(June 17, 2022 at 9:35 pm)TheJefe817 Wrote: One thing that struck me the most - although specifically "do not believe in god" was 17% total, an additional 11% believe in a God that neither hears nor answers prayers. and another 28% in a God that hears but does not answer. I mean, I fall in the 17%, but used to fall in the 42% of "hears and answers". These other two intermediate categories are somewhat mysterious to me - I guess it's just my background, but what would be the point of those "gods"? I mean, taken this way, 56% of those surveyed believe there is no form of divine intervention.
You take an interesting approach here when you ask "what would be the point of" a god which neither heard nor responded to our requests. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but you seem to feel that people believe in something because they find it desirable or useful. That is, they will believe in a god if they think a god would help them out, but won't bother to believe if god isn't useful to them.
No doubt there's a lot of variation even within that 11%, but if they conceive of god based not on wishful thinking but on some other reason, they might come to the conclusion that such a thing is believable. For example, if they think of god as some sort of organizing principle, or ground of being, or metaphysical necessity, or Form of the Good. Personally, the arguments for this god are the only ones that make sense to me, though I remain unconvinced either way.
A god who heard your secret thoughts and granted wishes is more like a magic friend -- the thing that Internet atheists rail against. But this is neither the God that Kierkegaard believed in, nor the one that Nietzsche spent his time debunking. (Kierkegaard thought that prayer was a form of self-help, getting one's mind more in line with the goodness that God wills. But he didn't think that God reached down to intervene. Nietzsche thought of God as something like an order underlying the universe, and thought that real atheism would demand belief that, at bottom, the universe is chaos.)
