(November 14, 2016 at 1:23 pm)Ignorant Wrote: Well, let's start with a real basic and simple reason.
If it's true that god exists, then you should care about it in the same way you care about anything else you hold to be true.
Caring about truth (or at least as close as we may come to truth) seems to be something you do a lot. Why not start there?
The thing is, I don't have one level of 'care' for the things I hold to be true. And the human brain is so weird that I don't think we consistently apply a specific amount of 'care' to things we know to be true. The reason why we care a lot/little for something might be buried deep in our subconscious so that we have no clue why a seemingly minor thing affects us far more deeply than an event that should be much more meaningful.
I know this, based on my experiences as both a believer and a non-believer: if I discover that God is real, the effect on my life would likely be negligible unless it's a completely different God than the ones we've had pitched to us as the real one(s). The Gods that theists here describe is the one that lives in the blind spots of our minds and only survives on a steady diet of cognitive biases and complicated logical fallacies. If there really is a God and it decides to inform me that it is real, it would need to provide more than just that fact to make me feel anything aside from morbid curiosity.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould