In this dream I was talking to someone about God. I said that I would believe in God if I felt God was real like a person I knew. Not physically seeing the person, necessarily, but feeling the person as real in an undeniably real sense. This was a powerful dream. Not that I woke up as a religious believer, but that I understood why someone could be such a believer for the first time.
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I reasoned later, after I was awake, that some people must feel that way, and hence view atheism as absurd. It would be like speculating about whether your wife actually existed.
Yet this argument is not made very much, so it follows that religious believers don't actually feel the divine presence in a palpable way. If they did, they would use that argument instead of the more speculative sort of reasoning in all the famous arguments for God. Pascal's bet and all the rest are really atheistic arguments, because they concede the possibility of non-existence from the very beginning. You can't feel it but it's there anyway, hypothetically, and you must take a leap of faith to posit its existence.
It would be pointless to argue with someone who felt the presence directly. It would be like trying to convince someone their husband wasn't real. On the other hand, if someone doesn't feel it already they are already vulnerable to losing their faith. They can only offer abstruse reasons why they think their spouse exists.
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