A person's upbringing and culture and scientific literacy make a hell of a difference. It's pretty easy to grow up thinking "This is how the world works and that's just the way it is." There are all sorts of ways to avoid critical thinking and an evidence-based worldview.
Although scientists are less likely to believe in god than the general public in America,
In general, religiosity (measured, as I said, by aggregating items on church attendance, frequency of prayer, and perceived personal importance of God) is correlated negatively with science literacy.
But the effect is modest.
I had a friend in graduate school who was a conservative Christian and Young Earth Creationist. He got his PhD in genetics. And honestly? It bothered me
way more than it did him. That Yale blog points to the Big Bang and Naturalistic Evolution as the two key areas where the more religious and less religious are going to disagree. I had another creationist friend in undergrad (the few hardcore creationists I went to school with are all super memorable). We'd argue almost every day before class about evolution but it basically never came up in class. We were both studying chemistry and there is a ton of work to be done there that makes zero reference to the age of the universe or evolution or on any other topic likely to provoke any kind of religious outcry. It's not like he would ever synthesize a molecule wrong and the professor would ask if he had believed in evolution during step 15. Even in biochemistry, one place where you think the topic might come up, the evolutionary processes that yielded the molecules and cycles and whatnot of interest were all pretty remote from what we were actually studying. There are obviously areas where you would be testing evolutionary hypotheses but you're talking about some highly specialized chemistry.
There is this assumption that being religious means you can't also be a scientist. Conversely, there is the assumption that declaring yourself an atheist means you'll cultivate a scientific mindset and have excellent critical thinking. But people don't live at the extremes of blind faith and mysticism and the cold light of pure rationality. People are frustrating in that we can mix the rational and irrational in weird ways. There are plenty of anti-vaccine atheists and there are people working on those vaccines who believe that god literally created the earth in 6 days, six thousand years ago. You'd think things would shake out a little more neatly but they just don't.
So here's my problem with the OP - for a whole lot of people, the existence or non-existence of god is equally obvious. One group sees the world and says, "Look at all this! Obviously there is a God." Another group goes, "Look at all this! Obviously there is no god." It's not like either of those positions represents a triumph of critical thinking. And the believers and nonbelievers can both say "I won't go over all of the arguments because this has all been cleared up long ago," which is just a nice way of saying "I am intellectually lazy but just trust me that I am better informed than you."
If you want to limit your case to the Christian God, you are talking about arguments encompassing history, archaeology, philosophy, textual analysis, language, biology, geology...just to take one example, the question of whether Jesus exists as a historical figure does not have an obvious answer. Is Jesus purely a fictional creation, rendering all questions about his divinity moot? If Jesus was an actual person, how much, if any, of the biblical account of his life is accurate? Those are interesting questions with interesting ramifications. If we have evidence that Jesus was a real dude who was born in Bethlehem, attracted followers, kicked it in Judea, and was actually crucified for what he was saying, it makes trying to figure out what we are told about his teaching more interesting, in the same way that the things that Winston Churchill said and did are more important than the things Harry Potter said and did. Only Churchill was an actual, for real wizard, and that's important. On the other hand, if Jesus was a real guy but the only bit that checks out is that he was a carpenter and the evidence points to him dying at 40 while making an end table, we might not care so much.
Unless the end tables were really really good.
I don't think we should choose the smug self satisfaction of proclaiming our views self evident (and I'm as up for some smug self satisfaction as anyone) over the much harder, but ultimately more satisfying, task of unpacking these topics and really digging in there.
In any case, I thought the line about Churchill being a wizard was funny.
