What would make me accept the existence of a deity?

[Angrboda]

This is what all theists want to know. What would make an atheist accept the existence of a deity?

This seems to be the complement of the question about what it would take to make a Theist disbelieve. And it always seems to proceed from some false premises. First, assuming that it means what it would take to make you believe "as you are today." But you won't always be the you that you are today. You may grow, acquire needs you don't now have, learn new things, have experiences you don't anticipate, or even develop psychological illness you don't currently suffer. All that is required for an atheist to believe is for the neurons and synapses in the brain to be in the right configuration, and there is nothing about being an atheist which prevents your brain from assuming the right position. Given the generally robust nature of our brains, it is a relatively low probability that an atheist will go on to become a theist, but it's not that low that you need place world changing supernatural events ahead of it in line. Even an atheist as renowned as Antony Flew could have converted (though there are reasons to believe he didn't.) Enough of you will cross paths with manipulative cults, irrational fears, faulty cognitive behaviors and so on that your conversion from these events over time is far more probable, even if a god exists. I think hidden in here is a kernel of smug superiority, of the sort that says, "I found my way to truth via dint of my own intellectual virtue, and nothing can turn me away." Wrong. The fallibility of human nature and the behavior of humans under emotion and cognitive bias is well documented. There's a perfectly good chance that next year we might find pocaracas mewling about being probed by aliens. We're very vulnerable creatures. I won't say that suggesting that it couldn't happen to you is tempting fate, but it's certainly hubris. And it ignores the very mundane reasons why people who actually do come to believe happen to come to that belief.


Speaking of the "god in our hearts" phenomenon, I've recently had an epiphany. V.S. Ramachandran, the neuroscientist, has a theory about Capgras delusion. Capgras delusion is the condition where, usually after some brain injury or stroke, the individual can no longer recognize common people in their life, believing that persons such as their mother or spouse have been replaced by identical look-alikes; they agree that the people look the same, they just don't believe that they are the authentic people. An interesting side to Capgras delusion is that for many, if you present the person to them aurally, by having them talk to the person on the phone, the sense of inauthenticity is not present, and they readily recognize the person speaking as themselves. According to the explanation I've seen from Ramachandran, processing of visual stimuli such as a face splits and goes down to separate paths. One path, presumably, is focused on processing the visual features themselves, but the other path leads to an area of the brain where it is believed an emotional response is generated; a sort of, "aha, this is my mother," kind of feeling. Thus if this second pathway is disrupted, the emotional response which accompanies recognition is never generated, leading to the common syndrome of Capgras delusion. Now I'm going to skip some steps and just draw a rough outline, so forgive a little. One of the current theories of religion is that we process our ideas of the "mental" person, who they are in terms of mental traits like personality, goals, beliefs and so on, separately from the way we process their physical representation. Thus we can imagine the mental portion of somebody, their "spirit" leaving their body (OOBE), floating above their bodies in NDEs, and even surviving the physical destruction of the body itself (it's even been tested on young children, showing that young children treat the mind as persistent independent of the body [Jesse Bering]). Because of our needs as a social species, we have powerful mental mechanisms for reasoning about other person's minds, which, when combined with the ability to dissociate it from the physical, yields an enormously rich potential source of religious ideas. All the way from people's souls surviving death, to being reborn, to thunder storms being gods, to the animism of Shinto in which almost everything has a kami or spirit. Now the question that occurs to me is, if Ramachandran is right about there being an emotional component to visual person recognition, is there possibly also an emotional component to the recognition (pseudo-recognition) of a purely mental person? If so, if such an emotional response was acquired over time with experience of the mental representation of a physical person, is it possible that, over time, such an emotional response might become conditioned upon thinking of [a] mental representation [spirit, soul or god] independent of any [definite] physical representation? There are a lot of questions that would need to be answered about specific systems and conditioning, but it suggests an alternate hypothesis to account for the "God in my heart" phenomenon aside from the traditional wishful thinking or delusion. This feeling of having God in one's heart may simply be another consequence of the way our brains manage the "mental" component of personhood; perhaps they actually do feel God in their hearts because that is what happens when you come to know some mental person, even in the absence of a physical representation. (And it's possible the feeling is more intense or tangible in the absence of a physical correlary.) (Remember the Capgras delusion patients who could recognize a familiar by voice but not by sight? What kind of emotional correlates are there?) I don't find myself able to be aware of an emotional feeling when I recognize someone visually, but there are reasons beyond it simply not being there which explain my inability to sense an emotional response. At present, it's just an interesting hypothesis, but the pieces (most of them) seem to fit. Anyway, food for thought.

(There's a part to this which I neglected which deserves to be thrown in here. Our perception of where "we" are, where our mental substance is, and so on, appears held in place by a continual updating of it, in relation to various sense data. Since it's an input to our "mental image" of our selves, it's subject to distortion just like any other component, resulting in things like floating above our body in dissociation [note the presence of dissociation], OOBEs, and things like the Alice effect, where our bodies are perceived as larger or smaller than they actually are.)

(There's another piece which may suggest a compltely different hypothesis. There is an experiment in which people are asked to think about themselves thinking about a moral act, another person thinking about it, and then God thinking about it. In the first instance, an area of the brain lights up; when thinking about another person's thoughts, a different area lights up; and when thinking about God, the same area that lit up while thinking about oneself lights up again. So, it's also a distinct possibility that there is a tangible, somatosensory emotional experience because they are inadvertently "lighting up" areas of the brain having to do with self representation and attitudes toward self when they think of God. [This is why details matter.] I wonder if someone who feels that God must be ashamed of them has a qualitatively different experience of "God in my heart" than one with a clean conscience?)