The No Good Reason To Believe God result

In The Wrong God Hypothesis I asked the question “could the possibility that there is indeed a god, and we all have in fact got it wrong about god, be a plausible explanation [for the god question]?“

It doesn’t take long to unwind this. The non-believer cites 1) a lack of evidence and 2) a lack of true, valid arguments as reasons for not believing in a deity. So, even if a freely acting, rational agent - such as a deity is presumed to be - does in fact exist, we still have no good reason to believe that he/she/it exists due to 1) and 2) above. The possibility that a deity could exist and there not be a present way to infer or deduce its existence, is the same (as far as I can tell) as its non-existence. If it has no discernable effect on the world, why should we care?

I suppose at this point, people go down the path of Pascal’s wager, but that doesn’t seem to be a good bet, since we know there’s a distinct possibility that we’re wrong about whatever we think of as god. We're most likely betting on the wrong horse.

So where are we?

We’re back at not having sufficient reason to believe in god. Whether or not it exists is not meaningful when there's no way to be affected by its hypothesized existence.

Don’t worry - be happy!