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All I can tell you is that I don't feel a God-shaped hole.
The stars wheel with no sign of a Creator's hand. Men kill and die and are lost to us--as far as I can tell forever. Beauty emerges from the interplay of a thousand million butterflies seething beyond our perceptions. So does suffering. I don't see all that you see.
The question, then, is whether the converse is true. Am I making conclusions based on the whole picture, or do I build on faith and call it reason?
I'm quite religious, and I don't feel a God-shaped hole either. For me it comes down to reason, faith, and personal experiences.
In particular, the single thing which most strongly leads me towards God is science (lowercase s). I have often in life come to a crossroads where I've essentially predicted "If God is real and I have a good understanding of who he is, I should do X. Otherwise, I should do Y." At times I've chosen X, at times I've chosen Y, and I'm personally satisfied enough with the design and outcome of those tests to be reasonably confident in my religious beliefs.
Of course, there's a chance that X is just a proxy for "what my gut says is the right decision" and Y is a proxy for the opposite, but I've tried to be quite thorough and rigorous with these tests, and after a certain point it's impossible to remove any possibility of bias. Sometimes my gut rebels against doing X and tells me that surely it won't work, but I do it anyways and it works out better than I could have imagined.
I'll give you the best recent example I can think of. LDS congregations are called "wards" and groups of congregations are called "stakes". Recently my (quite remote) ward was broadcasting stake conference. There were 3 2-hour sessions to be broadcast, including 2 which would contain highly-anticipated talks (sermons) from a church higher-up. Unfortunately, the broadcast wasn't working. So the wonderful members of my ward sat through 5 hours of screechy whines, the words of the talks only very rarely intelligible at all, and even then only for a second or two at a time. At this point there's only an hour left, everyone looks quite grumpy as they sit and bask in the sound of unholy microphone screeching, and I feel impressed to suggest that we pray for the sound quality to improve. This was very difficult--I was shy, I didn't know many people in the ward, wasn't a leader in any way, and really "calling for a prayer" is something I have never seen done except in occasional emergencies. I very much didn't want to do so, but strongly felt impressed to, and essentially also felt like "if my faith is correct, then of course this is the correct course of action. Therefore I should test it rather than living in uncertainty."
So, the congregation thankfully went along with the suggestion, and the static immediately cleared up completely.
Now, of course this example proves nothing on its own, but when these (and other) sorts of things happen over and over, I (with great reluctance) feel intellectually obligated to accept the gospel as the truth.
Sorry for the sermon, I just want to make clear that my faith has (so far as I can tell, and I've worked very hard to try and figure this out honestly) nothing to do with any disposition towards or need for religion. From my perspective it looks like God patiently gives me opportunity after opportunity to test his claims, because he wants me to follow his advice, and without thorough testing I could never feel sufficiently confident of his existence to make the sacrifices his advice demands.
In my own anecdotal experience, anyone who claims to have been provided an opportunity to test Gods claims, coincidentally never is able to provide a surefire test that can not be attributed to coincidence and/or confirmation bias.
If you prayed right now to find a $100 bill in your mailbox in the morning, and it did not come true it would likely not move you even a single step in the other direction, correct? If you prayed and it did happen then that would of course increase your confidence in your beliefs. How do you know you are truly updating based on the design and outcome of these tests, and not instead just updating when the results match your desired result?
Would you believe any less if when your group prayed for improved sound quality, nothing happened? Or would it be dismissed with a sentiment similar to "God answers all prayers, and sometimes the answer is just no"?
Well, you've caught me, because I can't provide a surefire test either. To be fair though I'm one of those guys in the "you can't ever be 100% sure" camps so I don't know if that sort of test is even theoretically possible.
The tests which I've found most consistently produce results are tests related to sin and sacrifice, which is where faith comes in. If you have the faith to test God and give up a sin, even for a short period of time, good results will generally find their way to you in a way somewhat unlikely to be the result of chance. Better results the bigger the sacrifice.
If I thought that that was how God worked then it would move me in the other direction. Since I think it's highly unlikely that he works that way, but still more likely than randomly receiving $100, it happening would still move me towards the "God exists" side and it not happening would move me very slightly away, but it's a bad test that I wouldn't try due to the weak signal (among other reasons).
Yes to both. My faith would definitely be a lot weaker if not for that and similar things happening. I can point to 3-4 instances in my life much more significant than the example I shared (both in terms of experimental design, and in terms of how strong the resulting signal was) without which my faith would probably be nonexistent by now. Probably another 3-4 examples at the same level as what I shared too, but which I can actually talk about.
As for why I don't think these are mutually exclusive, I think this is just naturally how updating works if you're doing it right. If I'm learning about some ridiculous conspiracy theory, and learn some half-plausible evidence for it, then perhaps I will lend the conspiracy theory a bit more credence, but at the same time, since I still don't believe in it, I will create a justification/explanation for why that evidence exists besides the conspiracy theory being true.
I absolutely think confirmation bias is still a possibility, and all I can say is that I do my best to stay conscious of that.
Thank you for the thoughtful responses.
You say that you don't believe "God works that way" in regards to the $100 in the mailbox, which is a sentiment I understand as most people of faith would say the same I think. Can you help me understand why $100 in the mailbox is not the way God works but improving sound quality upon request is?
I understand that there are many examples in your life outside of the ones you have given, but are any of them repeatable in a way that you could re-perform the test and have the results consistently be the same? I think I know the answer to that, but it just seems to me like if praying for improved sound quality and it happening is reason for increasing belief then there are a multitude of things you could pray for daily of a similar nature, and record the results/update accordingly. I am sure there is some reason why that is not true as I am aware of the general aversion to testing god in most faiths, but you seem more open to the idea.
Incoming wall of text, I'm sorry, I didn't want it to be this way
Let me start with a couple of first principles which strike me as intuitively true. I don't mean for this to be persuasive per se so much as to build a foundation to explain my beliefs about God.
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and wants us to be like him
Being like him means being happy, good, and free
It's impossible to force people to be good while preserving their freedom1 (which, yes, means God is not "omnipotent" according to some definitions of the word).
Essentially what I'm trying to explain here is God's motives and why he doesn't just answer every single prayer or personally appear to each person on Earth. The point of us being here is to learn to be good. God wants to reward us for being good, but he wants us to be good for its own sake, not for the reward.
There's a lot more details I'm glossing over, but in short, God putting $100 in the mailbox in response to a simple prayer doesn't match my understanding of who God is and what his motives are. I don't really see how something like that would help anyone to be a better person. The sound quality thing--I wasn't sure if it would actually work, and I'm still not sure if it's something that would always work in similar circumstances, but it at least matches my understanding of who God is and the kinds of behavior he will reward.
This is where the principle of faith comes in, which here I'll define as "the willingness to test God in what is, to you, a small way given your current experiences." When I was a kid and had seen a few tiny little miracles2, and told of very large ones3 by my parents, I at least had a high enough estimate that God was real4 to do something little like take a few minutes to say a prayer. I was extremely stubborn and refused to consider any of the responses I got through prayer as divine messages--they were generally just simple, good feelings. Soon afterwards the responses became thoughts rather than feelings though, and generally extremely useful thoughts which answered my prayers.
I realize (and realized at the time) that this is terrible evidence. The point is less "those thoughts and feelings proved that God is real" and more "I did a small act of faith and was rewarded in a small way." Given the quality of spiritual guidance I was receiving as I prayed, I considered it a worthwhile occasional pastime even if it really was just some sort of altered mental state where I was more likely to figure out the correct answers to my questions.
So at that point, now that praying more-or-less consistently works for me (if only weakly), it's no longer a test, just something I have found that works. I'm not even close to being willing to accept that God is real, but my estimate of the probability that he is real has risen enough that I'm willing to test something somewhat more substantial, a test which would have seemed crazy for me if not for the weak evidence I had gathered through prayer. For me, that was scripture reading, a task which required somewhat more effort, had somewhat more results (it was a fairly enlightening activity), but still comes nowhere near convincing me that God is real.
This process continued for years. It wasn't all forward progress either. There were plenty of times I would get lazy and stop testing the boundaries, which would soon result in me forgetting evidences I had previously seen (or distrusting my own past self's ability to accurately interpret those evidences) and then backsliding until simple things like reading the scriptures were fairly large acts of faith with equivalent rewards.
Years later, after seeing some much cooler (but still ultimately dismissible) miracles, I was essentially forced to make a choice and test God in a way much greater than I ever had before. I prayed for strength, threw my life in his hands for this enormous test, and it turned out better than I could possibly have imagined. That's an experience I can never deny, so these days I find myself doubting the church much much less, because of the colossal obstacle placed in the way of my skepticism. Unfortunately this obstacle doesn't help much against my many other faults such as laziness and selfishness. Which, again, is my whole point--evidence of God on its own doesn't usually help us to become better people.
I actually did keep a prayer journal5 for a while, but I worried that the very act of keeping the journal was tampering with the results. In my head, I reasoned that if you pray for something and then look for the result, you will probably end up finding something that you interpret as the answer to your prayer, even if it's quite a stretch. I wish I had continued the journal, because now it seems to me that there are relatively easy ways around that, mostly involving time constraints. If something has been plaguing you for months, you pray for it to be solved, and the next day a good solution presents itself, I consider that pretty good evidence for prayer. The longer the solution takes, the worse evidence it is. I like this method because so many of my biggest prayers were answered seconds after they ended, in quite blatant ways.
So to finally answer your question, I think only some of these specific tests are repeatable, but the general principle of faith is fairly straightforward and consistently repeatable, provided your understanding of it is correct. Just take the next step, one you should already know is a good idea based on past experience, and it will lead to positive results, usually both tangible and in the form of a spiritual confirmation. This next step won't instantly confirm that God is real, but it will provide enough evidence to continue forward with a repeat of that test or a larger test, and that process can pretty much continue indefinitely.
Footnotes
Also I think it's fundamentally incoherent to force someone to be good at all. IMO moral goodness fundamentally requires deliberate choice. A murderer who accidentally shoots a dictator rather than their intended victim can't exactly claim moral credit for the result. A bank robber whose money is returned by the police isn't good for returning the money.
Which here I'll define as "things fairly unlikely to have happened without God's intervention", thus marginally increasing my probability estimate that God is real
I honestly spat upon anyone else's description of a miracle which I hadn't seen with my own eyes. Completely dismissed them as probable lies or confirmation bias. I still do, which is why I feel a bit strange writing this stuff down--it's not the kind of thing that would have convinced me at all. In fact even now if someone else were to write a similar post as my original one, I'd still immediately discount it as coincidence or something. That's probably a sign I'm a bit too skeptical, considering I still think others are liars when they share experiences identical to ones I have personally seen for myself.
Whenever I say something like "If God is real" there's an unspoken addition to that: "...and my understanding of him is sufficiently accurate." My understanding of him is heavily reliant on my church and their doctrines, so really what I'm saying is "if this whole system of beliefs is true".
I didn't keep a scripture journal but had similar results attempting to track the evidence there as well. I noticed that I felt better on days when I read the scriptures, but it was incredibly difficult to tell whether it was due to some spiritual enlightenment, or some confounder--maybe I only read the scriptures on days when I felt good. The days I forced myself to read also turned out pretty well, but again I rationalized it as "maybe the days I have the willpower to force myself to read are the days which will turn out well." It's hard to ever know these things for sure.
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The phenomenon you're describing is, in the Rationalist religious texts, called "confirmation bias" I believe. Of course more idealist metaphysics do not have this peculiar tendency to dismiss one's awesome ability to change their perception of reality through noticing synchronicity but I doubt there is much ecumenical gains to be made from pointing out such synchronicities because they can all easily be dismissed.
The magnitude of them doesn't matter either in my experience. People will dismiss getting dubs on 4chan as easily as Mandelbrot fractals. "It's only significant because you noticed it" they'll say, the great irony being that this is the very essence of the effect.
I find art works better. It did for me at least. It's much easier to quell the temptation to use the limited tools of reason when you are channeling pure intuitive feeling. And then you can reflect on what is indubitably a transrational experience.
It means nothing because there is no control group. Replace "prayer" with a drug, and you get a shitty observational study that does not mean anything. I wouldn't take this drug.
That's not much of a response considering that OP doesn't even mention prayer.
He was replying to you. You did mention prayer.
Replace "prayer" with a drug and you have a medicine taken by billions of people throughout the world, all of whom claim to benefit from it, and who on average seem to enjoy benefits such as increased happiness, life satisfaction, and longevity. The clinical studies surrounding this drug seem compelling, but that's not enough for me; I wanted to run some of my own as well. I worry the drug may be a placebo--still perhaps effective but not the truth. That's what my studies are for.
And to be clear, if it was just the one I would not place much faith in it at all. It's the fact that this sort of thing happens consistently that makes it hard to deny.
As you are claiming that the effect of prayer come from the truth of your faith (and not just on some psychological phenomenon) you cannot count the other religion as "the same medicine" as those religions believe yours to be false.
Anyway, the fact that people "claim to benefit" from something does not mean they really benefit from it. A lot of atheists also claim to benefit from atheism, don't they?
Religion increases longevity, it does not mean that prayer does. There is no proof that a religion without prayer would not also increase longevity as long as it promotes a healthy lifestyle.
Religion might increase the longevity of religious people, but religious countries are poorer and have a worse longevity than not-so-religious countries. So it seems religion increases the longevity of the religious people at the expense of the average longevity of the country. It's a bit as if religious people were vampires, killing everyone else to extend their own life. But as religious people show less altruism (see https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/children-with-a-religious-upbringing-show-less-altruism/ ), they probably don't care.
Actually I can. Most people who pray are members of Abrahamic religions, and we all believe similar enough things. It's 100% compatible with most Abrahamic religions to consider other Abrahamic prayers valid. IDK about Muslims, but while other Christians may believe my religion false, they surely don't believe it so false that our prayers go entirely unheard.
I'm not going to adopt an entire philosophy just because people claim to benefit from it, but I am willing to try out a practice they claim to benefit from, if it seems mostly harmless. I definitely agree that claims to benefit are very weak evidence though.
Very true.
Also, that study about religious upbringing and altruism was retracted.
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Well, I think it's basically fair to dismiss these events as confirmation bias. I do so all the time with others' experiences, even in my own church, because I'm naturally an extreme skeptic. I wouldn't have trusted anything of the sort unless it happened to me, specifically, many times over, so I fully understand when others dismiss it.
I find art easier to dismiss as some sort of essentially mundane biological or cultural response, the same way I dismiss meditation. I fully believe meditative experiences happen (though perhaps not at quite the level people claim) but don't think this signifies anything particularly special about meditation itself. It's more just, "Oh, brains do that if you meditate long enough, cool."
Not to dismiss art entirely. I think that those sorts of spiritual experiences are definitely the best way to come to know God, but I also firmly believe that it's possible (if more difficult) to find him purely through rational methods. Ironically you just have to not let your own atheistic confirmation bias control you entirely, but that's difficult enough on its own, at least in my experience.
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