Let me start by saying I’ve always thought of myself as an Agnostic. I don’t follow any religion but despite all the reading I’ve done, and knowing full well I have no evidence to back it up, I’ve always believed I have a soul.
Obviously, a lot of people feel this way. Now, when I look at life, consciousness, space, time and infinity, I find it to be as incomprehensible as the concept of god. It makes no sense. Our evidence tells us our universe is infinite, but logically shouldn’t that contradict our reality? I mean in an infinite universe why should the laws of gravity apply? Shouldn’t they break at some point? Furthermore, where did anything even come from and why is it here? Wouldn’t nothingness be more logically consistent than reality? These are questions I don’t think will ever be answered.
In essence, life is a big mystery and the only thing that tells us it’s real is from our experiences. But what of the experience that so many people claim to have when they say they believe on god? Sure, it cannot be measured, but why should we dismiss it out of hand?
This VSauce video is what gives me pause. Towards the end, they discuss an experiment where people are asked to guess the amount of M&M’S in a bottle. No one actually got the answer right, but the groups median answer was within 5. It’s a concept they refer to as “Wisdom of the Crowds.” Now, use that as an analogy to a belief in God.
I would say it says something about human nature, but has nothing to say about the existence or non-existence of God or a god. 50 Million Elvis Fans can be wrong.
This is false. Just because something is infinite does not mean that “all possibilities exist in it”, and just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s “certain to happen”.
Roll a six-side die. The odds of a six coming up are 1 in 6. Roll it twice, the odds are 1 in 3. Roll it an infinite number of times, and the odds of seeing a six are really, really high, but they’re not 100%. There’s a tiny chance that a six will never appear. Now imagine a long sequence of digits between 1 and 6. Any sequence is possible, but it’s easy to imagine really long sequences that are unlikely to occur (like inifinity - 1 sixes in a row).
Further, an infinite universe does not even mean that all possibilities exist. The set of even numbers is infinite in size, and doesn’t contain a 3.
It might mean something if they all believed in the same god, which is what you imply in both the title of the thread and the OP itself…but they most certainly don’t.
Good point. But, I see this a large portion of society who have let themselves be misled. If they were to drop their religion and see it for the lie that it is, they would still have a belief in god and be more apt to search for the “truth.” It truly could be lead to new discoveries but instead these peoples minds are sqaundered on this topic because they have been given the “answer.”. It only adds another layer of contempt I have for religion.
As for the question posed by the thread title, I think the answer is maybe.
If many — meaning a significant percentage of the world’s population — people believe in something, whether that something is God or ghosts or extra-terrestrials or True Love or the female orgasm or… whatever, that suggests to me that it is in some sense natural to believe in that something. This might be evidence that the thing in question actually exists; or it might be because there are widespread phenomena which, rightly or wrongly, get reasonably interpreted as evidence for the thing’s existence; or it might be that there’s something about human nature that predisposes us to belief in the thing’s existence. In my opinion, the fact that so many people believe in God tends to rebut the claim I’ve sometimes heard that the only reason anyone believes in God is because other people have told them to, because they were deliberately brainwashed when they were young.
In other words, the fact that so many people believe in God isn’t in itself an argument for God’s existence, but it’s something that ought to be investigated by anyone who wants to take the question serioiusly: Why do they believe in God? What experiences or insights might they have had that make them believe?
This is just bullshit. You have no idea what they would do. Most people who drop their religion pick another one because they like it more or there are family/cultural reasons to change. Many become atheists. Many become agnostics. You cannot base any conclusions on an assumption like this.
I disagree. What is “natural” is curiosity and perhaps a sense of wonder or amazement. And IMO, there is a natural desire to make sense of things, and most people will settle for something that makes sense on the surface without probing it to the fullest extent. People are always trying to answer questions, and the fact that they find an answer has no bearing on whether the answer is correct. And as already noted, for the nature of a god, at least, there are thousands of answers, and the number of people who believe in one particular version has no bearing on the correctness of the belief.
Wisdom of crowds really only works in very narrowly defined circumstances: when estimating something in such a way that errors are evenly distributed, and even then only provided all guesses are statistically independent. In the M&M case, it’s roughly as likely to over- as it is to underestimate; thus, given the large sample size, the error tends to even out. But if there is some systematic bias, i.e. if people would for some reason preferentially overestimate, the effect vanishes; likewise if later guesses are influenced by earlier ones (i.e. are not statistically independent). Thus, there is no actual ‘wisdom’ in crowds: rather, the effect derives itself from the fact that all members are equally ignorant, and simple statistics.
The question of the existence of a god thus is not one for which ‘majority opinion’ is a good signpost: first of all, it’s just not the kind of question that benefits from statistics. God’s existence is not some quantity to estimate; he either exists, or not. Second, it’s very likely that people’s opinions are systematically biased in this case: most people will retain the faith they have been brought up with. Third, for the same reason, people’s ‘guesses’ won’t be uncorrelated: in fact, your social environment and history constrains your guess very tightly; you will likely guess the same way your peers do.
So, there’s really no good reason this video ought to give you pause.
But even without the video, the answer is no: even ignoring the differences between different religions (or within them), it’s simply the case that for most of history, most of the people have been wrong about most of what they believed. So, what people believe is not an especially good indicator of what is the case (this is sometimes called ‘pessimistic meta-induction’, which I just mention because it’s fun to write/say).
Nothing much, as pointed before even a documentary from the 80’s that dealt with this subject (A documentary that was much in favor of the phenomenon being proof of life after death) there was even the case of an atheist that reported the big light and he still remained an atheist after what happened to him. AFAICR it was not the only one.
Many people claim to see UFOs and ghosts. Many people claim to possess memories of past lives. Many people believe they can read minds and talk to the dead. Many people think they can tell the future by dealing cards a certain way.