[Joey Joe Joe]

I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God. I believe it’s possible there is a God, He or She’s just a big longshot. Others who feel the same way around here sometimes put an odds line on the existence of God (I’ve seen estimates varying on these boards from 10:1 to 1 billion:1). Those who feel like I do see no logical reason to believe in God, so we don’t, but we believe it’s possible. When we make a seat-of-our-pants guess at an appropriate odds line, we’re trying to get a good line down, using all available information (and yes, these lines are wildly subjective, and kind of silly, but also provide a little fun on a gambling website). But are we properly incorporating the information that billions of people believe in God, with no logical reason for it? They keep telling us that one just has to have faith, and we just don’t see it. We throw logical arguments back at them, and they keep coming, sometimes with (possibly false) logic, but often with the faith argument. This of course doesn’t hold much water from a scientific perspective. We feel that these billions are under some misguided mass delusion. This is probably true. But, the fact that there are these massive numbers of people with so-called faith surely must fudge the line that God exists by some amount. Perhaps there really is something to this concept of faith, and we who do not have it can not possibly understand.

To put this another way, suppose the world we live in was basically the same (as similar as possible), but only 10% or so of people believed in God. Suppose this 10% was made up of the poorer, uneducated folk, and belief in God was very rare among educated individuals. How much would this shift the line that God exists? After all, perhaps God is speaking to his children through this whole faith thing. If I lived in such a world, and set the odds line for the existence of God at 1000:1, what would the appropriate shift in our world be? Nothing? Tiny change but negligible? A new odds line of 999:1?