Not to be snarky, but my term for this is “accidents of history”, combined with their sense of entitlement (I don’t mean this in a mean way btw rather than just the strength of their beliefs, which doesn’t need a god).
There seem to be certain ethnicities and cultures who are very good at holding grudges through hundreds or thousands of years of history, or over stupid things (the middle east, Ireland, and the Balkans come to mind) and they are bloody determined to perpetuate this shit.
I’m a Canadian of Scottish ancestry (trust me, I really couldn’t give a rat’s ass) so if I and my fellow Scottish descendants demanded a Scottish homeland free from the UK, would that be a proof of God?
All of these religious, cultural things are ultimately a choice (and I’m not including skin colour btw) and the people who fight for this often bring on their own stress and misery (holocaust excepted).
Imagine a circle the size of the known universe, made up of individual hydrogen atoms. It’s not a perfect circle, but it’s as close to a perfect circle as is possible in our universe.
Pi, calculated to the first 32 digits, is sufficiently precise to describe the exact ratio of this circle’s circumference to its diameter.
All God needs to do is to round pi off to 32 digits, such that all future calculations give a rational number, and I’ll believe.
Of course, it’s not clear which God performed this miracle, so I’ll add my own twist: any God who wants to be considered for belief is assigned an eight-digit number. They must round pi off to 40 digits: the first 32 suffice to describe the universe-spanning hydrogen circle, and the last eight digits are their unique code. That way I’ll know which God to believe in.
(Note: a more perfect circle might be possible with electrons, or quarks, or something, and pi might need to be calculated to more digits. I accept any such corrections without changing the structure of the argument).
Well, that’s just blatantly circular, though: in order to use my headache as evidence towards concluding that I have a headache, I’d first have to know that I have a headache… In which case, I wouldn’t need any further evidence.
More importantly, it’s clear that evidence isn’t the general reason we know anything: if that were so, we couldn’t know anything, since whatever evidence we had would need evidence of being, in fact, evidence. We need something to ground the regress, and that’s our experience—which hence, we can’t know evidentially.
So it is really a question as to whether you find the aliens in the gap more convincing than gods in the gap, and since as I said the gap is sufficiently god shaped I’m probably going to go with that. There is also a Pascals wager type reasoning to my decision. If these things are indeed aliens with near god-like power, they for some reason want to convince me that they are god are perfectly capable of smiting me, so who am I to displease them.
The other things that Jews have is a willingness to tolerate other religions and cultures practiced by others with no particular desire to convert them, while at the same time having very strict traditions against intermarriage and not accepting the gods and traditions of others. This allowed them to live along side other more numerous cultures in (relative) peace while at the same time not being assimilated by them.
This behaviour is sort of endemic to humans - religious or not - there’s a tendency for people to just assume their little bubble of reality is how the whole thing is (which is why we get stuff like people asking why English people are speaking American instead of their own language)
But there is one critical difference: The Human Race exists. We know it’s possible for a biological species to exist in this universe, and become technologically advanced. The only “beliefs” needed are that some other alien species also exists, and that there is more to science than we have discovered, and that it’s possible to make those discoveries. History of science and technology makes that a pretty good looking bet.
But we have no evidence at all that Gods exist, or that it is even possible for Gods to exist in this universe. The leap you have to take to get to God is far greater than the leap to aliens.
Well, yes, this is the Stargate Problem. I’d certainly be down for appeasing these aliens, but in my heart I’d still know they were a bunch of fakers. And kind of lame. Being a super-advanced alien isn’t enough? No, little green man needs to be a god, too? Fucking Space Incels.
Circular? A headache is not knowledge, a headache is a feeling (a bad one: it hurts). If you feel a feeling, that is proof that you have that feeling. Feeling a feeling is what feelings consist of. It is not proof of knowledge.
If you want to state it that way, go ahead. I think it is enough to feel your headache to be aware that your head hurts. You can deny it, call it circular, throw an anchor to ground the regress, it does not matter: your head will still hurt. Perhaps even more so.
But if you still want to reconcile experience and evidence there is always the good old Cartesian cogito ergo sum. Still does not convince me of any deity’s existence.
But that’s exactly my point: you know you have a headache without any need for evidence or argument; it’s enough to simply have that headache. Hence, not all knowledge is delivered to you evidentially.
Or to put it the other way around: it’s reasonable to believe you have a headache, without any need for evidence to that effect. Hence, there are things it’s reasonable to believe without evidence. So telling those who believe in god that they shouldn’t, because of a lack of evidence, doesn’t quite fit the bill: it’s not a given that it’s only reasonable to believe in god on the basis of evidence.
The disconnect here is, that’s evidence for you. It’s not evidence for anyone else. So it’s reasonable for you to conclude that you have a headache, but someone else is also reasonable in being skeptical of that claim. “Not tonight honey, I have a headache” being the old cliched example.
And therein lies the difficulty with using personal experience to convince anyone else of God.
I’ve known many Christian testimonies that were things like, 'I know God exists because my wife and I were headed for divorce but suddenly I had a change of heart and it must have come from God." Good for him, but he can’t persuade others with that story to believe in God because others didn’t experience it.
You don’t think a person could wake up with what they think is a splitting headache, then as they open their eyes they realize they are in a hospital bed, they feel their head and find bandages, etc? Evidence - even internal evidence - can be misleading.
Note that the headache itself could be evidence of other things. A headache could be evidence that you are prone to migranes, that you were shot in the head, that your hat is too tight, or that the music is too loud.
You wake up with pain in your head. This is evidence of a headache.
You open your eyes. You are in a hospital bed. You touch your head. Bloody bandages. This is evidence of a head injury rather than a simple headache, so you take this new information into consideration and amend your earlier conclusion.
