(June 18, 2022 at 7:27 am)Belacqua Wrote: 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.)
Fair points. If I'm honest, I would say I agree with you in how I feel about it - I would say most people believe in a god because they think there is a benefit of some sort - reward or avoidance of punishment. That's almost certainly what kept me personally there for so long. I know the poll is not that deep into reasoning and motivation, and I think it would be interesting to know. My evidence on this is anecdotal, but of the religious folk I know - and I know a lot of them - this is to some extent observably true. Theirs is more of the magic friend/Santa Claus in the sky theology and they probably have never heard of Kierkegaard, much less have any understanding of his views. Simple, again anecdotal, evidence - hundreds of theist facebook friends rallying to pray for whatever mass shooting happened that day - expecting the prayers to have a result of any sort.
