LovePeaceHappiness and I were having a debate about the atonement and he tried to support this by using arguments that assume that God already exists. When I confronted him with this he suggested I make a new thread about this topic, so here it is. The purpose of this thread is to use logic and reason to try to determine whether God exists, or at least find out whether it is likely that God exists.
I am defining God to be the Judeo-Christian God. There is no reason to say God exists any more than there is to say that unicorns exist because there is no evidence of God. This is a very common argument and is very persuasive.
Well, you know my opinion of God's existence from that other thread. I believe that an eternal thing-that-is-responsible-for-everything-else-that-I-also-call-God exists.
Why, then, do I believe in the Judeo-Christian God specifically?
Because, I think there is sufficient evidence to suggest that belief in the Judeo-Christian God is reasonable.
Perhaps the greatest of this is the survival of the Jews at large, and the specific survival of Judaism in its Orthodox form. It is not only their survival (which is not necessarily divine), but the fact that they predicted it long ago. How long ago? Well that is disputed, but long enough, consistently enough, and accurately enough to make it reasonable to assume that they've got at least some idea of why that is.
The fact is that there are these Jews, Orthodox ones specifically, who have been teaching and believing in Orthodox Judaism for a long time. They have done so in such numbers and conditions as to lead one to believe that they should be gone. Sociologically speaking, the fact that any of them remain in any largely influential number is highly improbable.
They say that it is because the god-thing, who I can't say I know much about otherwise, wants it that way. I could say they're wrong. They could be wrong. But I think that the benefits (a life of fulfillment, lower rates of all sorts of undesirable things in observant societies, etc) are worth the possibility that I might be wrong, that there might be no God, and thus find no real reason not to believe in Judaism (unless you think that a reality--in which the more I learn about it the more I realize I know nothing about it, is the result of chemical reactions occurring multiple times in an infinite number of places that results in what we have now, and where I need to find my own meaning in life--is a good reason).
Are there other religions? Yes. Do they have the similar benefits? Yes. But I like Judaism, and given the statements of these Jews who have existed for longer than any group as small and as targeted as they are, and given the fact that I do think there is an eternal thing out there responsible for everything else and the Jewish idea of it doesn't seem all that bad, I think it is reasonable to believe in the Jewish God and even the Jewish religion in its Orthodox sense.
Not to mention that there is no other religion which makes the claim that:
- God showed up to 3 million of their people
-gave them instructions (which they still sort of follow to this day)
-told them that they would be around for a really long time (under conditions that should have resulted in their extinction)
-they have a continuous chain of people going back for a really long time (back to Sinai) of people who have faithfully followed these instructions under these conditions with records of these people which date back that far
and also predicted it in a document that dates (even by secular standards) back long enough for it to have been something that wasn't written after the fact.
I assumed that your OP was a question "Why believe in the Judeo-Christian God?" Well I don't know what that is because Christians, Jews, and Muslims see God very differently. Hell, just among Jews we see God differently. But if you were to ask why I believe in Judaism as opposed to some other religion with a different god-concept, then the above post is my answer. I hope it suffices.
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