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

My Journey from belief to nonbelief (a summary)

I would like to begin by saying that, although I am now an atheist, I never intended for things to end up the way that they have. That’s not to say that I’m not happier than I ever have been, I simply mean that at the beginning of this endeavor my goal was not to become an atheist. I originally set out as a protestant baptist to reinforce my faith with reason and logic. As is plainly obvious, it didn’t work out too well. I just ask that anyone who reads this (especially believers) keep in mind that every argument you probably know are the very same arguments I used to use in favour of my beliefs. It’s very rarely that I hear an argument that I’ve never heard before, although it has occurred. This is not to say that I don’t want to hear your arguments because I do! I’m just simply saying that I know most of the common ones because I’ve been using them my whole life.

So I was raised protestant baptist. If you’re not familiar with the baptist denomination, they hold believes that the Bible is the true word of God and, though it was written by man, it is infallible. They reject the authority and holiness of the pope, they reject the idea of priests and confession, they believe that all believers should have equal access to God’s authority, and they are generally in favour of the separation of church and state. They have two major offices within the church, one being the pastor and the other being the deacon. They believe that baptism plays no role in salvation it is just an outward expression of an inward change. Many conservative baptists oppose gambling, alcohol, tobacco, and some even oppose certain styles of dancing (though I personally don’t know any). They believe in salvation by faith alone. The biggest difference among many baptist churches are in the areas of Calvinism (disbelief in the existence of free will) vs Arminianism (belief in free will), the ordination of women, homosexuality, and the end times. They generally reject a lot of the supernatural claims of the individual such as the supernatural spiritual gifts.

I have been going to church for as long as I can remember. Church is all I’ve ever known and it’s all I’ve ever been taught. I’ll talk about indoctrination in another post. The point is that, at an age before I knew what truth was, I was taught by the church that God was the truth. As I grow up, I naturally want to please the god that I believe to be true by following his commandments TO THE LETTER. I do everything this god tells me, simply because it’s all I’ve ever known. Disobeying God’s commandments is something I considered to be absolutely abhorrent and I would’ve rather died than done so. Skip ahead to college. I get to college and immediately start searching for a church. I happen to land in a nondenominational church. The only church services I had heard up until this point had been baptist ones, and the sermons I heard at this nondenominational church seemed to fit in line with what I already thought to be true, so I kept going. eventually, I made friends there and began to go on a regular basis.

After a few months, I started to notice some things that this church believed in that I had never even heard of before! They believed in this (what I thought to be) crazy claims! They believed people actually had the power to HEAL other people. They believed that speaking in tongues was an actual interpretable language, and not just someone moving their mouth and making random sounds. I, as a scientist, naturally dismissed these ridiculous claims because 1) i had never been even heard of these before and 2) these just seemed absolutely ludicrous to me. It doesn’t make sense that a person can physically heal another person. I had always believed that God did the healing. Why would God need an intermediary? It made no sense to me.

Enter my skepticism! I started to realize how many different things there really are that Christians believe. If certain Christians believe that another person can heal someone and I don’t believe that. which one of us is right? for 2 or 3 months I just shelved the idea…justifying it to myself by saying things like “Oh, it doesn’t matter! We’re both going to the same place in the end.” But the rational side of me couldn’t help thinking about it. So one day last year I decided to actually do some research, just to appease my curiosity. I found myself swept up in finding out what other Christians believe, why they believe it, and, if i don’t share those beliefs, who is right. I researched many different topics over many weeks and found myself more and more invigorated with the most fundamental question “Why don’t others believe?”

I bought books on the subject of creationism and what science has to say. I had already known that science didn’t get everything right. It had just always been a fact that evolution was wrong and creationism was right. I went to an “Atheist vs. Christian” debate, fully expecting the atheists to get blown out of the water. However, much to my chagrin, the atheist were well founded in fact and demonstrable evidence, and the Christians only made appeals to the Bible (which I knew from my logic courses to be something known as “Circular Logic”. It’s basically exactly how it sounds. “God exists because the bible says so, the bible exists because God created it”). I had left disappointed because, I truly wanted to hear factual evidence for the existence of God. Thus begins my search for such evidence.

throughout my search I found an apologist by the name of “Ray Comfort.” He had what I believed to be a wonderful, hands-on ministry called “The Way of the Master.” I began watching his stuff a lot, he would go out on the streets and have theological debates with people. I truly enjoyed his stuff. One day when I was browsing on YouTube, I stumbled upon a video entitled “The Atheist Experience: Ray Comfort Interview.” I clicked the link, again, fully expecting the atheists to be blown out of the water by someone, who I believe, to have clearly superior arguments for the existence of God. I couldn’t have been more disappointed. Every single point that I had ever heard Ray make on the streets, were easily debunked by the atheists. In a way that I could not even deny. I was literally watching it and saying things like “…Oh, yeah…But what about?….no….wow, yeah I guess they’re right.” by the end of the video even Ray Comfort seemed to be calling for a euthanasia of sorts. He began saying things like “Just be tolerant of religion! we’re not hurting anyone.” In my head I knew this to be last resort for any apologist.

Enter atheism. This was the scariest time for me. I began being absolutely overwhelmed by these doubts. Every argument I had ever known for the existence of God had been thoroughly debunked by “The Atheist Experience”. I kept watching their show very often because they are VERY logical and VERY keen on what EVIDENCE has to say and I knew in my head that I wanted to believe something based on evidence. That is the main reason I embarked on this journey in the first place. However, very afraid that my doubts would soon overwhelm me, I desperately read every book I could get my hands on about the “failure of evolution” or the “failure of atheism”. I read books suggested to me by all my friends, such as “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist”, “The Case for Christ”, “The Creation Answer Book”, and anything else I could get my hands on. I desperately cried out to god to help me through this time of doubt, to help me see what I’m not seeing. I cried to God to give me any sign that would help me believe. to just show me why it’s so easy to doubt and so hard to believe! however, despite sincere and honest appeals to god, Time after time I’d watch every argument I ever read be debunked by “The Atheist Experience”. despite sincere and honest appeals to god, no answers came. I can’t tell you how scared I was now when I came to grips with the fact that what I believe may not, in fact, be the truth.

after about a month of research, reading, praying and thoroughly pondering…I decided to see what it would be like to just say that I didn’t believe for just one hour. So I said, out loud, “I don’t believe in God.” I waited around for about 10 minutes and then decided what it would be like to say that I was an atheist, so I said, out loud “I’m an atheist.” At the moment I said, “I’m an atheist” I let the doubt flow through me. I let go of all this stress I kept inside that my beliefs weren’t true and I felt the most overwhelming sense of freedom. I didn’t have to justify these irrational beliefs any more. I accepted the fact that they were most likely not true and I felt so incredibly happy. No longer did I have to believe that many of the people I love are going to hell. No longer did I have to believe that God doesn’t want homosexuals to get married, or that God created the world in six days. I realized that accepting my doubt was a healthy thing, and free from doubt, I can believe what I actually believe is true, instead of trying to justify to myself that my beliefs are true, instead of LYING to myself for 2 or more months I can finally accept that evolution is true. I can finally accept that the big bang is the most likely scenario based on the evidence.

Since the day I was deconverted, I’ve never been happier. There is truly a different perspective between having a conversation…and having a conversation with God watching. It’s truly a new life I’ve been living and it has been nothing but wonderful so far. In this blog, I hope to address some of the reasons I don’t believe, I hope to address some of the reasons other people DO believe and why I think they’re nonsense. I hope to address some of the things that I disagree with about, not only the religion I was raised in, but many other religions. I hope to address some of the things I agree AND disagree with about atheism, as well as to clarify common misconceptions. But if you’ve gotten to the end of this blog, that says a lot about you. It says either 1) you care enough about me to care what I believe and give me courtesy of examining your own beliefs and objectively justifying them. or 2) you care enough about truth to examine the beliefs objectively for yourself.

Since I’ve become an atheist, I’ve been happier than I ever was in religion. I’ve come to see that religion is, not only pure fiction, but extremely divisive, and hurtful to those around it. I’ll address some of these issues in a later post. But in short, atheism is one of the most important and, as of now, best decisions I’ve ever made. there is nothing better than having an open mind. A mind to objectively look at the evidence without a predisposition. Instead of guiding the evidence where I want it to go, I follow the evidence and see where it leads. That is the nature of a rational mind who is concerned with truth. Truth is not something to be put second hand to anything. Truth is the only thing that matters, and it’s the only thing I believe in.