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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'm an atheist, albeit a protheistic (or really pro-Christian) atheist. Clearly, secular modernity isn't working, given how miserable and childless we all are. I'd love to believe in God.
At the same time, I genuinely struggle to understand intelligent people who do believe in God. I know intellectually it's compartmentalisation, but I can't put myself in that position. The world is so obviously not a supernatural one, prayer does nothing, there is no evidence of God exerting his will at either the small scale or the large one. The world as we all see it is completely compatible with the non-existence of God and so clearly not compatible with anything but the weakest form of Deism. And I'm tempted to agree with Penn Jillette's 'hardcore atheism', which is I don't believe in God, and I don't really believe that believers do either. That's why nobody ever prays for falsifiable things that an omnipotent God could do (e.g. all the Russian guns in Ukraine stop working) and instead prays for psychological stuff (please give me resilience to endure) or stuff that would happen in a Godless world (my chemo-treated cancer goes into remission).
The closest I ever come to religious feeling is either when I'm feeling especially grateful for my life, or when I consider the question 'why is there something instead of nothing?' which genuinely does boggle the mind. But neither leads me to conclude that a jingoistic, jealous Caananite war god manifested as a pacifist peasant and then killed himself in order to forgive humanity for committing the sins he designed us to commit and knew we were going to commit when he created us.
That... is not actually obvious in the way you say it, and I think your struggle to understand said people is downstream from that. I'll concede that it seems obvious to you, fair enough. But it is not obvious to everyone, and there are people equally as intelligent as you to whom it seems perfectly obvious that we live in a supernatural world, that prayer is effective, and that God exerts his will on the small and large scale. It has nothing to do with compartmentalization as you are (kind of uncharitably) assuming. Those people simply disagree with you.
Are you religious? If so, could you give any examples of why you think these things are true?
Because the median religious person certainly doesn't act as if their faith is true. People still get sad when their relatives die and are still scared of death themselves, even though they (supposedly) believe in heaven. They claim that God answers prayers but then don't ask for anything that couldn't happen in a Godless world (e.g. God ends all war and cures all disease tomorrow) because it might ruin the spell when it doesn't happen. Even the Pope himself suddenly turns into an agnostic on the topic of hell in spite of Catholic doctrine.
The model of religion as 'belief in belief' is much more consistent with what we see.
As a sidebar: you have misunderstood what Pope Francis said in the link you provided. He did not turn into an agnostic, nor go against Catholic doctrine. The Catholic church does not definitely say that anyone is in hell, nor does it prohibit the hope that all might be saved. What is prohibited is teaching that all will be saved. It is possible, but we do not know that it will be so, and the doctrine is that we must be open to the possibility that some might be in hell even as we hope for that to not be the case.
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I am, and I will. But first...
You are completely failing to understand people when you say stuff like this. People get sad when a relative dies because it hurts to not have them around now, even if you believe you'll see them again someday. People absolutely pray for an end to war and disease, it happens all the time. I personally pray for God to end wars at least once a week. You really, really do not understand the mindset of religious people based on what you've said here, and I strongly advise you to not draw inferences based on the very faulty premises you have laid out, because they will be completely invalid. Anyways, that aside...
I believe that the existence of a supernatural universe (not a specific deity) is pretty obvious based on simple logic. If we trace back the chain of events in our universe, at some point we must arrive at the thing that kicked it into motion - the uncaused cause, the prime mover, pick your term. There are two possible explanations for that: either the universe itself is eternal, having always existed, or else it was set in motion by something outside the universe which was eternal and has always existed. It seems obvious to me that the natural world itself cannot be supernatural, that would be ridiculous. Therefore, there must be a supernatural force which was the uncaused cause behind the chain of events that is our universe. Which is to say, it is obvious to me that we live in a supernatural universe. That is a limited insight - it doesn't tell us anything about what this supernatural force is like - but it does seem very clear to me that our reality is not materialistic.
I also believe in the existence of the Christian God not through logic, but through the personal experiences of a person whom I know very well. He's not lying, he's not hallucinating, the only possible explanation is that the things he experienced must have truly happened. I won't bother to relate them in detail because I know that "someone I know had supernatural experiences" isn't at all convincing. It wouldn't have convinced me if it wasn't someone I knew personally. But suffice it to say, I do believe it, though I think we have left the realm of the "I think it's obvious that..." behind.
I also believe that God intervenes in the world. Not always in the way we want him to, and not in ways that are undeniably divine intervention, but I do believe that it happens. I believe that I met my wife through such an occurrence. The circumstances in which we met were sufficiently improbable that I do not believe they could have occurred by random coincidence. Moreover, my wife has said that at the time she was praying to meet the man God intended for her, so I believe that our meeting was in answer to her prayer. Again, I don't think that this is something which would necessarily be obvious to anyone, but it seems very clear to me that this was the work of God in our lives.
All of which is to say: yes, intelligent people who are religious do in fact believe that God exists, that he answers prayers, and that he intervenes in the world. It isn't just compartmentalization and going along with the culture in which one grew up.
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