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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.
I kind of doubt we have many true-believer Christians on the forum. There's plenty of cultural Christians, i.e. people who don't really believe in the superstitions but nevertheless have their arguments cosplay some hollow Christian aesthetics as a mostly futile attempt to craft a broader right-wing worldview. And I bet we have an even bigger swathe of people who don't believe in that, but see cultural Christians as "fellow travelers" in the fight against the Left, and so they give them a free pass.
When I've tried to debate some actual true-believers on here, it's always gone badly since they mostly trend towards metaphysics, which in terms of debating bears a very close resemblance to conspiracy theorists in that it's very jargon-heavy, highly specific to the individual, and ultimately unfalsifiable.
I wouldn’t suggest I’m insincere though as a Catholic I could be a more observant one than I currently am; and indeed am trying to be.
All the arguments I’ve come across for God’s existence I regard as either fallacious or unconvincing. You could argue as the Reform tradition does that all the arguments stand as a cumulative case for theism, which is to say collectively they all add up to the existence of God. I don’t find this convincing either, but there’s assuredly no “one” argument I’ve ever come across that makes the case either. Aquinas shouldn’t be taken seriously in light of contemporary science; though his observations were adequate to the period in which he lived.
I take the faith as an article of faith and live it as such. It’s not a distant afterthought in my daily life, but I do find the intellectual justification wanting.
Thank you for being honest.
My question to you would be: why is faith enough for you? Religious communities hold up faith as this wonderfully good thing, but all that faith means is that you believe something without evidence. You're giving in to wishful thinking. Granted, everybody (including me!) does that to some extent, but it's generally seen as a failure-mode of human cognition. Why admit that openly, and do nothing to try to resolve it?
Yea. I think right-leaning rationalists think to themselves, "If I can believe in Christianity or Islam or any of those, why not be a woke progressive? They too believe untrue things. And at least it's considered mostly normal in day to day life in the best places in the country to live, to boot."
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