Comment on Something's Wrong

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:22:14 GMT

Right, I have no idea what God would actually be like, and since there is virtually no reason to entertain the possibility that he exists, it's not really worth worrying about.

Yet I find it interesting to entertain, for the sake of argument, the religious proposition that we should consider what might happen if God does exist, yet we don't believe in him. I'm not sure if we should worry about that scenario, even if we grant the plausibility of the existence of God.

Many religious people who believe in God attribute qualities such as omniscience and perfection to him. Gods are often portrayed as more intelligent that human beings.

I just think that if an anthropomorphic God exists, and if he is really omniscient and super-intelligent, there's a reasonable chance that he is a better rationalist than the religious humans who insist on believing in him without sufficient evidence... and he would give us a pass, or even props, for not believing in him. God would know how weak the evidence for his existence is from our perspective.

It would just take a strange divine psychology for God to give a crap about people believing in him, to want people to believe in him on very skimpy evidence, and then punish people for not believing in him. That sounds like the psychology of a human child (or certain human adults), not of a god.

I can't reconcile the notion of an omniscient, super-intelligent, perfect, and forgiving god (e.g. like the New Testament Christian God), with the notion that we should believe in a God without evidence. That's a strike against internal religious logic. If God exists, I don't think he would want us to be bad rationalists and believe in him.

Discuss