Widespread Theistic Belief is Evidence for Theism
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ส.ค. 2024
- I joined @DryApologist and @johnbuck4008 to speak about the common consent argument, which is typically dismissed as fallacious without much consideration. However, I think the fact that most people in recorded history have believed in something godlike is some evidence favoring the existence of the divine. We discuss why that's the case, as well as the only good response to the argument: the evolutionary debunking response.
Defending the argument from widespread theistic belief: • Defending the Common C... (There are plenty of objections you may have thought of that didn't come up in this video. They're probably discussed in the longer video linked here ^ )
How did religion evolve? • How did religion evolv...
Full conversation with Dry Apologist, John Buck, and Chris Rhodes: www.youtube.co...
Linktree: linktr.ee/emer...
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“[Ad populum] is the ‘fallacy’ of believing something because most people believe it. But what exactly is supposed to be wrong with that? . . . Maybe the idea is that most people believing p is irrelevant to whether p is true. I.e., if most people believe it, that doesn’t mean it is more likely to be correct. Problem: This is obviously wrong. If most people believe something, that obviously does make it more likely to be correct than if most people don’t believe it. If most of our beliefs weren’t true, the human species would die out pretty much immediately. Sometimes, people elaborate on this ‘fallacy’ by citing examples of beliefs that were once widely held but were false - e.g., that the sun orbits the Earth. So let me now just mention a few typical examples of beliefs that are widely held: Dogs exist. It’s generally lighter in the daytime than at night. The sky is blue, not red, green, or yellow. There are more than three human beings in existence. Human beings commonly have beliefs and desires. Putting your hand in a fire hurts. Six is more than two. The Earth has existed for more than five minutes. When you drop rocks near the surface of the Earth, they generally fall. . . . I’m sure you can extend that list for a long time. Now, which would you say there are more of: Widely-held beliefs that are true, or ones that are false?”
Michael Huemer (Knowledge, Reality, and Value)
Here's my written defense of the common consent argument (argument from widespread theistic belief) emersongreenblog.wordpress.com/2022/05/29/does-god-exist-transcript-of-opening-statement/
and here's a longer video I made about the argument. There are plenty of objections that didn't come up in this video, but they're probably discussed in the longer video: th-cam.com/video/lF6Z7uKiHpQ/w-d-xo.html
Hi, Emerson! I am starting to doubt the applicability of Bayesian probability theory to the philosophy of religion in general. I think that the way evidence is defined is too liberal. Basically, evidence for theism would be anything data that is more probable on theism than on a hypothesis that negates it, for example naturalism. I think that this brings many issues. Naturalism depends on research that takes a lot of time - human knowledge about the natural world takes centuries, if not millenia to advance. On the other hand, even a child can postulate an extremely powerful transcendent agent to explain things. Surely, such a hypothesis can explain pretty much anything. It is massively unfair and simply childish. The whole Bayesian approach only leads to arguments from ignorance. How can we know if we justified in assigning certain probability to Naturalism when we do not even know enough about nature? I think that probabilistic arguments are doomed to failure. I'll simply take theism as an ad hoc hypothesis devised by ignorant humans and consider it likely false. It is simply not worth debating. Gods are man-made mythological creatures invented to fill gaps in our knowledge of nature, or to simply answer our psychological needs. Theism is bunk.
There is huge and unharmonizable disagreement between religions throughout history too. Also, there is a long history of atheism and skepticism in various cultures (Carvaka, “The Cheese and the Worms,” etc.), though it is often crushed through various means including violence and other forms of coercion, so it’s not like religion just happens into a persons mind when they are born or reach a certain age. It is highly socially and geographically determined and until recently in some places enforced under threat of violence. Religion itself is subject to selection pressures such that the belief/institution becomes refined to optimally spread and be maintained in populations. This is on top of an ever growing understanding of human psychology (and evolutionary psychology) that gives naturalistic explanations for religious beliefs and experiences (such as our tendency to find patterns or attribute agency even when there is none).
Some of the arguments in the video seem to overlap with those put forward in William Alston’s “Perceiving God.” I think it is important, however, to separate intuitions and experiences from beliefs and belief systems when talking about how widespread belief is compared to other widespread experiences and intuitions we take for granted. Also we should note there is conflict between religious beliefs but not much conflict in most experiences of the physical world, etc. across the globe. Finally, we should note that in many ways religious experiences are epistemically weaker than other sensory experiences (I can explain more if interested).
I wrote my thesis on a tangentially related topic, so it’s interesting to hear it discussed.
@@jackbarman7063 This is an important comment. Almost no person is ever in the position of knowing that theistic belief is widespread without knowing at least some additional facts about how it differs across space and time, how it arose, and how it is maintained through psychological and social mechanisms. That being the case, the evidence of common consent feels massively understated in this argument. It’s just not all that useful to extract from the messy set of facts about the distribution of theistic belief one high-level description like “theistic belief is widespread.” The requirement of total evidence would have us grapple with all the relevant facts here.
The closest analogue I can think of right now is Lowders argument from consciousness. Even though it makes a perfectly innocent point about the evidential support offered to theism from the fact that “there is a conscious being,” no person ever finds themself in possession of that piece of evidence without already being in possession of a more specific piece of evidence that “there is a non-divine conscious being.” Since the latter constitutes our total evidence (in the relevant domain), there’s not a whole lot of use discussing the evidential import of the former.
Small correction, sadly religion is still enforced under threat of violence/death in some places.
@@zedmeinhardt3404 yeah it’s unfortunate. I did say “until recently in some places” because enforcement is the norm and the exceptions tend to be recent and only in some places.
I don't really see how this is entirely obvious. Consensus, to me, describes a relation to belief -- a social one -- rather than being a feature to ontological truth surrounding this subject. It seems to tell us more about how humans think, not what they ought to. This goes for either theism, atheism, agnosticism, whatever might be the most prevalent manner of thinking in a possible world.
In the video, you also reference how, for an atheist, they'd be saying "basically everyone is wrong" and that would be an extraordinary thing (or however you'd phrase it). Though, I think this view is situated from a notion that humans are rational beings -- which treats us more like dignified scholars than being erring, helter-skelter beings. I think this view needs to have good reasoning for it and I feel that'll lead to a pretty long conversation. If humans fit the latter category, then we may have more of a reason to be skeptical of this point.
Hopefully, I'm not condescendingly reduced to some angsty atheist that just doesn't want to give any type of wiggle room (and I'm not even an atheist), but yeah, I'm not too convinced.
If widespread belief in God is a sort of evidence for God, is the increase in athieisum proof against God? If current trends remain steady, would we be seeing this claim get slightly weaker each year?
WHat are your sources for increasing secularism? Most tend to focus on the anglosphere, rather than global trends.
@calebp6114 pew research. While the biggest growing religion in the US at least right now is nothing in particular or "nones" athiesum has been growing modestly. 2% in 2009 4% now.
That depends on what places you're analyzing. There's a huge debate in sociology over whether any of this phenomenon is true outside of occidental countries. Peter Berger's work is an awesome piece that looks at this and leans towards this being the case. I feel Emerson is looking at belief in more universal terms.
@humesspoon3176 god belief, like most beliefs, seems pretty inelastic. If this is true (which i could be false), even if it is only changing in the us and Europe, then this represents a decline in religious belief.
Islam is growing a ton
Christianity is growing but less than the world population (they are still growing but shrinking in proportion)
Non-religious is growing worldwide
0:55 - The same conclusion? The only thing that is the same about most religious ideas is the conclusion that there is at least one unseen intelligent agent, which is not a very specific conclusion at all, and has obvious evolutionary roots.
I was thinking at how different god concepts have been over time: temporal vs atemporal, immaterial vs material, created vs uncreated, animistic vs anthropomorphic vs emergent vs "spirit," eternal vs finite, and so on, and son, yet Emerson wants to think they are the "same thing." This smacks of either conflating all the concepts or equivocating what people mean.
@@RustyWalkerhe said if we all *roughly* agree, and that is true
@@ILoveLuhaidanIt very clearly is not!
sure, just like widespread belief in the earth being flat is evidence of poor critical reasoning and delusion.
The argument falls apart once you start thinking about it. Widespread theistic belief isn't a belief in Christian God, it's a large number of belief systems. And each of those belief systems are likely contradicting all other belief systems. You want to lump Hindu religions together with your own and say "see, our beliefs prove that there's some divine" but a Hindu would be more likely to say "your god is false". I'd argue that the fact that most religions are contradicting other religions is evidence against the divine because there's no common thing that everyone could point to and say it's really there. You can't even say that there's exactly one deity because there are a lot of religions where there are many deities and some belief systems have no deities whatsoever.
I think there’s an important distinction that ought to be made here. That’s the distinction between a randomly drawn claim and a specific claim.
Say someone presents me with a box and in that box is a claim. They ask me what probability I assign to that claim being true. I average over the possible claims that could be in the box. The average probability I assign to their truth is X1. My answer is X1.
Now they tell me another piece of information about the claim-namely that most people believe it. What’s my new credence? Well I average over all the claims that everyone believes. That’s X2 so my answer is X2.
If I think people are generally reliable wrt to the set of possible claims, then X2 > X1. And the fact that most people believe the claim in the box is evidence that the claim in the box is true.
But say the claim wasn’t in the box. Say I know it’s content. Is the fact that most people believe it still evidence for it? Well that can depend on the claim. There’s no inconsistency between thinking that people are generally reliable (in the sense that they tend to be right about randomly sampled claims) and thinking there are claims where popular consensus is no evidence at all or even evidence against.
The probability of the claim being true if most people believe it if you also can assess what their warrant for belief is.
If most people believe something but can't provide a foundation, it's irrelevant if no people believe it or if everyone believes it.
That woul be an argumentum ad populum.
*is only affected if
I have no edit on the mobile platform I'm on.
@@RustyWalker If I understand you correctly, then I disagree. I don’t think I need to be able to assess people’s reasons/warrant/what-have-you for common consent to function as evidence. If people generally form beliefs for good reasons, then common consent can be evidence even if I don’t know whether they’re especially accurate when it comes to the specific claim in question. I think this is pretty obvious in my toy example above.
But I think you’re getting at something close to the point I was trying to make. *If* we had additional information about the type of claim being made and knew that people were more reliable about claims in that domain, then this would be better evidence for the truth of that claim.
@@mf_hume Believing in supernatural entities *IS* one of the beliefs that feeds into that probability. Let's take a specific supernatural claim: ghosts exist.
Is that a belief that a lot of people hold one "of the beliefs that people hold for good reasons," or for bad reasons? How do you know?
What about flat Earthers? Is their belief that there is a flattal conspiracy to hide the true shape of da Erf a belief held for good reasons?
What about moon landing deniers?
Is that a belief people hold for good reasons?
Climate denial? Reptilians? Literally anything David Icke says? Republicans having the electorate's interests at heart? Tobacco not being harmful? Viruses not being real? Covid being a conspiracy/bioweapon/other madhat belief people conjured up to make sense of something relatively normal?
How about the Aztecs using human sacrifice to appease the fertility gods? Was that a belief people held for good reasons?
I see no effort made to quantify that it is *TRUE* that people generally hold beliefs for good reasons. This might *ITSELF* be a belief you hold for shite reasons.
But you don't think warrant matters? You do you then. Become a flerther TODAY!! Clearly, the majority of people in a flat Earther discord server have common consent on it, and that totally obviously raises the probability.
Except it doesn't, because there is *NO* warrant to believe it.
Do you see now?
I'm at home now so I can composite my comments into a single entry.
The funny thing is all the different believers have no qualms in saying people in every other faith are wrong, even down to what "godlike" even means.
This suggests to me that Emerson is either conflating or equivocating on "godlike." If there is no single concept held by all the people he claims hold the same belief, it is fallacious to appeal to "common consent." I recognize Emerson brought up that they have different gods and views of the supernatural, but he needs to recognize that he can't simply say "lots of people believe the same thing" when they don't appear to believe the same thing at all. Here are some of the crucial differences through the different concepts of gods: finite vs infinite, created vs uncreated, material vs immaterial, interventionist vs non-interventionist, temporal vs atemporal, animistic vs spirit vs anthropomorphic vs emergent etc.
You say common consent is evidence for god whilst also saying it can be accounted for evolutionarily.
This means - if we treat them as hypotheses - the probability of both hypotheses being true is raised simultaneously, and the implication of that is the prediction fails the exclusivity test, since it is expected in both scenarios. Both naturalism and theism predict common consent to things that *appear* to be agents. Theists hold they're actual. Naturalists hold they're a consequence of agency detection gone awry along with pareidolia etc, as Emerson himself explained.
Neither hypothesis can point to the popularity of the belief in these apparent agents as evidence nor that the hypothesis is probabilistically raised for that reason. If the same evidence appears in two competing hypotheses and is accounted for by both of them, it is not evidence in either.
You raise a good point about the two competing hypotheses both being supported by this idea. I would go further. Why should we expect a God to instil God belief within us? It seems like question begging to me. I think it's far too easy to conflate common consent about the existence of some divine being, with common consent that this being wants us to be aware of it. I mean how do we know this? Because we are told we know it implicitly. It's an unspoken assumption arising from the premise that 'we know God exists'. I think our brains just connect knowledge of other beings with the idea that these other beings in some way want us to know of their existence - and maybe that's just projection. We want other beings to know that we exist, and so we assume other beings think likewise.
So while I think it's reasonable to raise both the naturalistic and theistic hypothesis equally, on this matter - I think that's being unnecessarily charitable to theism. It's not at all clear that a God does in fact want us to know he exists, and therefore common consent is not expected necessarily, or even probably.
Rusty Walker: Exactly! For far too long, believers in specific "God" X have brought to the table other people's beliefs in other "Gods" as if this were supporting evidence for "God" X. It is not. When the chips are down, they - Jews, different types of Christian, Muslims, Hindus ... etc - do NOT believe in the existence of the "God" of the other; indeed, they would say that the "God" of the other is "false" or in some way non-existent.They want to have their cake and eat it - all the while saying that other people's cake is not, in fact, true cake.
This is something I think I have always dimly perceived, but it is only now - at 60+ years old - that I have articulated it and come fully to grasp how important it is.
It needs to be said much more frequently. It is time to lift the ecumenical veil. I have started telling Christians that their "God" is emphatically NOT the "God" of the Jews ... and they don't like it!
What you say about Emerson "conflating or equivocating" is spot on. It seems to me he REALLY wants believers in other "Gods" on his side to some extent, so he instinctively uses "God-like" to allow for that. It is not intellectually honest, but I do not think we can blame him entirely because it is the way "God" believers have thought for centuries.
@@bengreen171I think that Emerson is too often unnecessarily charitable to theists. Although I do not strawman their arguments, I can hardly be charitable to them when they are clearly fallacious to me. I engage with people's arguments, not with the people themselves. Just like I am not going to attack the person, I am not going to be overly friendly either.
@@Nexus-jg7ev
I know exactly what you mean.
@@Nexus-jg7evAnd you are too unnecessarily uncharitable to theists 👍🏻
It *is* evidence. Just bad evidence. We do have a naturalistic evolutionary explanation of why people tend to believe in gods.
So did alot of our beliefs. This does not make them wrong if they come about naturally.
@@pabloandres06183 No, right, it just means that we can explain why as a species we have a mechanism to believe in things that aren't true or real.
I'm not done watching, but this conversation so far feels a bit biased toward Western philosophy, most notably in the assumed consensus on the definition of the term 'god.' For example, Tibetan Buddhism (and I think Buddhism more broadly) does believe in what it calls 'gods,' but these entities are (as I understand them) emanations of the subconscious self, representations of aspects of human nature, not concrete external beings. That's a far cry from certain eras of Greek religion, which held that the gods were literal beings dwelling atop a literal mountain, causing literal thunderstorms and literal earthquakes. Among these two worldviews alone, it would seem that the only unifying attribute of these gods is that they represent the existence of a reality or group of realities deeper and more enduring than the conscious ego... That's not exactly a profound parallel in the grand scheme of epistemology or ontology.
I don't have the education to do so concisely in a TH-cam comment, but I would wager a bet that things would break down even further were one to compare a broader sampling of worldviews across space and time, even when taking into account population size. Using consensus as evidence in a metaphysical sense just smells very strongly of either ignorance, cultural supremacism, cherry picking, or some combination thereof depending on who's speaking. "We are many, therefore we are more likely to be correct," "they are few, therefore they are more likely to be incorrect," "our ideas have more influence, therefore they are more true," "their ideas have less influence, therefore they are less true."
It's kind of gross, and honestly a little scary as someone in a philosophical camp which differs from surrounding cultural norms.
Good discussion!
There is independent evidence for math, so that is an entirely irrelevant analogy. Maybe a better one exists of course, but that one sucks.
I feel like Emerson too quickly brushes aside developments in scientific fields relevant to the subjects he discusses. It comes across as though he approaches any given subject like it can be answered from a solely philosophical perspective, and the hard science that speaks to the matter is purely incidental. This is foolishness, and I'll give an example of how:
Say someone approaches me who believes in water spirits, and according to their philosophy, the observable phenomenon of fluid flow is evidence that these spirits exist. They say that the spirits move about for one reason or another, and this causes fluid flow. I, as a degreed and certified engineer, explain that no, actually fluid flow is a purely mechanistic phenomenon which occurs across pressure differentials. These differentials can occur naturally, such as with gravity, temperature, or surface tension, or they can be created mechanically using pumps or other means. The person then replies, "well that's an interesting argument, but everyone I know believes in water spirits. People throughout history believed in water spirits, and furthermore I have X, Y, Z well reasoned, non-fallacious philosophical arguments for these spirits' existence, so I think you're just being small minded and overly physicalist."
Do you see how this way of approaching things could be frustrating to someone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about? Science is not irrelevant to philosophy, and you can't just pop off philosophically on subjects you're ignorant about, or brush aside the perspectives of people who actually study this stuff by saying, "well, you just don't get what I'm saying," or, "well, that's just your interpretation of the data. Opinions can vary." That's anti-vaxer shit right there. Read some papers. Get educated about subjects before you try to incorporate them into arguments.
As it pertains to this video:
We can track the evolution of any given god belief across time and culture. We have studied how and why ideology propagates, and how deviation from norms impacts individuals on psychological and sociological levels. We understand this sort of thing well enough to know that, absent of underlying bias, the prevalence of god beliefs across cultures should tell a person absolutely and precisely NOTHING about the epistemological value of any aspect of any or all of those belief systems.
I think it's worth imagining how we would react in other scenarios when consensus turns against us. Imagine, for instance, that your senses tell you the sky is blue, and then you find out everyone else thinks it's red. The mere fact of disagreement, even overwhelming disagreement, probably wouldn't make you believe the sky was red, but you'd be crazy if it didn't rattle you. It might even inspire you to see an optometrist. In other words, it would motivate an investigation to explain the discrepancy. Maybe you're colorblind, in which case you'd probably defer back to the consensus. But if your investigation concludes that your eyes are just fine and the sky really is blue, then that is what you ought to believe.
Same deal for theism, I think. Common consent doesn't have a lot of force to change your mind, but it is evidence that you ought to investigate.
That... isn't how science and evidence work.
Given theism, is it expected that there would be a widespread belief in theism?
Maybe, I don't know.
Depends on what kind of world the god felt like creating. One with widespread belief in theism, or one without. Could create either.
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If there wasn't a widespread belief in theism. Would that be evidence of a theistic god with a desire to create a world without widespread belief in theism?
Perhaps I'm too late, but before people jump on Emerson, remember where he's coming from. He's an atheist, he's not saying this proves God, his only point was that he thinks it's probability boost, even if it's only a marginal one. Which isn't that grand of a claim really. I agree most with the overall conclusion that what this entails for the atheist is that maybe we shouldn't take this so lightly, since we are basically claiming a whole lot of people, most people on earth, are wrong.
I'll add, even as an atheist, I don't think belief in God is at all comparable to belief in flat earth in the past. We will assume for the sake of this context that flat earth theory was widespread(I think the widespreadness of it in the past is overstated a bit). Scientists for lack of better term have known the Earth was a sphere since ancient greek times. They even measured the size of the Earth with their limited means to astonishing accuracy. The reason everyday people didn't believe the Earth was a sphere is because information about science just wasn't accessible. It was very inaccessible for a very long time. Which wasn't anyone's fault, they didn't have what we have at our disposal. But everyday people had not great, but not terrible reasons to believe the Earth was flat at the time. People were focused on other things, most people's worlds didn't go beyond like a 30 mile radius. and from first glance, it kinda makes sense to see it as flat. Finally, my point is that given this, flat earth really isn't all that great of an example of an ad populum error. Because average people didn't make any super insane epistemological errors to get that belief.
Until about 20 years ago everyone on the earth who ever lived who did not have aphantasia (so 97% or so of all humans ever) thought everyone in the world could see things inside their own head, while everyone who had aphantasia thought nobody could see anything in their heads and phrases like "visualize it", or "see it with your minds eye", were just artful terms and nobody was actually seeing anything.
So the fact 97% of humanity has always believed something clearly does not make that thing true. For something with some other good evidence, arguments from popularity can contribute to the theory, but without other evidence it means literally nothing.
Im definitely curious why humans believe certain things but just because its widely believed i dont think it makes it more probable. Theres too many examples of where the collective consciousness gets it so wrong its disturbing.
I think it has *some* evidential power but very little.
Very easy to imagine why the great majority cultures would adopt religions, but all of them did it based on guesswork. You could also reverse the argument: the number of atheists in the world has been rising over the past centuries, and the rise is directly correlated with improvement in scientific technology and greater access to education....
Even if gods real I hope it isn't the Christian one lol
Millions of people in history over thousands of years have had experiences of God and the supernatural. I've talked to some myself; college professors, Ivy League graduates, not frauds.
The overwhelming evidence is that God is real.
brianw etc: "... have had experiences of God and the supernatural." - That does not mean that "Gods" exist or that the "supernatural" is a thing. It could simply mean that self-delusion, wishful thinking, evolutionary imperatives and susceptibility to cultural influence are human characteristics/vulnerabilities.
The people to whom you have talked may not be frauds, but you should ask them for good, credible evidence to support the specific claims they are making.
This is not even remotely "overwhelming evidence". It is overwhelming evidence that human beings like to tell stories, project their agency onto the world and like the idea of a protective, celestial father figure who will eventually shield them from death.
You see, you have fallen into the same trap as Emerson. The people you have talked to do not believe in "God". They believe in their specific and particular "God". The vast majority of them think that the "Gods" of other people are not real. These "Gods" are mutually exclusive, thus the fact that the Muslims believe in a "God" does not support [your] belief in [your] "God". The "God" of the Jews is NOT the "God" of the Christians; ask a Jew. Ask a southern American Baptist whether a Roman Catholic believes in the right "God" and is on the right path to this "God" and s/he will tell you that the RC is damned to hell fire by his/her Baptist "God".
So I am afraid you have to exclude the argumentum ad populum from your armoury and go back to looking for good, credible evidence for the existence of your personal "God".
I will admit that I haven’t listened through this video yet, but if you consider that evidence than you’ll have evidence for all kinds of actually debunked stuff. There are so many things that most people believe that have been proven wrong. It might be evidence in absence of any evidence against it. This argument isn’t worthless, but it’s very very weak.
I am Hindu. We are more than 1 billion. So it is evidence for gods actually. Hail Lord Indra
Is it consent or assent?
depends if you're going uphill?
There is a huge misconception here: human rationality is not what you think.
One can hold a belief because it gives an accurate picture of the world.
And one can hold a belief because it gives social and emotional benefits.
To which category does the God belief belong to? And why?
1:06 but this is arugmentum ad popularity.
If we can understand WHY humans are inclined to be theistic, say through how evolution have wired our brains, then this argument is not evidence.
Or the critic could argue that manufactured consent, say through (involuntary/coerced) proselytism and indoctrination, leads to widespread false beliefs
"Widespread theistic Belief is evidence of God" is such a loaded statement and I think this topic is silly.
As you mention in the video, the phrase "theistic belief" has to be modified to "belief in divine reality/something god-like" to really be "widespread" in the way that you want, so the goalposts are immediately shifted and what little utility the claim had for apologists is destroyed. The diversity of religious and spiritual belief in the world is a direct contradiction of most religious worldviews and is totally unpredicted by most forms of theism. The claim of "common consent for theism" is a deliberately vague statement designed to help the apologist avoid being confronted by the diverse nature of supernatural beliefs whose mere existence challenges their specific worldview.
Even without hyper-active agency detection it's perfectly reasonable for human beings to come to the conclusion that some divine realm or supernatural agents like spirits exist simply by virtue of the fact that we have an incredibly limited ability to understand the world around us. Where did the world come from? Why are things happening? What should I be doing with my life? Why do I want what I want? Stories of gods and religious practices provide answers to these impossible questions and they become the framework for our entire lives and cultures through tradition. Heck, people believed flies spontaneously generated out of meat less than 200 years ago. It wasn't stupidity or even superstition: we just didn't have access to the information it would take to understand things any better. Add superstition and imagination on top of that and it becomes clear that it would be very surprising if most humans WERE NOT religious in a naturalist worldview.
"We're right more often than we're not" - Are we? Historically, has humanity collectively been "right" about most philosophical or scientific or religious topics? And are the reasons we agree that 2 is less than 6 or "fire hurts me" because of "rational intuition"? I don't think this claim is true in this discussion and your examples don't work to support it.
"You are epistemically conceited/lack humility for not taking this argument seriously/not being a theist" - Lmfao get out of here. What exactly do you want non-theists to do? For 99% of non-religious people, they're FORCED to be humble to even begin engaging with religious people on these topics BECAUSE the religious are the majority which largely enables them to squash and ignore critical discussion.
Argument ad populum
lol
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BEFORE THE CREATION OF THE WORLD THE DIVINE QUESTION DIVINE TRIAL AND DIVINE MERCY WAS READY FOR MEN ANGEL OR GOD. GENESIS 1:1-27. Psalms 53:2-3. Genesis 6:5. Isaiah 1:18. Hebreo 4:12.
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