RE: I’m an atheist. So why can’t I shake God?
February 5, 2016 at 5:00 pm
(This post was last modified: February 5, 2016 at 5:02 pm by athrock.)
(February 5, 2016 at 6:00 am)Pandæmonium Wrote:(February 4, 2016 at 10:10 pm)athrock Wrote: Turns out it's pretty hard to believe in nothing when your psyche is wired for faith.No. How does that even make any sense? Why would you even bother doing that when its within your power just to make people believe in the first place? Isn't it a contradiction to the entire free will thing if you give people a predisposition to make it easier for people to believe in you? How would you know the difference that you'd 'found god' the legitimate way (whatever that is) as opposed to just becoming a slave to your predisposition?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/postevery...age%2Fcard
After reading the article, my questions are:
Why on God's green earth is the human brain wired for faith when our development is the result of purely evolutionary processes with no supreme being involved at all?
Is it possible that God gave us brains that are pre-wired for receptivity to His existence to make it easier for us to believe in Him?
And how does that solve the issue of the vast majority of the world not believing in the same given deity as everyone else? Did 'God' (which one? How defined?) screw up this predisposition wiring to make humans jump at shadows and mistake everything to be 'God' without really giving them a frame of reference? Does it regret people believing in Vishnu or tikka-takku the coconut god?
If I were a theist I wouldn't go anywhere near this line of thinking. It's shoddy and even more full of contradictions and holes than the usual rhetoric.
How would God be able to reveal His existence without impacting your free will to accept or not accept Him as your Lord?
For example, if He is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, then many (like Hitchens and many member of the forum) would resent Him as the ultimate Big Brother.
Others would choose to worship Him out of fear (the very thing that forum members SCREAM about every time the existence of hell is mentioned).
So, how does God strike a balance between giving you (a mere speck of material in a purely natural world) the ability to perceive the existence of the supernatural Creator of that world without so overwhelming you with His glory that you are coerced into worshiping Him?
(Oh, and the "different gods" bit? Theologians accept that Christians, Muslims and others do worship the same God - but they have different impressions of him based upon the paths they have followed to find him.)