I’m an atheist. So why can’t I shake God?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Ok, none of that particularly addresses my points in the cited post.

So I ask again, how do you resolve the inherent and self evident contradiction of, on the one hand, assuming this as of yet undefined and un-evidenced being has ordaining free will to chose, with the idea that in fact we are also pre-wired/predisposed to believe in 'its' existence (also unsupported and demonstrably false in my case)? You may as well just force belief if you're going to do that.

Why is it a contradiction? Giving us a pre-disposition to believe in Him is pretty subtle, IMO.

Err, what? How does subtlety make any difference or indeed help your thesis? It could be so subtle as to make it almost meaningless, it's still demonstrably hedging the bets in your favour.

Really I'm struggling to see how you can't compute the obvious contradiction in logic here. It's almost as mind boggling as the absurdity of the premise.

And how does this even compute in a scenario where this celestial being has created an entire universe, including the life forms that reside within it and, importantly, every facet of their existence from behavioral to emotional, only to then stumble at the hurdling block (even taking into account Muslims and Christians and the relatively small number of Jews into account) of having a very large proportion of the planet both today and throughout history never worshipping it, or even knowing of its existence? I ask you how a rational mind can even consider that to be feasible let alone plausible.

How? Relatively simply, I think. More people believe in some sort of a supreme being than you apparently realize. If you add up the number of Christians, Muslims and Hindus alone, you're at about 5 out of 7 million people who are theists (monotheists or polytheists). So, God understands what the life experience of each person has been, and I personally believe He grades on a curve. And, FWIW, the Church teaches that all those who lived and died as "good" people before Christ were waiting for His day in a relatively pleasant place known as "Abraham's bosom" and had an opportunity to meet him during the three days his body was in the tomb. This is known as the harrowing of hell.

That's moving the goalposts. Now you're adhering to vatican 2 and going fully all inclusive with this? So when you talk of pre-wiring, can you actually define what you mean so we can avoid having the posts moved around please? Hard wired for what? A specific deity? If so, why do many more people not believe in it than do? If any deity, what difference does it make what you believe? Does this not again contradict the premise of the article in the OP?

I am ignoring all these deflections of materiality, 'what other forum members think' (I don't particularly care) and further assertions until you can provide a satisfactory answer to that.

QFT