The God Delusion creates a very well thought out attack on religion. But going back to philosophical arguments there’s a couple he missed, or maybe I need to read the book again. Here I’ll give some reasons why you at least you don’t have to be delusional to believe in God. At least, you’re no more delusional than the rest of us. These have got names, but I prefer focusing on relatable ideas.

Short version: When someone tells you God is rubbish, ask them how they know if we’re not in the matrix and where they get their ethical beliefs from.

The main idea is not that religion is definitely right or wrong, but just that it’s at least reasonable, rational, not crazy to believe in a God. So if you’re preaching, I don’t have to listen to you, but I also don’t have to send you to the loony bin.

1. We’re in the Matrix / a simulation.
   1. The basis is that we can treat religion as similar to our senses/perception proof.
   2. So whether you think its rational or rationality has nothing to do with it, if you trust your senses you can say the same for religion.
   3. If we are in a simulation, then there clearly is a creator.
   4. There’s an argument that it’s almost certain that we’re in a simulation, but I prefer Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s explanation that it’s 50/50 whether we’re in a simulation or not.
   5. There’s three forms of this that each have fancy names. But they all say that religion is no worse than perception – fideism (perception is arational), quasi-fideism (the core of perception is arational), reformed epistemology (perception is rational, religion is a divine sense)
2. Ethics are beliefs too
   1. Ethics isn’t something of the animal world, they mostly act on instinct and don’t have the ability to reason beyond that
   2. There’s no proof for ethics, but we believe it still
   3. We rely on expertise, wisdom and experience same as we can do for religion
   4. Shamans are an interesting example of this. They understand the set and setting for using psychedelics (see discussion at end of the Michael Pollan & Imperial presentation on psychedelic research)
   5. Fancy name: exemplar account

The main argument used against religion is that there is no evidence (fancy name: evidentialism). This was Ricky Gervais’ good point that you can burn all science books and get them all back again in 1000 or so years. There is evidence you can find. The point here is not to even argue against that. We accept there is no proof for God, but it’s still a reasonable thing to believe.

Belief is a very important word amongst this. We have ethical beliefs, and we believe what we see and hear. If it’s OK to that, then it’s OK to believe in a God.

The core of this comes from the book and course Philosophy, Science and Religion for Everyone By Duncan Pritchard and Mark Harris, I highly recommend following their course or reading their book.