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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 feel like the current discourse advocating religion is pretty similar to the current discourse advocating wokeness. People probably know it's bullshit, but push it anyway because they think lying the right way will bring us a better world. A type of person thinks that sure, it's bullshit, but it's our good sort of bullshit that keeps the queers and the degenerates down instead of elevating them and will lead to prosperity and clean cities. Only you're still lying about important things, you know you are, and the same dynamics that broke down the consensus religion of previous generations will hit you as well.
What do you make of God not being a viable concept to appeal to in public discourse? We're living in a sort of mixed postmodern picture where everything is real and truths don't matter when it's about the dignity of religious people, but then if there is a global pandemic the alternative truth that microbes don't exist and sickness arises from peoples' chakras being spiritually misaligned will not be given equal hearing. Right now metaphysical beliefs from any religion seem to have no purchase in the sort of consensus reality discourse that says things like "our ongoing pandemic is caused by contagious microbes". If the place of religion in society is that the secular morlocks go "that's very nice dear, now go play in the corner, we've got three nuclear power plants to build and an mRNA vaccine to sequence against the latest pandemic", how does that look for religion's claimed capability to ascertain very important things about existence? People who like religions seem to want to generally to downplay this instead of honestly thinking what it entails. Fighting science hasn't gone very well, religious people enthusiastically tried, got trounced, and then developed sophisticated ideas about "separate magisteria" and coexisting with science. Coexisting with science is tricky as well, since science keeps moving. You can go "but consciousness!" today, but what if we get a broadly accepted scientific theory of consciousness in 2038? People who wanted to keep space for religion could go "but élan vital!" in 1910 but that one was doing significantly worse 50 years later. Doesn't stop people from still trying though.
The public discourse thing seems to not be just about the rise of science, it's also about the rise of cosmopolitanism. It's hard to ignore that there have been multiple very different world religions that all have had significant civilizations associated with them. "Why are you convinced it's specifically the religion you were raised in that's right" is a tough question. It's not a question asking you to tell you what you like specifically about your own religion. It's asking that if you think your own religion gets something specifically right that other religions don't, isn't it a bit suspicious it's mostly people who were raised in that religion who think so, and people who were raised with other world religions by and large happy there. If you take the consciousness and quantum physics thing seriously instead of just dishonestly dishing it out as apologetics for your pre-existing bottom line, this is a problem, because you're fishing for something that's the same in everyone's reality, not just a nice story of cultural tradition. Even if you think something like a first mover argument is convincing, it doesn't specify the God of Abraham who is particularly disgusted by the sight of human feces. If you take religions at face value, at most one can be right, but religious people who claim inner conviction of the truth of their own religion specifically seem to be happy with their own thing and there's no widespread movement of Sikhs, Shintoists, Catholics, Orthodox Zoroastrians and Jains going "so I looked into this American Mormonism thing and turns out my inner conviction of the truth of God now feels like the Mormons got a better picture of things than the thing I was raised with." So if there's one correct religion, religious people seem to not be very good at discovering it, and if you want to think that the religions all point to the same thing, then you run afoul with many religions themselves saying, nope, our specific picture is correct, people who think otherwise are damned heathens. If you think the first mover is valid but are agnostic about everything past that, you can't very honestly commit to an existing religion like Christianity that demands adherence to all sorts of specific things beyond that, and you lose the social cohesion angle. And if you want to stick with your one specific religion while ignoring this part, you've sunken pretty well into the woke-equivalent "we know it's bullshit but we'll lie to everyone that it's true to reap social benefits" thing again.
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