But really, not a bad way to go out. I imagine it would go pretty quick.
The difference really comes down to the afterlife. If there is a god, and when you die you go chill with him for eternity, that makes a difference in how I’ll live my life over there just being some powerful entity who can throw around planets and part the ocean.
That’s pretty much it. If God is omniscient, he knows how to change my mind, if he’s omnipotent, he can do it, and if he’s omnibenevolent, then he will want to.
So, what would make me believe in God? A God who can make me believe in him. The rest is just party tricks.
But an advanced ET would almost certainly be able to make organic beings live indefinitely. And be able to make a trans-realistic VR that you could inhabit with your friends and relatives (and by “trans-realistic” I mean it would feel more vivid than your life does now).
I guess one difference would be a God could bring back your previously-deceased family and friends. But that gets us into the weeds of the philosophical issue of identity. That would be too big a tangent.
This is my take. I don’t know which particular miracle would overcome the “Maybe it’s just god-like aliens” problem. But, if god exists with the attributes that believers attribute to god, then god would know which miracle it would take. And this would literally be something I’ve never even considered, since if I had considered it, then I would know what it would take to make me believe.
So, that: Blow my mind in a way I’ve never even thought of before, that I can’t say, “Aliens did it” about.
Except that Spider Robinson once wrote a story about people in the future using time travel to go to the past, and surreptitiously record the memories of everyone who had died prior to memory recording, and also sampling their DNA, so that exact copies of the people at the moment of their death could be made in the future, thus saving the half of the human race who had died over the course of history up to that point. So, yeah, Grandma suddenly showing up again could just be time travellers messing with us.
I don’t follow the logic there. The Talmud is very clear that not all Jews are righteous people and not all righteous people are Jews. OTTOMH of the great sages, only Maimonides held that a person must believe in G-d to be accounted righteous. For me then, the question is WHY would G-d make you believe in Him? If belief is not necessary to be a righteous person, what would be the point?
Because I don’t like believing in things that are wrong. If I’m wrong about the existence of god, I’d like to know that, and a benevolent god would want to make me happy by letting me know the truth. If there really is an afterlife and all that, then I’d really like to know that there really is a chance that we’ll all be reunited on the other side, and that the crap we have to put up with in this life isn’t all there is.
Fair enough, if they can offer me an afterlife better than promised by the Gods of our mythologies, then I’ll probably take them up on their offer and call them God.
Because according to Christian doctrine, if you don’t believe in God and Jesus, you go to hell, and an omnibenevolent God wouldn’t send someone to hell just because they didn’t get the message delivered correctly.
Yeah but, like I say, that gets us to the issue of identity which is a big tangent in itself.
If I make a perfect copy of a brain at some state, is that the same thing as bringing the original person back, or is it merely making a copy?
Either answer leads to several philosophical problems, so it is something of a paradox.
Anyway it would take us too far afield.
Yeah, but I think that the people who develop actual brain recording technology won’t be the people who let themselves get tied up in knots over such questions. If she looks like Grandma, and has all the memories of Grandma, you’d be hard pressed to convince most people that she isn’t Grandma.
Yes, but does she think that she’s Grandma, and more importantly, does Grandma think that this copy is her?
I like this one.
For me, it would be easy. Bring back my long-dead grandparents in the flesh. One died 40 years ago, and the other died 30 years ago. I think I could tell if it was a fake or a hallucination. Multiple people I know and trust would have to witness this miracle with me. If you could somehow do that, I would believe in supernatural powers.
I’m holding out–you want me to believe in a god? Well, according to the predominant religious texts god is the one who created the world and so, if I’m to believe an entity is a god then that entity needs to do a factory reset on the world. Pollution, gone. Nuclear waste, back into the earth as ore. Mountaintops removed for coal, back as they were and the waste shitpits gone. All water safe to drink, big holes in the ground filled in, air pristine, ice caps back to pre industrial age levels, global temperature cooled down to preindustrial levels, invasive species back where they came from, the oceans completely repopulated with krill and plankton and fish and whales to pre-whaling days levels. All the negative crap we’ve done, fixed. We can keep our buildings so long as they aren’t likely to make things worse again so maybe about 90% of the parking lots and asphalt surfaces returned to grass and dirt. Better yet, the buildings get fixed and clean and cars run on water, man.
Do all that in an instant and maybe I’ll concede the existence of a god. Or I’ll just be happy enough about the changes to pay lip service.
I could be wrong on this not being Christian.IIRC Altough one gospel has Jesus say “No one comes to the Father but through me.” another has him saying ‘All who do good do so in my name, though they know it not’
I recognize the first, I don’t (nor does google) recognize the second, nor the many variations I tried.
Anyway, there are more than just that one reference to needing to believe in Jesus in order to get to heaven. All the references I see about doing good works all have a theme of “Do it in my name”, not “It is done in my name.”
Anyway, I have suffered several forms of persecution in my life because I am not a believer, and could not bring myself to profess a faith that I did not believe. If there actually is a God, and he could have actually made me a believer so I didn’t have to go through that, so his omnibenevolent action would have improved my worldly life as well.
Well, in this hypothetical, Grandma was already dead, so her opinion is kind of moot. Only Grandma’s opinion will matter 
This, basically.
An omnipotent god, such as the one claimed by Christianity, could make me believe whatever that entity wanted. And could make everyone else believe it also.
You can’t even use the free-will excuse to get out of that, because an omnipotent god could make everyone believe in that god’s existence and nature, while still leaving everyone free to decide what to do about it.
And as @glee says:
– both theoretically and in the pit of our stomachs.
Yeah.
Well, sorta. But Grandma version 1 is still dead. Even a perfect copy can’t change that.
It would be cruel to the copy to refuse to know her, of course. But, again, the original’s still dead.
The Christian god would automatically know what it would take to convince each and every person, wouldn’t it?