50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God

by Guy P. Harrison

Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. —Chapman Cohen

They “know” their gods are real because they have “faith” that they are. They believe because they think that they must in order to be a good person. They believe because the world is “perfect” or at least “beautiful.” They believe in a god because it is

the only way they have ever known.

I only want to encourage readers to think more deeply about why they believe in a god.

In my view all gods are equal, regardless of how many people believe in them at this moment in

history. My skepticism for Ra and Apollo, for example, is no more or less than my skepticism for Jesus and Allah.

there are many thousands of other gods that people have confidently claimed to be real throughout history. Failure to acknowledge this important truth would be historically ignorant and culturally prejudiced. Fairness and logic demand that we respect the indigenous tribal believer who sees many gods in the forest and the ancient Greek who saw several gods atop a mountain as much as we do the contemporary monotheist who sees one god in the sky.

When claims for the existence of gods negatively impact world peace, the education of children, the development of new medical cures, safety and justice for women, and the

progress of science, they must be challenged.

Probably the majority of the world's believers

see no possibility that they could be wrong about this because it is just so darn obvious that they are right. After all, their god is everywhere. Their god made everything. Their god answers prayers. Their god runs the universe.

If a significant portion of our species insists on discriminating, hating, killing, and slowing scientific progress in the name of gods, then don't we owe it to ourselves to at least try and confirm whether or not these gods are even real in the first place?

all this skepticism vanishes when the spotlight turns to their own religion. The truth is, just about everybody is a skeptic—except when it comes to their own “obviously true” belief. Unfortunately, this is the one religion that they need to challenge most of all. It makes no sense for a believer to arbitrarily exempt one religion out of thousands. All religions deserve equal scrutiny, even if it is the one that mom and dad told you was true when you were a child.

The breakdown of who believes in which god and how they must be worshipped should trouble religious people, or at least make them curious.

Wouldn't an obvious god be able to convince at least a majority if not all of the world's people that he or she exists?

How is an invisible and silent god (at least to most of us) obviously real? It shouldn't be too hard to convince others if the god truly is obvious.

Any god that is obviously real should be recognizable to anyone, even atheists. I don't think most atheists would deny the obvious.

I would never close my eyes or my mind to good evidence or strong arguments. I am a curious person and want to know as much as I can about everything. I would never deny scientific confirmation of a god.

the African god Fidi Mukullu

If the world's scientific community presented overwhelming evidence that Fidi Mukullu or any other god was real, I would not hang my head in shame for having been an atheist. I would be grateful to know something new and important. If any gods are real I sincerely want to know them.

Stories in sacred books have not convinced most people that one god or another is real. Merely pointing out the complexity of the universe has not been enough either. At this point in time it looks doubtful that anyone will ever come up with something that will show that a god is undeniably real. For centuries, brilliant theologians, monks, imams, authors, and even many scientists have taken their best shot at showing the entire world that their god was real. But none of them came close to succeeding.

Today a high school student with a fair understanding of religious claims and a good science education can defeat, or at least cast crippling doubt on, every argument for a god ever posed by the greatest religious minds of history.

a god must have created everything. A god must be making the world go round. This much is obvious, they say.

According to sociologist Phil Zuckerman, between five hundred million and seven hundred fifty million people currently have no belief in any gods (Zuckerman 2005). This is a huge number. And

Zuckerman only included what he calls “organic atheism” in his calculations. Organic atheists, he says, are true nonbelievers who are living in relatively free societies and able to believe or not believe without fear of severe punishment from an oppressive government.

So who are these five hundred to seven hundred fifty million infidels without a god in their lives? Are they the misfits and maniacs of the world? Are these the people who fill the world's prisons? It doesn't seem so. Zuckerman's research shows that these nonbelievers mostly come from the safest, healthiest, most educated, most charitable, most technologically advanced, and most crime-free nations on Earth. Countries with high percentages of nonbelievers include global bright spots such as Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Japan, Canada, and France. These people are...

A more specific group of people worth considering are scientists. Why do so many scientists fail to see these “obvious” gods whom believers keep talking about? Despite the fact that the United States is a highly religious society, almost all elite American scientists are nonbelievers. Researchers Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham revealed this with a study of members ...

scientists believed in a god. A full 93 percent indicated that no god is obvious to them (A...

We can safely assume that these are very smart people. That's why they ended up being elite scientists.

If an obviously real god created the universe, the earth and all life on it, wouldn't you think that America's best astronomers, geologists, and biologists would be the first people in line to worship that god?

it means the existence of gods is far from obvious.

Do you ever ask yourself: What if I'm wrong? —Daniel C. Dennett

many people find confirmation for their god in numbers alone.

More than 80 percent of the world's people claim to have some sort of religious identification or belief in a god.

Many believers take note of the overwhelming majority of religious people around the world and conclude that there must be something to it. All this praying and prostrating that is going on day and night could not possibly be in ...

The weight of believers alone is not enough to tip the scales. Only the weight of evidence can do that.

Virtually every believer today believes in the same god or gods that their parents taught him or her to believe in. Religious beliefs are learned not discovered.

It is likely that the sharing of belief from adults to children is the primary means of survival for religions.

A high number of believers in the present shows only that a high number of believers in the past taught religious belief to their children and nothing mor...

Isn't it interesting that most adult believers so easily dismiss every religion except the one they were encouraged to believe in childhood?

Many believers are not too shy to admit that they view other religions as unproven and maybe even a bit silly. And this is despite the fact that these religions have no more or less evidence than their own. What would happen if most people grew up without any belief system imposed on them? Would they see all religions as unproven and maybe even a bit silly?

Another problem with the “everybody is religious” justification for belief is that “religious” is a loose term that appl...

The world's believers are not in agreement on even the most basic points. There is no consensus on which gods are real or how these gods want us to worship them. Nobody can even agree on what the gods want us to eat or how they want us to dress. Disagreement and disunity is the rule for the world's believers.

One cannot find evidence for a god in billions of believers alone. How, for example, does a modern-day worshiper of pagan gods in Greece reinforce the claims of a Mormon in America? How exactly do a billion Hindus complement the religious claims of 1.5 billion Muslims when the two are in complete disagreement on the basic claims of their respective belief systems?

Finally, some religious people—including many Buddhists and Taoists, for example—do not believe in any gods at all. Therefore, they should not be lumped in with Ch...

Various religious groups make claims that are vastly different from each other and, in most cases, irreconcilable. It is impossible to unite them all under the banner of religion and d...

Let's say, for example, that we decide Allah is the one real god and Islam is the only true religion. That would mean about four billion non-Muslim religious people have made a big mistake. They believe in the wrong gods and follow the wrong religions.

The mere presence of these billions of misguided believers would be a strong indication that there is something about the human mind or human culture that makes us vulnerable to believing in gods that do no exist.

if the majority of believers can confidently believe in gods that were never there, then the minority of ...

Look back across history and it becomes impossible to count the religions and the gods. Is this really validation for claims that any particular god is real? Or could it simply be an indication that we have always been very good at inventing gods?