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Let's talk about the existence of God. The OG internet debate culture war issue. Not about the ethical value of a Christian life, or the enduring influence of Christianity on the intellectual tradition of the West (although we also can't declare a priori that those considerations are irrelevant). But just, the simple question of God's existence.
The existence of God is possibly the culture war issue that TheMotte has the highest degree of internal disagreement about, given that we have a pretty healthy mix of both Christians and atheists here. But we rarely address the issue directly. Possibly because both sides assume that these arguments and debates have been exhausted already, and both sides are intransigently locked into their current positions, so it's better for everyone to just maintain a quiet detente. But given that there's something of a renaissance of religious (or just generally pre-modern) thinking going on, we may increasingly find value in revisiting some of these questions.
Reasons for believing in God can be divided into roughly two camps, which I'll call the rational arguments and the extra-rational arguments:
The rational arguments are (purportedly) valid arguments such that, if you accept the truth of the premises, you are then compelled to believe in the existence of God under threat of irrationality. This includes many of the classic apologetic arguments: the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the fine-tuning argument, etc. Although apologetics and the philosophy of religion have historically paid a great deal of attention to arguments of this sort, I think it's pretty rare to find a religious believer who claims that their belief rests on the force of these arguments alone. Even if rational argumentation alone could get you a good deal of the way towards a fully Christian theological doctrine (e.g. via considerations like Lewis's trilemma), there seems to be a general sentiment that purely rational belief is missing something crucial if it's not backed up by personal faith and experience.
The extra-rational arguments include everything else: faith, either of the "garden" variety or of the "Kierkegaardian leap of faith" variety ("I believe because it is absurd to believe"), religious experience, either of a single life-defining event or in the more general sense of a sort of continuous and ongoing direct perception of God's existence, belief on pragmatic grounds (perhaps because you think you'll simply be happier if you believe, or it's better for the social order, or you believe because of Pascal's Wager style considerations, although maybe you could argue that Pascal's Wager blurs the lines between "rational" and "extra-rational" argumentation...)
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling. Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is. Perhaps this is an indication that other spooky and mysterious things are going on too, like God. (That's obviously a very crude way of phrasing it, but I think that captures the basic intuition common to this family of arguments.)
I get the impression that most Christian Mottizens are believers essentially due to some sort of personal experience or personal revelation (please correct me if I'm wrong). This makes me curious though: why do you think that you had this experience, or are perceptually attuned to this truth, etc, while so many other people (namely atheists) aren't? Why are some people capable of simply "seeing" or "realizing" this truth, but not others? (I'm assuming that there's something intrinsically inarticulable about your faith that makes it not amenable to rational argumentation). I'm not trying to do a "gotcha" here, I'm just throwing out some debate starters.
I am an atheist, although not a particularly ardent one. It would be cool if there were compelling reasons to believe, although I don't think that I have any sufficiently compelling ones right now, and I'm also aware that I have an intrinsic bias towards wanting to believe, which means I need to apply a certain level of heightened scrutiny in order to counteract that bias. I would rather the universe not be a boring place. The total intellectual dominance of materialism for going on two centuries now has gotten rather repetitive (which is part of what drives my interest in any and all exotic ontologies, like Kastrup's analytic idealism). I would rather not believe that we have everything figured out, that we have the final true picture of reality in our grasp; at the very least, it would be nice to introduce some epistemological uncertainty into the mix, the presentiment that there might be something new and unforeseen on the horizon. But we also have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that reality might actually just be that boring.
Religion advocates still don't have an even close to satisfactory answer for the two most basic playground arguments so personally it's hard to take discourse there seriously.
If something can't come from nothing, why does God exist? And why does that answer not apply to the universe itself existing?
Why is your religion, most likely the one you were raised in, the correct one? Not just Christianity vs Islam vs Judaism, but also specific denominations? Statistically speaking the large large large large majority of religious believers are blasphemous in some way (not even counting the overwhelming number of people who clearly don't even follow their own belief's teachings), so why not you? And that's assuming that any of the mainstream religions are right to begin with and God isn't an Eldritch shadow beast who hides and laughs at our idiotic ideas or the ancient Greeks were right all along or the spaghetti monster or plenty of other possibilities. Religious belief doesn't seem to come from logic or first principles, but cultural indoctrination or else we wouldn't have this issue.
I've never seen a satisfying answer to these. I've seen attempts by religious people jerking each other off with a bunch of gobbledygook, but it's never been logically strong. And arguing back is easy, you can just paint a rock with their same exact logic "actually the Eldritch shadow beast spaghetti Zeus did that"
I'm an atheist, but I think the Abrahamic faiths all have a reasonably cogent answer as these things go: "we know our religion is the correct one because, fairly recently in the grand scheme of things, God sent us prophets and/or a Messiah, who performed all sorts of miracles as tangible proof of the divine; and people wrote credible accounts of those events down for posterity".
e.g., I think there is genuinely something to the case that the Christian Gospels are probably more historical than not. I don't believe for a moment that they were directly written by the people they're attributed to, of course - but we have historical evidence that they were written shortly enough after the fact that, yeah, it's kind of bizarre to imagine people making too much of this stuff up out of whole cloth and trying to pass it off as fact. Mark's Gospel was probably written something like 40 years after Jesus's purported crucifixion - it could and would have been read by people who had personally met Jesus.
Indeed, it seems to be written in a way that assumes the audience has some prior knowledge about Jesus and the rumors that surrounded him, so that the Gospel's purpose is to theologically nail down
(or, as they case may be, nail up)who and what Jesus was. Mark is very concerned with telling his audience "no, Jesus wasn't John the Baptist resurrected, or the prophet Isaiah returning to Earth - and he was definitely an emanation of the Jewish God, not a different Gnostic God", not so much with persuading an audience who might think that Jesus was just some guy and all the supernatural claims about him are nonsense. This tells us that, at least within certain circles, "there was a guy called Jesus whose life story went roughly like this, and there was something supernatural going on with him" was a relatively uncontroversial starting point within a few decades of Jesus's death. How would we react if someone wrote a book which took it for granted that everyone knows that, IDK, Jimmy Swaggart routinely performed honest-to-goodness public miracles in the 80s - a book which seemed merely interested in telling us precisely what it was that empowered him to do so?As a materialist, I don't ultimately find this persuasive as evidence for divinity itself. The credibility of the Gospels as historical document is significant, but not significant enough to match up to the basic improbability of "the supernatural exists" as a root claim. But that's not the question you asked; you asked what makes Christians so sure that, even assuming there's a God, it's specifically the Christian God. And I think that once you take for granted that the supernatural exists, Christianity does start to look pretty well-supported.
The thing is belief in supernatural healing seems to have been commonplace at that time. John 5, for example, tells the story of Jesus healing a man who wasn't fast enough to access the existing supernatural healing method available, namely, jumping into a pool first when the water moved. The passage makes no attempt to dispute that this other supernatural healing method, which seems to bear no relation to Christ or his mission at all, totally works. In fact, it's seemingly assumed the reader would accept such a thing as normal.
To the skeptical reader, the passage is kind of revealing: you have a pool surrounded by blind and lame people who have to race to jump in at a specific time to get healed, and... well, I suppose there's a sampling bias towards not being blind and lame among those who are capable of jumping in first. Does this not sound completely plausible as a mean-spirited prank the lads would play on the blind and lame? Just jump in the pool and start shouting "I'm healed! Wow! Man, if only you were faster, you could have made it in before me, tee-hee." Yet the text makes no explicit attempt to entertain such a reading: it just flatly asserts that no, there actually was supernatural power here, you just had to be really fast and jump in first, but it really did work! I'd love to read a theologian's explanation of why exactly an angel behaving in this extremely troll-ish way is... well, still allowed to be considered an angel lol.
My memory is that the disabled had people there to help them, and that particular guy was disadvantaged by being there on his own, so he had nobody to keep a space for him or tell him when the waters were disturbed or help him get into the pool:
Rather like the helpers at the baths in Lourdes.
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This doesn't solve anything, there isn't even a majority religion just a plurality one of Christianity (and that's again dismissing the significant differences between various denominations all asserting to truly know God's will) so you are still most likely wrong even if there is a god of some sort.
Who is the last true prophet? Is it Mohammad? Christ? Joseph Smith? Malachi? Sun Myung Moon? Maybe L Ron Hubbard? Li Hongzhi of Falun Gong claims to be capable of miracles right now and he has millions and millions of followers. Tons of people vouch for the supernatural powers that Falun Gong brings them. Well there you go, a large number of people vouching that he is the newest spiritual leader and performs miracles in front of them. Many have even personally seen into the other dimensions themselves. I guess that is the true religion.
And why does it even have to be an Abrahamic one, the people who believe in stuff like Hinduism and Buddhism seem pretty confident too.
If we grab a random person off the planet and ask them, most likely they'd be wrong given that no religion is in the majority and therefore even the correct belief system is not believed by >50% of people. More people should be reflecting on themselves and wondering about that right?
"I believe in what I was told to believe as a kid because religion is culturally indoctrinated and I want to feel like a special part of a bigger whole" is a great explainer for why the large majority of people have to be wrong.
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Jesus was one of many holy miracle men. He isn't even unique among second-temple Jews (see Honi the circle drawer and Hanina ben Dosa). It was taken for granted back then that certain humans were uniquely empowered by God(s) to do cool shit.
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