Do you believe in God? Why/Why not?

[JWeinCom]

NightlyPoe said:

JWeinCom said:

If I shuffle a deck of cards, the odds of the deck ending up in the order I shuffled them are 1/80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000

So, let's say I play a game of poker during which the deck is shuffled 50 times.  The odds against that particular sequence of shuffles would be so astronomical that I'm pretty sure I couldn't fit them into a message here in standard notation.  But, does the fact that the sequence did in fact occur despite such unfathomably small odds mean that someone or something designed it to happen that way? 

There are two issues.

1.  It's not just a shuffling of a deck of cards.  It's the shuffling of ALL the decks of cards going back to the beginning of the universe.  And they'd have to all come out exactly right to produce the person that is me.  It's like hitting a lottery the odds of which are a number not just beyond this board's ability to notate, but a number well beyond human comprehension and placing an exponent on top of it equal to every single instance of the Planck time for the past 13.8 billion years, and quite probably beyond that given how weird physics are, up to my conception.

2.  You are treating it as a neutral outside observer.  I am in internal observer.  I would not be able to note the near impossibility of my existence without the certainty of it already having been established.

Squaring that impossibility with the certainly requires a leap of faith either way.  I've concluded that believing higher power of some sort bestowed this life onto me makes more sense.

Yes.  And that doesn't matter.  If we shuffle the deck a quadrillion times, the odds of getting a particular result would be well beyond human comprehension.  But still some result would have to come out.  No matter how many times you shuffle the deck you will have to get some result, and no matter how absurdly small the possibility gets, you can get there without any higher power.  There is no point where the result becomes so unlikely that a god would be needed to achieve it.  

The only reason you think this result required a higher power is because it seems special.  You are biased by the fact that you like (I hope) existing.  But, that doesn't mean this is some sort of special result.  As a neutral observer, there is no reason to assume this result was the result of a particular intent, and if we're trying to get to truth, we should treat the scenario as neutral observers.

You're not squaring impossibility with circumstances.  Nothing impossible has happened.  Something incredibly unlikely happened.  But, that's the point of the card example. Every time you shuffle a deck of cards the result you get is so unlikely that your brain can't really process how unlikely it is (or at least my brain can't fathom what 1/8with like 100 zeroes would be).  The universe has many more variables, so it is certain that whatever we get would HAVE TO be astronomically unlikely.  It would be IMPOSSIBLE to get a "likely universe".  

But of course, if all that still doesn't convince you, and you still think both positions require a leap of faith, then why take a leap of faith either way?  There is always "I don't know" which is an answer that definitely requires no leap of faith, and is the correct answer to most questions that you can be asked.