Are the religious merely fooling themselves?

The appearance of the world always seems to confirm what we believe. This makes sense because we pride ourselves on forming our beliefs based on our observations of the world. We are convinced the world confirms our beliefs because our beliefs are correct. 

Of course, its the other way around. The world seems to confirm our beliefs only because our beliefs color how the world looks to us. We adopt our beliefs first, and then our chosen perspective determines what the world looks like. We think the world’s appearance causes our beliefs, but in fact our beliefs cause the world’s appearance. 

This is the phenomenon of subjectivity. And when people of religious faith point to things about the world as evidence supporting their belief in God, atheists discredit these reports as merely the delusions of the already-convinced. Of course, atheists are as deluded by their beliefs as everyone else, and so its impossible to tell who is more subjectivity deluded.

But consider the religious claim that, when we resist the urge to solve our problems as we would prefer, and instead leave entirely to God the decision of how and even whether to solve our problems, God will manipulate the course of events to solve our problems for us. Millions of religious for thousands of years, including myself, have seen this happen over and over again until they leave more and more of their life’s decisions up to God. 

An atheist might try to dismiss this as another subjective religious delusion: the religious are fooled into thinking God intervenes on their behalf simply because that’s what they already believe that in the first place. Its just another instance of plain old, garden-variety subjectivity. 

But the religious’ evidence is not so easy to dismiss. If the religious in fact resist the urge to solve the problems that confront them, then according to the atheists there is no God to come to their rescue and all the religious’ unsolved problems would sooner or later overwhelm them. Faith in God would be evolutionary suicide, so consistently wrong that only the most fanatical religious would hang on to such a futile strategy.  

And yet the faithful thrive.  

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