean it's rational for me to believe, it just means I was manipulated by a serge of my own emotion.

I'm sure many theologians would argue that miracles don't need to come in the form of huge spikes of disruption. I suspect many theologians would argue that miracles surround our ordinary lives in subtle forms of beauty. I don't follow this line of argument either mainly because I don't think beauty objectively exists. It's a hardwired response our brains we have evolved with for survival reasons. If you were to look at the Universe at a closer level (literally at the nano level for example) you would find that even the most elegant process of a flower opening or a bird singing can be described by boring meaningless chemical/mechanical processes. Secondly, the existence of subtle miracles like a cancer going into regression for example, seems to me to be a desperate attempt to avoid the fine resolution of the scientific microscope. I don't think it's any coincidence that as our ability to understand scientific processes continues to grow and our ability to accurately record history improves, we notice miracles become less and less miraculous. It's not that God favors healing patients with tumors more than healing amputees, it's that humans misattribute gaps in a complete scientific understanding to divine origin.

Lastly, I've met 'weak believers' who claim that the only miracle to have ever occurred was the creation of the Universe in the big bang. My first argument doesn't apply here because the whole natural world didn't exist before the big bang, so you can forget about analyzing probabilities! You'd be tempted to think that if the Universe couldn't come into existence naturally, then it must have been caused supernaturally. This is a tempting thought until you realize that logic, causality and rationality only products of the natural world (1+1 has no meaning without a Universe, so we can't say it's equal to 2). As I always say, 'to add, you must first invent the Universe'! To say that the Universe was caused by something also makes no sense, so sadly, this just means I need to suspend judgement here. Maybe God exists, maybe he doesn't... maybe he does and doesn't. After all, logic doesn't apply.

Ok, if miracles won't convince me to believe in God then what will? Well, Matt Dillahunty, an atheist talk show host that I used to listen to a lot in my mid teens (but now kinda dislike) argued an interesting point. He argued that even if he doesn't know what it'll take for him to believe in God, God knows what it'll take to convince him. I think this argument only holds up for Abrahamic religion like Gods that actually care about human actions like worship and belief. Of course it's possible a perverse God could simply be timeless and uncaring about whether I believe in him or not.

My hero, Carl Sagan, had an interesting approach to this. He argued that the only way a God would infiltrate his way into the Universe is though mathematics. In one of his books he argues that if one of the fundamental constants of the universe, Pi, developed a pattern (like an infinite string of 0's) then this would be proof of a divine architect shaping the world in the most fundamental way. Once again, I don't like this for two reasons 1) We can prove mathematically that this can't happen, and if it did happen, we can apply the same logic from the first paragraph, and claim that mathematicians must have made a mistake in the calculation somewhere. 2) Humans are infamously good at spotting patterns. So good that we see patterns when there actually are none! This is especially the case for recognizing faces in clouds or bushes for example. Because of this, I don't think there's anyway to know that a pattern in the numbers is actually a subtle message from God or not.

What about emotion? Why do we assume the belief in God has to be rational? I have no doubt that religious people 'feel' Gods presence, rather than rationalize about his existence, and there are hundreds of YouTube videos showing the pure emotive power of belief. The problem with believing in God based on emotion is that it takes away your only reliable tool for discerning what is true or not. You can believe anything! I think following emotion, no matter how convincing it appears to be, ultimately just facilitates belief in the cultural norms of the society you grow up in. After all, there are videos of both Christians and Hindus reaching divine like levels of emotive connection, and yet we know that the Christian God and Hindu Gods are incompatible. This means that extremely convincing emotive connections don't need to be divine in origin; they can be natural occurrences in our mind.

So there it is! At this point in my life nothing will make me believe in a God. Just typing that sentence makes me seem horribly stubborn and intellectually closed. Perhaps I've missed something, or maybe I'll change my mind about a few of my arguments in the future, because I really don't like the idea of appearing so closed minded. A few future avenues of exploration are
1) The existence of consciousness. After all, it seems like a completely non physical property.
2) The matrix possibility. This entertains the idea that my brain is in a vat being fed illusionary images about the world. This is an interesting idea because it means establishing probabilities, having a sense of time and maybe even basic logical constructs in the real world could be completely false.