# Why do so many people still believe in God?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [April 17, 2022, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965 "2022-04-17T20:24:15Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 25
### Author:  [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)
#### Post date: [January 21, 2024, 11:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/481 "2024-01-21T23:42:20Z")
> [@Jay\_Z](#):
>
> But that still doesn’t answer the question of “why are we here.”
Why assume there is an answer to that question?
Why are you here? Why am I here? If there is a purpose for us, that means someone has hacked our ancestry for millions of years, and that the course of events that caused you parents to meet and conceive you at a specific time is predetermined. It seems much more plausible to think we’re just random. Why can’t the universe be the same?
My friend’s father used to say “Why is a crooked letter.” He was a Holocaust survivor, and I figured he had more thoughts on “why” than most of us.
---
### Author:  [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)
#### Post date: [January 21, 2024, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/482 "2024-01-21T23:45:03Z")
> [@Babale](#):
>
> > [@Thudlow\_Boink](#):
> >
> > However, Lewis did call the story of Jesus a “true myth.”
>
> Sure, so _his_ myth is true, but everyone else’s isn’t.
Lewis considered himself an atheist from his mid-teens until his later twenties. Now you can disagree with the reasons he decided that Christianity was literally real, but one thing he can’t plausibly be accused of is gullibly swallowing all the myths he was raised with uncritically.
---
### Author:  [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)
#### Post date: [January 21, 2024, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/483 "2024-01-21T23:45:13Z")
> [@Lumpy](#):
>
> The tribal myths of the Hebrews; which pointedly do not include ascribing any divinity to Jesus.
The Hebrews? I was speaking of the Greeks and Romans who had lots of godlings born of Zeus and the others.
I suppose Hebrew myth had the Nephilim, but they aren’t nearly as prominent.
It seems pretty clear that Jesus’s divine birth narrative stems from Greco-Roman influence, but I am not a biblical scholar so I could be wrong about that.
---
### Author:  [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)
#### Post date: [January 21, 2024, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/484 "2024-01-21T23:53:12Z")
> [@Stratocaster](#):
>
> > [@Jay\_Z](#):
> >
> > Because frankly, the only rational universe is no universe at all.
>
> This has always seemed intuitively accurate to me. The only thing that makes sense, absent an uncreated creator, is that there should be _nothing_. The fact that there’s something, anything at all, is astounding.
This is a common belief, but that’s all it is: an article of faith. There’s no scientific basis for it. On the contrary, there is some scientific evidence for the exact opposite, like quantum fluctuations in a vacuum that spontaneously result in the creation of particle-antiparticle pairs out of nothing at all. The theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss analogizes this with the Big Bang itself in his famous book, _A Universe from Nothing_. What would be truly astonishing is if there was some supernatural being making all this happen, rather than natural phenomena.
> [@Biffster](#):
>
> Nothing/no life seems to be the consensus everywhere else.
We don’t know that. Our ability to detect life elsewhere is extremely limited and primitive even in our own immediate cosmic neighbourhood, and beyond a few light-years is essentially non-existent. But the amazing technology in the James Webb Space Telescope has already detected both complex organic molecules and their precursors in distant star systems, suggesting that processes necessary for life are happening everywhere.
---
### Author:  [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)
#### Post date: [January 21, 2024, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/485 "2024-01-21T23:57:19Z")
> [@Lumpy](#):
>
> Lewis considered himself an atheist from his mid-teens until his later twenties. Now you can disagree with the reasons he decided that Christianity was literally real, but one thing he can’t plausibly be accused of is gullibly swallowing all the myths he was raised with uncritically.
And yet his arguments were pretty pathetic.
> **[Lewis's trilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%27s_trilemma)**
>
> Lewis's trilemma is an apologetic argument traditionally used to argue for the divinity of Jesus by postulating that the only alternatives were that he was evil or mad. One version was popularised by University of Oxford literary scholar and writer C. S. Lewis in a BBC radio talk and in his writings. It is sometimes described as the "Lunatic, Liar, or Lord", or "Mad, Bad, or God" argument. It takes the form of a trilemma — a choice among three options, each of which is in some way difficult to Th...
---
### Author:  [@Stratocaster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stratocaster)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/486 "2024-01-22T03:33:57Z")
> [@wolfpup](#):
>
> This is a common belief, but that’s all it is: an article of faith. There’s no scientific basis for it. On the contrary, there is some scientific evidence for the exact opposite, like quantum fluctuations in a vacuum that spontaneously result in the creation of particle-antiparticle pairs out of nothing at all.
I don’t think so. Isn’t that attributed to vacuum energy, the background energy that exists throughout the universe? There’s tons of complex stuff going on in a vacuum, and a quantum physicist ignores the effect and properties of the energy that exists in a vacuum at his peril. Those particle / antiparticle pairs do not emerge from nothing.
---
### Author:  [@Stratocaster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stratocaster)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/487 "2024-01-22T03:36:46Z")
> [@Biffster](#):
>
> Which appears to be the case for everywhere in the known universe today, save for our little pocket of civilization. Well, at least as far as life goes anyway. Nothing/no life seems to be the consensus everywhere else.
When I said “nothing,” I wasn’t referring to the absence of life. I meant, literally, nothing. No matter, no energy, no stars, no rocks. Just nothing.
---
### Author:  [@Tibby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tibby)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/488 "2024-01-22T04:13:01Z")
> [@wolfpup](#):
>
> > [@Stratocaster](#):
> >
> > > [@Jay\_Z](#):
> > >
> > > Because frankly, the only rational universe is no universe at all.
> >
> > This has always seemed intuitively accurate to me. The only thing that makes sense, absent an uncreated creator, is that there should be _nothing_. The fact that there’s something, anything at all, is astounding.
>
> This is a common belief, but that’s all it is: an article of faith. There’s no scientific basis for it. On the contrary, there is some scientific evidence for the exact opposite, like quantum fluctuations in a vacuum that spontaneously result in the creation of particle-antiparticle pairs out of nothing at all. The theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss analogizes this with the Big Bang itself in his famous book, _A Universe from Nothing_. What would be truly astonishing is if there was some supernatural being making all this happen, rather than natural phenomena.
And this can be further explained if we live in a multi-verse and you apply the anthropic principle (the observed features of the universe are compatible with the existence of observers, because otherwise we would not be here to observe them). If there are many universes with different parameters, then it’s not surprising that some of them happen to be habitable. Our universe may just be one of many possible outcomes of a quantum fluctuation, a random and spontaneous change in the energy of a system.
So, why do we live in a universe with matter, when universes with no matter should be the most common? Perhaps most universes contain no matter at all, but we simply live in one that was conducive to the eventual formation of life, and lifeforms with the cognitive ability to ask the question, _“why are we here?”_ Or perhaps there is more to the story (the multiverse theory is difficult to test or falsify, after all), and we are just lucky to be here.
---
### Author:  [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 4:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/489 "2024-01-22T04:32:00Z")
Insert the ramblings of sentient puddles _[here](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/70827-this-is-rather-as-if-you-imagine-a-puddle-waking)_.
---
### Author:  [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/490 "2024-01-22T04:44:54Z")
> [@Babale](#):
>
> Of course, whether people actually learn what they are exposed to is a very different question; see this video:
For _Apparent magnitude_- that is correct. Unless you count the Sun as a star, which most people do not, altho it technically is. But if you google _closest star to earth_, it comes back **Proxima Centauri** , not Sol.
---
### Author:  [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/491 "2024-01-22T04:49:18Z")
> [@DrDeth](#):
>
> For _Apparent magnitude_- that is correct. Unless you count the Sun as a star, which most people do not, altho it technically is.
By apparent magnitude the question makes no sense. What is the apparent magnitude of the universe?
---
### Author:  [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/492 "2024-01-22T04:53:53Z")
I only see Sun, moon, & planet.
---
### Author:  [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 6:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/493 "2024-01-22T06:19:16Z")
I don’t consider that I “believe in God” so much as I use God to refer to something I consider quite real.
My use of the word “God” isn’t utterly foreign to the ways in which any other people who also use the term or the concept of “God”, but it’s definitely not the typical mainstream of what you encounter in this culture.
I’m not a follower of people who taught me about God. I don’t mean none of my thinking was affected by what I heard other people say, but I did my own seeking and reached my own understanding. And I can be just as wrongheaded and stubborn in service to my understandings as anyone else in theirs, but I know that, and accept that.
I do not use the word “God” ironically. I wouldn’t have chosen to do so if I didn’t see any thread of commonality in the understandings that others have reached and spoken of.
---
### Author:  [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/494 "2024-01-22T07:08:24Z")
> [@Voyager](#):
>
> My friend’s father used to say “Why is a crooked letter.” He was a Holocaust survivor, and I figured he had more thoughts on “why” than most of us.
But you know why he said that, right?
---
### Author:  [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 11:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/495 "2024-01-22T11:07:36Z")
Well, yes and no. As I’ve pointed out myself (on this very board, I think) quantum fluctuations represent a fundamental property of spacetime, so in that sense you’re quite right. My contention in those other comments was that Krauss’ argument is flawed because, while quantum fluctuations are a property of spacetime, the Big Bang did not occur “in” spacetime, but rather, created it. What I was rejecting there was the idea that Krauss had a slam-dunk argument against the existence of God (Krauss is something of a crusading atheist).
I’m somewhere on the border line between agnostic and atheist myself, but anyone who claims to know with certainty one way or the other whether some “higher power” exists beyond natural physical laws is just expressing an article of faith without evidence. The reason, I think, that so many people fall into the category of the religious faithful is that it’s comforting, particularly the mythology about an afterlife, which sounds so much nicer than just vanishing into the dark void. But it’s certainly not based on evidence. And it’s hugely problematic when this delusional certainty informs significant real-world activities, like objecting to the teaching of evolution, or using it an excuse to ban abortions, or flying airplanes into the World Trade Center.
But as I said, yes and no. The other side of the argument is that the phenomenon of quantum fluctuations is useful as an **analogy** to the Big Bang. A pure vacuum is the closest thing we can conceive of to nothingness, and the fact that pairs of particles like photons and neutrinos briefly pop into existence is really rather remarkable. And the phenomenon isn’t just pure theory, but has observable effects, like the Casimir force that has applications in nanoengineering. More intriguingly, if Hawking was right, near the event horizon of a black hole, the virtual particle-antiparticle pairs can become decoupled. What happens is actually fairly complex, but an oversimplified rough conceptualization put forward by Hawking himself is that one can imagine an antiparticle being swallowed by the black hole and its partner therefore freed to become a real particle, apparently created from nothing. Hawking predicted that we should see a stream of such particles being emitted from the event horizon, a phenomenon that’s now called Hawking radiation.
> [@Tibby](#):
>
> And this can be further explained if we live in a multi-verse and you apply the anthropic principle (the observed features of the universe are compatible with the existence of observers, because otherwise we would not be here to observe them). If there are many universes with different parameters, then it’s not surprising that some of them happen to be habitable. Our universe may just be one of many possible outcomes of a quantum fluctuation, a random and spontaneous change in the energy of a system.
Indeed. The anthropic principle can also be used to address the question of why certain physical constants have precisely the required values to allow subatomic particles to form atoms, atoms to coalesce into molecules, and molecules to form complex organic compounds that ultimately lead to life. One answer is, because God in his wisdom made it that way. A much better answer is that if it were otherwise, we wouldn’t be here asking the question.
---
### Author:  [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 11:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/496 "2024-01-22T11:16:22Z")
> [@Riemann](#):
>
> > [@Lumpy](#):
> >
> > Lewis considered himself an atheist from his mid-teens until his later twenties. Now you can disagree with the reasons he decided that Christianity was literally real, but one thing he can’t plausibly be accused of is gullibly swallowing all the myths he was raised with uncritically.
>
> And yet his arguments were pretty pathetic.
>
> [Lewis's trilemma - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%27s_trilemma)
Just to add my idée fixe into the mix, I’ve always thought Lewis overlooked _gullibility_ in that framework. Because, if we take the account seriously: what was Joseph’s reaction to being told — in a dream — that Jesus was divine? Well, it was to react as though that were true.
Which is easy to gloss over if you read it while already a Christian — you’re already figuring it’s true, and so you’re practically _waiting_ for him to react accordingly when given a factual message from above — but, minus that context, we’re merely being told that, _yup, that’s how folks back then would’ve reacted; he wasn’t a lunatic for doing so, any more than he was a liar: it was reasonable, to the point of being unremarkable, that a Jewish fella circa that era would react that way to a dream like that._
And if that’s true, and Jesus had a dream like that, then — what?
---
### Author:  [@Stratocaster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stratocaster)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 11:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/497 "2024-01-22T11:28:22Z")
> [@wolfpup](#):
>
> I’m somewhere on the border line between agnostic and atheist myself, but anyone who claims to know with certainty one way or the other whether some “higher power” exists beyond natural physical laws is just expressing an article of faith without evidence.
I agree with that, to the extent that the need for an uncaused creator leads to the belief in the unequivocal existence of God as he’s typically envisioned. In case my “Spaghetti Monster” comments didn’t make it clear, none of this leads to a conclusion that the Christian God must exist. He could, but that belief is an act of faith.
It’s possible we haven’t yet discovered some force within our own universe where something emerges from literal nothingness. Or, if our understanding (thus far) holds true, there seems to be a need for something that defies our universal laws and triggered our universe. We’d consider it supernatural, I guess, but in its own realm it might be perfectly natural.
But anything other than nothing is truly astounding to my puny mind. There shouldn’t be anything!
> [@](#):
>
> But as I said, yes and no. The other side of the argument is that the phenomenon of quantum fluctuations is useful as an **analogy** to the Big Bang. A pure vacuum is the closest thing we can conceive of to nothingness, and the fact that pairs of particles like photons and neutrinos briefly pop into existence is really rather remarkable.
Yes, close but no cigar! 😄
---
### Author:  [@Fear\_Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fear_Itself)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 11:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/498 "2024-01-22T11:59:47Z")
> [@Jay\_Z](#):
>
> Because frankly, the only rational universe is no universe at all. That answer requires no origin story. All existing universes require an origin story, one way or another.
In that context, the bible is no more sarisfying than atheism. If god created the universe, what created God? If the answer is god always existed, then it obviates the need for an origin story, same as atheism.
---
### Author:  [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/499 "2024-01-22T13:00:41Z")
> [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](#):
>
> Just to add my idée fixe into the mix, I’ve always thought Lewis overlooked _gullibility_ in that framework. Because, if we take the account seriously: what was Joseph’s reaction to being told — in a dream — that Jesus was divine? Well, it was to react as though that were true.
Not to mention, unreliable narration. Where is the evidence that Jesus claimed to be the son of God during his lifetime?
Here’s an alternate scenario. Jesus is a Jewish human teacher who goes around teaching things, mostly to other Jews. His message spreads. He is crucified by the Romans and dies. His followers keep spreading his message, with some prominent followers tweaking it in ways that make it more appealing to pagan Romans. One way this is done is by adopting Greco–Roman tropes into the Jesus story, inspired by tales of Zeus and pals begetting divine children with mortal women. They also tweak the new faith so that observence of Jewish law, circumcision, etc are no longer required.
The new religion appeals strongly to the Roman public and Christianity spreads like wildfire among Rome’s pagan population, until Roman emperors adopt the faith - and the rest is history.
---
### Author:  [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)
#### Post date: [January 22, 2024, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/500 "2024-01-22T13:25:54Z")
> [@Babale](#):
>
> Here’s an alternate scenario. Jesus is a Jewish human teacher who goes around teaching things, mostly to other Jews. His message spreads. He is crucified by the Romans and dies. His followers keep spreading his message, with some prominent followers tweaking it in ways that make it more appealing to pagan Romans.
According to religious scholar Reza Aslan, the historical Jesus was a political rebel seeking to free Judea from the Romans. The mystical connotations were a side effect that were considerably embellished later. His crucifixion was an act of political retribution against a perceived enemy of the state. The initialism “INRI” on the cross (“Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum”, meaning “Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews”) which Christians are taught was meant mockingly, according to Aslan was meant literally.
Aslan is controversial and his conclusions may not be right, but I found his book _Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth_ to be credible and persuasive as an objective historical account.
> [@Babale](#):
>
> and the rest is history
And after the First Council of Nicaea and its formulation of the Nicene Creed, the rest is indeed history. Thus was Christianity created, not by Christ, but by a committee of bishops.
[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965.md?page=24)
[Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965.md?page=26)