Why I'm not an Atheist and believe in what I believe.

[Angrboda]

I've examined quite a few "proofs" for the possibility/probability of God, and invariably they all have the same property: they are persuasive to those who believe, unpersuasive to those who don't, and rarely if ever change minds. So obviously, there is a likelihood that a prior belief in His existence makes you open to such arguments as proof. But note, that if this generalization of the effect of proofs of God is valid, you likely believed prior to any proof or argument. Which gets back to intuitions versus wishing. Samuel Johnson once said that if he is undecided about any serious matter, that he takes out a coin and tosses it in the air. His point is not to let chance decide for himself, but that when he tosses the coin in the air, he suddenly knows intimately what it is that he truly wants, by knowing which way he wants it to land. I suspect these arguments you reference are like Samuel Johnson's coin — they don't tell you what to believe, they simply uncover your pre-existing disposition to believe.

Briefly, while I'm a strict materialist, I am becoming convinced that the predicate/property "real" or "is real" has no valid meaning. To put things in a nutshell, basically, there is no way to tell what the basis of our experience is: it could be atoms and quarks, we could be brains in vats, we could be ideas in the mind of God — there is no way to tell on the basis of experience which, if any of these, is the case. So while we can make projective predictions on the consistency and coherence of our experiences, those projections cannot inform or provide us knowledge about what is real. It's okay to have a model of reality, just so long as you accept its limitations, that any talk about the metaphysical/ontological cause of our experience is essentially empty, it's noumenon; to paraphrase Hume, consign it to the flames.

I'm feeling lazy tonight, so I'll return another time, but my signature encapsulates a truth I feel strongly about, and is relevant here:

"It doesn't matter what I believe, it only matters what I can prove." — Lt. Kaffee, A Few Good Men

However there's another favorite quote from this movie which probably better captures my feeling about your intuitions about a deist God:

“No, I won’t listen and I won’t hear you out. Your passion is compelling, Jo; it’s also useless....” — Lt. Kaffee, A Few Good Men


If you take a jar, and some pads of paper, and start writing on the paper notions that possibly or plausibly might be true, if you are possessed of imagination, you can fill many jars this way. Possible or plausible may be used as a sieve to separate out ideas not worth considering, but if you don't go beyond this criteria, you have to admit all those slips of paper into your world as "intuitions" you believe in. Even if one wanted to settle for this, the brute fact is all the notions on those pieces of paper are mutually inconsistent: you can't assert a worldview based on that standard and hope for it to be consistent. If you want your worldview to have a chance at consistency, you have to use a stricter standard, or, admit you're relaxing the standard for non-logical, non-rational reasons. I'm not suggesting this is a problem uniquely yours; even scientists fall prey to conflating plausibility with probability, as the vast wasteland of discarded evolutionary stories can attest. If you want consistency, if you have any hope of approaching knowledge, you need better standards.