What Would it Take to Convince You to Believe in God?

I love talking with theists. I love honestly hashing out the issues that I have with the Bible and with Biblical morality and things of that nature. I talk with a lot of theists from many different religions. (I don’t get many Scientologists that often though, bummer.) The most common, of course, is Protestant and Catholic Christianity. Maybe it’s because most of my friends are protestants since I grew up protestant and was involved with the church until recently. Whatever the reason, I’m honestly glad that I have so many people in my life that enjoy talking about these issues in a non-hostile, non-proselytizing type way. It’s important to understand what we believe and make sure that the reasons we have for those beliefs are firmly backed with reason. If you can’t defend your beliefs, in what sense can you say to believe them?

One of the frequent questions I get is “What would it take to convince you that there’s a God?” or something similar. For all the people who are praying for me, I’ll tell you right now, the only thing capable of convincing me is either evidence, an argument or God himself. Since God himself, to my knowledge, has never revealed himself to anyone, I don’t find that option terribly likely. Of course, I’m a skeptic, but I think it would be rather closed-minded to not even consider what I would think would be valid data and evidence for God. That would be, in my opinion, overly skeptical. Barring some extremely vivid, divine experience (which I don’t think is likely), we need to set our bar of evidence at a level that is not only achievable, but inevitable if there is a God.

There are a few things that we must do before we can talk about being convinced of something.

Firstly, we need to decide on the method for discovering what is true and false in this situation. Since the scientific method is the best way that I have for discovering truth, I will be using it for the majority of this post along with reason. I hope I don’t need to justify why these are good methods, but I don’t think anyone that would reject these methods is going to be interested in what kind of evidence would convince me. As Sam Harris said, “If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it?”

Secondly, since I have chosen science to be my method, we must first conform God into something that can be analyzed by science. Inevitably, there will be people who say that God is outside of the realm of science. “God cannot be observed; an infinite God can’t manifest itself in a finite way without being inconsistent with itself”. This is a popular position and one that I myself used to hold. Unfortunately, if you have defined God in such a way that it cannot be verified, then tautologically by definition, it cannot be verified and thus I can’t believe it and I think that anyone who does is acting dishonestly.

In order for God to be analyzed by science, God must be defined in such a way that, as a hypothesis, it is falsifiable. If something is falsifiable this doesn’t mean that it is wrong. Falsifiability only means that it could, in theory, be proven wrong. In other words, there must be a postulated observation that could potentially be observed that would be inconsistent or disprove our hypothesis. Why is this required for science? Well, I’ll answer that with an example. Let’s say that Bob says that he has a million dollars, but no one can see it or verify it in any way except for him. How can we prove that he is telling the truth? Well, by definition, Bob is the only one that can verify that he has a million dollars, and since we can’t go inside Bob’s head to see if he’s telling the truth, we can’t prove that he has a million dollars. This is something that is out of the realm of science. Science doesn’t claim that Bob is lying, but science must officially declare no position on the veracity of Bob’s claim. Why can’t science analyze his claim? Because it’s not falsifiable…there is nothing that could potentially be observed that would disprove Bob’s claim. This makes it clear that falsifiability is necessary for science to analyze the claim for a truth value. On the other hand, if Bob says he has a million dollars in his closet, all it takes is a peek in his closet to verify if Bob is telling the truth. Thus, in this case, there is something we could observe that would prove Bob wrong. Thus, in a seemingly strange way, the ability to prove something wrong allows us to prove it right! Thus, God must be defined in such a way that is falsifiable.

So we must ask ourselves, what kind of things would we observe that would disprove God? I’ve spent many nights thinking about this very question. “What kinds of things can we observe that is the opposite of what we would expect if God exists?” Here is where we get to the meat of this post: my conclusions about this topic. Firstly, I’ve made a couple of assumptions that I believe are common enough to assume for the sake of argument. I’ve assumed that the God hypothesis we are testing contains a few attributes.

1) There is one God that created everything. (Justified by the fact that most major religions I deal with are monotheistic)
2) God is active in the lives of humans (Justified by the fact that most major religions I deal with accept this as true)
3) God created humans in His image and He cares about them. (Justified partly from number 2, but also in the Judeo-Christian model, this is true)

In other words, this is a theistic God. These three assumptions in mind, here is my list of things we would expect if God existed. This list is by no means exhaustive, these are simply the things that I could think of.

In a Theistic Universe, we would expect…

1) We would expect God to be logically demonstrable and/or verifiable in some way.
2) We would expect God to be easy to find and thus, we would expect everyone to believe the exact same things about God. There’s no reason God would give special messages to one specific group of people; we would all understand God’s message perfectly.
3) We would not expect religious doctrines to be needed to explain anything about God. In the event that religious doctrines were required, we would expect them to last a very long time and in a stable way with minimal changes or additions.
4) We would expect religious doctrines, or God himself, to be progressive and always correct. Sexism is wrong, slavery is wrong.
5) We would expect religious doctrines, or God himself, to tell us important things. I.E. Electricity, Germ Theory, Gravity.
6) We would expect prophecies to be extremely specific: The exact day, place, and event that would occur and there wouldn’t be a single prophecy that didn’t come true. There would be no need for vagueness.
7) We would expect humans to play a significant or important role in the universe and that the universe would not be needlessly large.
8) We would not expect anyone to require faith, because we would have evidence. There’s no reason for God to hide himself.
9) We would expect the mind to be independent of the brain, no change to the brain would affect personalities or decisions.
10) We would expect there not to be gratuitous suffering. People would do bad things and God wants us to have free will, but there would not be random suffering. We would expect everything to be ultimately just on earth.
11) We would expect creation to be perfectly designed and suited for its habitat.

These are the 11 things that I can think of that we would most likely expect if God existed. Conversely, what would we expect in a universe void of a God? These numbers correlate (and are sometimes the converse) to the numbers above.

In a Non-theistic Universe, we would expect…

1) We would expect there to be no sound arguments for the existence of God.
2) We would expect people from different geographical regions to believe different, inconsistent things about what they think is God. We would expect most of these religions to have some kind of holy text to back up their claims and likely some etiological mythologies.
3) We would expect these holy texts to have translational and factual errors (since it is being copied over time with no aid from a divine being), adaptations to social conditions, and possibly even contradictions.
4) We would expect that religious doctrines would reflect local cultures. Sometimes we get good rules (love thy neighbor), sometimes we get bad rules (advocation of slavery, genocide by divine fiat)
5) We would expect religious doctrines to be full of no new information. Nothing that was not available to the writers at the time. We might also expect to find some strange mythological parts that are a reflection of the author’s understanding of the world.
6) We would expect religious doctrines to be full of failed and vague prophecies. Additionally, the prophecies that come true would often be because people later read the prophecies and took steps to try to force it to become true.
7) We would expect the universe to be uncomprehendingly large, to make the probability of intelligent life quite probable.
8) We would expect “faith” (belief without evidence or contrary to the evidence) to be required in order to believe in God
9) We would expect our personalities to change based on physical necessities and changes to the brain
10) We would expect natural disasters to occur at random intervals with no apparent purpose
11) We would expect humans to have things such as vestigial organs and things that could have been better designed, but are understood better under naturalistic theories.

These are the two possible worlds I submit to you. It may surprise many of you to hear that to my knowledge none of the things that I’ve outlined to expect under the existence of God are true and all of the things I’ve outlined to expect if there was no God are true. Of course, I’m sure people would disagree with me on that, but that’s why I’m here! I want to know which ones people disagree with and what is the justification for that?

Now if you’ve gotten this far, you may be asking yourself, “Wait a minute, he hasn’t answered the question! He hasn’t told me what would convince him yet!” and you’d be absolutely correct. The reason I’ve laid this out is partly because I like organizing my thoughts, and partly because I wanted to outline how strong I believe the case is against the existence of God. That being said, here is what I think would convince me that there is a God:

1) At least 7 of these 11 points that we would expect under the existence of God would either need to be demonstrated to be true, or demonstrated why we shouldn’t expect them under the existence of God. (I think that’s fair and not overly skeptical)
2) You would need to demonstrate that your holy text is reliable and an accurate source of information (You would need to use science)

I think that demonstrating these two things are not difficult at all if God truly exists. If something is true and the mechanism for discovering truth is agreed on, often it’s very easy to demonstrate it. That being said, I’m very open to it. I love debating theists and I do it on almost a daily basis. So if you’re someone who thinks you can meet this burden, I would happy to have a dialog with you. However, if you’re a Christian that doesn’t like confrontation or debate, that’s fine too. I’m still interested in listening to your opinions without arguing against you. I love my Christian friends. So please, I invite the confrontations and the friendships. I’m open to all and for all. That being said, I wish you all the best.

Avery