What arguments would you use to convince someone that God really does exist?

I would find it highly unnerving that a massive and well established group supporting the idea that I’m seven feet tall existed.

And very annoying that they kept telling me that I ought to play basketball.

– I don’t find the mere existence of Christians unnerving, because I’m used to it, and because I know quite a few Christians who don’t seem to find it necessary to insist that I could be a great basketball player if I just decided to believe that I’m tall. I do find the insistent ones unnerving. Probably because I’ve read some history books; and, over the years, some news.

I understand. I feel the same way. It takes more than the determination, the will, to effect that drastic a shift to one’s worldview, and there’s no incentive to go looking for the kind of experiences that would make you open to it.

I’m not saying you could just change your thoughts. I’m saying it would take a lot of new experiences that affect your mental state to make your past experiences reinterpretable. Say, a heavy dose of hallucinagens under the guidance of a guru or mystic gives you an experience of oneness with the world, combined with heavy dose of religious imagery.

You can’t just decide you want to believe. You have to fundamentally break and reform your worldview. That’s why religious conversions seem so powerful to those who undergo them.

I’ve had experiences of oneness with the world. (No guru was needed.) That’s got nothing to do with belief in God, at least as nearly everybody’s using the word. It certainly has nothing to do with belief in Christianity.

Some people certainly interpret such experiences through the format of one existing religion or another. If that’s what works for them, that’s fine. The universe doesn’t fit inside a human head and how people interpret their connections with it is always going to vary. But that doesn’t mean that everybody can make a conscious choice to pick any specific interpretation. Some interpretations do not fit inside some people’s heads.

I’m not saying any differently. I mentioned the type of immersive, extensive, mindblowing experience that might be able to shift your worldview. It’s entirely possible to have that kind of experience and still not get your worldview reshaped to a God shape. I’m agreeing with you that deciding to believe in God of whatever shape isn’t something people can just do. It is a cumulative evaluation of all that has happened to you, and there may not be ways to undo or rethink or override some experiences you’ve had that lead you where you are.

My point to @survinga about desire was that people don’t get motivated to shatter and rebuild their own worldview on a whim or because somebody else says, “you just have to believe”. You can’t convince a person their worldview is wrong just by saying that you believe differently than them.

It’s not like anybody goes, “Wow, this God cat seems really rad. I think I’ll believe anything you tell me. He created the universe and the Earth and everything in it, cool. He had a son through magical birth by a virgin, whoah. That Son is actually a physical manifestation of himself in flesh form, and he prays to himself. That makes total sense. What’s this about dying for our sin, Awesome! And he wants me to eat some of his skin and drink some of his blood to prove I’m down for anything - got it.”

It takes either being embedded in the belief from infancy or an extensive amount of effort to get to that point. It takes a wilful allowing that it could be something other than gibberish, and not everyone will let themselves wilfully overlook that it sounds like gibberish.

Ah, you’re actually replying to the topic of the thread! Sorry, I missed that. This whole is-it-a-choice bit is rather a digression.

Oh, it’s kinda both.

My take is that “choice” is too simplistic a word to adequately describe how a person determines their beliefs, and one can’t just arbitrarily decide to believe differently. There is a decision somewhere in the process, but that decision is often just recognizing that what you actually believe doesn’t match what you’ve been led to think you believe and have been humming along to out of inertia.

It sounds really easy to “just accept Jesus as your savior,” but that only works if you already accept Jesus exists as a divine being. Most unbelievers aren’t saying, “Yes, God of the Bible [which God] is real, the Bible is accurate, Jesus was the human incarnation of God and paved the way for my salvation. But no, I don’t want anything to do with that. I’ll stick with Hell, thank you.” But that seems to be the picture that many believers paint.

“Have faith.” Ok, I can have faith that quantum mechanics accurately describes how parts of the universe work. I don’t claim to be an expert or really that well- versed in the matter.

But I can’t have faith that the human mind or soul continues on after death. Our experiential self may be some pattern we don’t fully understand how it comes into existence or what it really is or how it fits into the physics and biochemistry of our bodies, but enough is known to know that the brain drives it, controls it, and makes it happen. Whatever consciousness is doesn’t survive the destruction of the meat host.

And I can’t just arbitrarily decide to believe it might. Conceivably there could be some experience I could have that would alter that belief, but just saying, “Hey wouldn’t it be cool? Everybody else’s religions think it does. Come be like us,” isn’t persuasive.

I would not want to count the number of time these phrases have been said to atheists,
‘You suppress the truth in unrighteousness’ (from Romans 1:18)
and
‘You deny God because you do not want to be held accountable for your sin.’

Don’t forget “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.

If you disagree, that just proves you’re a fool! Says so in the Bible, so you know it’s true, because, otherwise, you’re a fool! The logic is airtight! Case closed!

@survinga , what is your take on Pascal’s Wager?

At that, I’ve been waiting a while to hear back about my question: @survinga wrote that, hey, we can see there’s something, and “I don’t think it came from Nothing.”

If that’s meant to be the conclusive tail end of a piece of reasoning, then a detailed explanation cries out to be spelled out: why can’t something have come from nothing? And, if the something did come from a god, then (a) could that god, being ‘something’, have come from nothing? And (b) could that god have, after creating something, later ceased to exist? Is it merely an argument that there was a god, and not that there is a god?

And so on; but, if it’s just a casual I Don’t Think So mention that isn’t meant to be conclusive and doesn’t actually rule out the possibility, then: what’s the point of noting it? I don’t think my next roll of the dice will come up Snake Eyes — I’d even bet that way, if someone offered me the right money at the right odds — but, even to me, that’s not convincing proof that it’s not the case, because, y’know, I freely admit that it could well be.

That does seem to be the picture they paint when they quote the Bible at us, as if that proved anything.

@Irishman I have appreciated your contributions to this thread, which explain things better than I can.

One complication with Pascal’s Wager is that the array of 1000’s of gods in human history are typically very thin skinned and take great offense to people who believe in a different god. So the person who believes in god just to be safe is going to be faced with the decision of which of the many gods to actually believe in. If they make the wrong choice, the thin-skinned god will take out its wrath on the person who chose the wrong god to follow. Or perhaps it’s actually better not to believe in any single god. The one true god may be sympathetic towards someone who doesn’t follow any god. Kind of the way that sports fans hate people who follow other sports teams but are indifferent towards people who aren’t sports fans at all. I would hope that the one true god would be understanding towards someone who said that none of the religions made sense, but that they still tried to live a moral life. Hopefully living a moral life is more important than blindly picking the correct god out of 1000’s of possible gods.

“Suppose we’ve chosen the wrong god? Every time we go to church, we’re just making him madder and madder.”

From 1 Homer.