Hello E,
>Would it be inappropriate to ask your personal opinion,
>even if expressed as
>an approximate percentage...
>whether you believe there is or is not a God?
My Reply:
Only an engineer or scientist would ask for a probability of something such as this-)
Nobody else has ever asked such a strange but reasonable question.
I would be interested to know what your probabilities would be.
(1) I would suggest that an evolved personal God (religion) mudule(s)
exists in the brain in all or most people to be most likely (80%).
This personal God (religion) dies when the brain dies.
Observe all the people that believe in all sorts of religions and new age
beliefs in the present -- and have believed in the past.
Observe also that people in the same religion are influenced by it, yet
each has beliefs about what their God is like and what their God considers
to be a sin, that differ from their cohorts.
This part(s) of the brain may actually be part of some other functioning
entity in the brain (19+%).
This is why private prayer is really a person's way
of talking to himself. In spite of what people say, talking to oneself has been found
to be beneficial. The danger is when the person believes that his personal God is
also the Universal God.
You must also consider
Most people seem to have
a very strong urge to survive -- a human cannot imagine a universe without
his own existence. This urge extends to an afterlife. It would be interesting to know
how many people would follow a certain traditional religion (God) if
there was no promise of an afterlife or even a statement in their creed
saying that there is no afterlife.
(2) The existence of a personal God that is outside of the person's brain approaches 0%.
A Universal God that is also personal approaches 0%.
(3) The probability of a supernatural realm is very remote -- approaching zero --
there is no evidence of it's existence. Since there is no supernatural realm,
therefore no supernatural entities, except in the imaginations of people,
there is no supernatural God.
(4) The probability of the existence of a natural God (whose consistency
is natural) that is not personal is very difficult (impossible?) to determine.
I would wildly guess 1%.
The greatest threat to the progress of science is (1).
How does one manage this part of our make-up?
Would be interested in your probabilities,
Hooge