One of the most troubling things that I’ve notice while talking to many religious people is the level of certainty with which they hold their beliefs, even in the face of such overwhelming odds that they’re wrong.
The number of gods that have been postulated by humans over the last hundred thousand years is staggering and all of them were proposed by people that held a sincere belief in their particular god.
And yet, if you ask a religious person, they’re likely to claim that all of the gods on the list are false, except theirs.
Not only is such a claim statistically nearly impossible, it’s also incredibly arrogant and presumptuous. The people that make these statements are claiming to not only possess an ability to detect supernatural entities, they’re also claiming that they’re the only ones who can. Because if another person were to claim that ability and is convinced of the existence of a different god, they’re dismissed as being misled or simply wrong.
Another problem that people hate hearing about is that the most reliable determinant for religious belief is tradition. Whichever religious belief a child is raised with and is dominant in their culture is most likely the religion that they will follow into adulthood.
Given that, is it more likely that some cultures got it right and pass down the ability to detect god from generation to generation or is it more likely that it’s just another tradition that people accept because they were born into it?
The problem is made worse by the likelihood that no two people hold the same conceptualization of god. If we were to consider only the Christian god Yahweh, for example, we would first have to determine which of the 40,000 different denominations has the correct general understanding of the nature of god.
If we then, went to a church of one of these denominations and picked two people that hold as close to identical beliefs as possible, we would still find some variation in their beliefs which would be in conflict with one another.
So, not only do we have thousands of named gods that are in conflict with one another, we also have billions of individual conceptualizations of those gods that are also in conflict. This means that the odds that an individual’s god concept is accurate is at least billions to one. Probably not the best numbers to have on your side while emphatically professing that yours is the one true god.
The problem is made infinitely worse by the possibility that gods exist that have yet to be proposed by anyone. Since we have no mechanism by which to measure or validate supernatural claims, the number of gods that could exist is limitless, making the claim that you’re worshipping the one true god even more improbable.
It’s astonishing to me that so many people seem to overlook the overwhelming probability that god is the product of an evolved human brain and that we tend to mold our concept of god around our own needs, whatever they may be.
A great example of this are commonly used phrases like, “I just can’t believe that God would…” fill in the blank with whatever people wish to believe about their god. Maybe they believed that homosexuality was a sin worthy of hell until their child or someone else that they love came out and then their conceptualization of god changed. Why? Does God change? Or do people’s perception of god change as their experience and necessity to rationalize grows?
Most Helpful Opinions